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Comment by fear91 | Hacker News Reader

Google's grip on search is absolutely enormous, especially in Europe.

They literally decide lives of thousands of people when they change their algorithms. With one update, they kill thousands of websites someone lives off and then they replace them with big brands or their own services.

This isn't healthy for anyone and I wish there was more competition. It would do a lot of good to everyone.

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But there is competition. Bing, DuckDuckGo, even Yahoo's still hanging in there.

There are no technological or commercial barriers to switching search engines: no-one is making people use Google search (except I guess maybe on Android devices or Chromebooks -- I don't have and have never used either, so I don't know).

People use it because either (a) it returns better results or (b) inertia.

If it's (a), using it is a rational choice (though one that could be trumped by privacy or ethical concerns).

If it's (b), eventually they'll be knocked off their perch by a better search engine.

> But there is competition. Bing, DuckDuckGo, even Yahoo's still hanging in there.

Only if you are English speaker and are looking for English sites (which is the case only for minority of Europeans). Apart form Google other search engines are localized either poorly or not at all.

Which sounds like a great service that Google provides that greatly differentiates it from its competition, not a monopolistic barrier.

Sounds like a market opportunity for someone. In Russia there is Yandex, in China there is Baidu. The EU has a larger population and much higher GDP (~market size?) than Russia, and a higher GDP than China. (Actually, a higher GDP than the US, according to Wikipedia.)

Even if we have to break it down by language, Germany, France, and the UK have larger GDPs than Russia. Italy's not far behind.

So why is there no European competitor -- or multiple EU competitors -- to Google?

(Apart from the obvious snarky "someone might start one but then they'd have to worry about being hamstrung by EU Parliament resolutions once they got too powerful" reason -- Russia and China are hardly bastions of libertarian capitalism.)

I would say that the technological barrier exists for google just like with IE and MSFT: Google is the default browser in Firefox + Chrome.

The IE solution was to offer an explicit browser choice in EU versions of windows. A similar one could be imagined here. The "solution" would be to disallow Google from making an exclusivity agreement with FF and to have a choice screen in Chrome. Unfortunately this would cause immense harm to Mozilla...

Firefox has just switched its default search engine to Yahoo:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2850152/yahoo-dethrones-googl...

So maybe not so much harm to Mozilla.

Only in the US. In the EU it sounds like the default is still Google.

> The IE solution was to offer an explicit browser choice in EU versions of windows.

And what did that solve, really?

> to disallow Google from making an exclusivity agreement with FF

They do not have an exclusive agreement with Firefox and in Firefox Google's Search is only the default, not the only one. Mozilla is also switching to Yahoo as the default in the US, Yandex in Russia and other local search engines where it applies. That doesn't sound exclusive to me.

It is broadly true that people have a choice with search, and clearly Google's position is down to the quality of service rather than the sort of trap-in you see with physical monopolies like ISPs. But I don't think the point or aim of all of this is to do anything about search, it's to prevent Google from using that position to favour its other commercial services. The monopoly issue is by proxy, it's not search itself.

I believe the parent comment is talking about website owners. A quick check of a website I run says 96% of hits come from Google. If Google decide to block that site or put it on page 10, the site is dead.

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