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Comment by zaphar | Hacker News Reader

    Google doesn't want competition

That is a statement that reveals more about your own biases than it does about Google. There is no evidence indicating Google doesn't want competition.

If french businesses can and will produce competitive search products then they wouldn't need the market leader to leave the market to give them the opportunity. There is 0 barrier to entry here. Anyone can spider the same pages Google does. Anyone can develop ML algorithms to rank them. The only thing keeping Google at the top of search is how good they are at it.

Google is global leaving France wouldn't hurt them.

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Why does any business want competition? I wasn't criticising Google on this particular point; it's an obvious and well-known fact of capitalism.

> The only thing keeping Google at the top of search is how good they are at it.

As far as I'm aware, other search engines are usually competitive in blind tests for quality. Other things keeping Google at the top include: their incumbency; anti-competitive practices such as browser bundling.

    I wasn't criticising Google on this point; 
    it's an obvious part of capitalism.

Except it isn't really. Capitalism the theory may stipulate that an idealized company doesn't want competition but in the real world people run companies and everyone is a different.

Google as a company (speaking from insider experience as a former employee, But not in any official capacity) values competition. It provides a way to measure your success as a company. Google loves measuring things it's so deeply ingrained into their DNA they can't help it. Ranking themselves against other search engines is a vital part of how they work. They would quite possibly be lost without it and very definitely be a different company without it. Google loves competition.

So, when you say Google loves competition, what you mean is that Google would be happy to gain market share and be unhappy to lose market share? OK...

Edited to add: the cost of expressing a dissenting opinion on this site seems to be waves of downvotes followed by a trickle of protective upvotes. Do the downvotes all come from the same place, in this case, I wonder?

When Google measures itself against other search engines it is primarily interested in measuring search quality and not market share.

Google has put a lot of effort into creating test query suites and other systems that can be used to evaluate search results and works to make sure that in each region and language it can out perform competitors. I don't know how effective the measurement is but I can tell you that Google takes providing the best search results seriously.

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