How did Google get so big?

Post by xg15 » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 10:10 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #117

xg15 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn't keep others out of the search market through any other means than just being better... They have 98% market share in europe. They also provide the main revenue source (AdWords) and the most important implementation of the web stack (Chrome) - which fitted with mandatory automated updating. If you combine those factors, they are in a position where they can to a large part dictate what the de-facto stan…

Market share does not equal monopoly. Why aren’t Europeans building better search? It isn’t because of Google, it’s because of the risk-adverse tendencies of investors in Europe. If you pitched a search engine to a Euro-VC, you wouldn’t even get asked for a deck. Europe isn’t very innovation driven: they prefer the 2x rather than the 200x. The proof is simple: just look at the flow of European investment money: rarel…

Post by stuckinarut » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 10:10 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #111

zjaffee wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how they would do it. When Microsoft ware being ruled against for anti trust, they would have forced them to split the operating systems business from the rest of their product businesses. My guess would be that google would get broken up in a way that separated things that were strategically vertically integrated, say, search+android (their big platforms for directing you at their services) and things like y…

How does splitting Google benefit the consumer? Is the consumer being harmed right now? Are they being price gouged or forced to use inferior products?

Post by stuckinarut » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 10:11 PM UTC

xg15 wrote: post #211

fixermark wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quick experiment you can try to check if Google is blocking competition: 1) navigate to bing.com 2) do a search If it works, congratulations; Google isn't blocking competition. The 98% market share is probably because the market is winner-take-all, and people don't see a need to use a new competitor that's even equivalently-effective over one they are already comfortable with.

Imagine you run a website. Some day, for whatever reason, Google is blacklisting you. Are you going to say "eh, no big deal, I'll just have my customers use Bing instead"?

Post by binomialxenon » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 10:13 PM UTC

paulpauper wrote: post #18

amerine wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring the cynic in me that tells me that nothing will change, makes me think that the right answer is probably less to do with breaking apart or changing google but more likely the establishment of personal data privacy rights in the US. Once it’s more expensive to collect everything about us, companies like google will have a hard time. I don’t think we’d realistically introduce laws like this until the citizens…

I don't see what the problem with google collecting my information is. You are more likely to have your data leaked by a careless or vengeful webmaster after visiting a small personal website than a massive corporate website like google.com. If you visit any website , your IP can be logged.

Post by stuckinarut » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 10:14 PM UTC

TomMarius wrote: post #47

lovich wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They routinely put their other products on top of the search pages, such as Google reviews over Yelp or Google maps over OpenMap results. The issue isn't even so much as Google is dominating search, because they have been providing a better product in almost all cases until recently. The issue is that they are using their dominance in search to try and dominate other markets

It's their product after all; do you point people to your competition from your product? Everyone is free to use anything else. Anti-competitive would be if you couldn't use anything else.