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How did Google get so big?

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Re: How did Google get so big?

#381

Post by YokoZar »

xg15 wrote: post #231
briandear wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ok, we built our awesome EuroSearch. How do we get it on the start pages of Firefox, Chrome and Android?

Firefox has had different default search engines in the past. At one point Yahoo was the default, and I believe it varied by continent.

Ubuntu once switched from Google to Yahoo in its Firefox as the default search engine, citing higher payments from Yahoo.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#382

Post by xg15 »

TomMarius wrote: post #351
xg15 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, e.g. by stiffling sale of alternative Android-based operating systems, as the EU just concluded. Google uses their market power and control over Android to give competing OSes a disadvantage, whether or not they would be better than Android/Google Play.

Using the EU as an argument is like bringing a friend that agrees with you to confirm your statement. Use actual arguments, please.

It seems a bit ridiculous to call a multi-year investigation by the EU's anti-trust agency "calling in my friends", but ok.

The most severe thing they did was give retailers a hard choice: Either they only sell phones with Google's Android distribution (AOSP+Google Play) or they only sell phones with no-name AOSP distributions. They cannot sell both.

As missing out on the revenue from Google Play-based phones would be financially irresponsible, this choice had only one viable option: Not selling any other AOSP-based OS except Google's.

Therefore Google effectively made competing AOSP-based projects extremely hard to sell, regardless of their quality.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#383

Post by sievebrain »

barry-cotter wrote: post #370
adventured wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google was solely responsible for YouTube's ultimate success and they deserve the credit accordingly. It was a dead company if they didn't buy it, they were rapidly bleeding to death financially and the legal picture was disastrous. It was viewed as a stupid mistake of a purchase in part because the argument was they would be a giant red ink pit forever. The sole reason YouTube survived the legal attack was due to Go…

> Google was solely responsible for YouTube's ultimate success and they deserve the credit accordingly. If they were capable of making a success of video without buying YouTube why did they buy it in the first place. Video.google.com was developer internally, YouTube thrashed it, Google gave up and bought YouTube. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Video

They needed each other. YouTube couldn't survive without Google's money and engineering ability, and Google didn't understand how to quickly iterate in social products.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#384

Post by sievebrain »

maym86 wrote: post #356
trishume wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm not mistaken, they contractually limited manufacturers from selling devices with Android forks , according to Google to avoid experience fragmentation. AFAIK the terms didn't limit any other operating systems not based on Android.

Yep actually I retact part of my original comment. Thanks for the correction. The dumping part is still valid because any OS that isn't free and relies on licencing can't complete with an OS that makes it money from a secondary business like search and advertising. Google gave away Android to make sure it dominated mobile advertising. Any OS reliying on profits directly from licencing the OS cannot complete.

Your comment is still false. Google allows Android forks with their services installed. You just can't break the API, which makes sense, otherwise apps from the store wouldn't reliably work.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#385

Post by sievebrain »

mirimir wrote: post #109

OK, so I watched it all happen. Back in the day, I loved AltaVista. And then I dicovered Google. And found that it consistently gave me better results. At least at first, Google grew because its stuff worked better than the competition's. Still, it is pretty clear that Google now excludes competitors through discrimination in search results. But it's hard to prove, because search algorithms are so bloody complicated.…

Not a joke. Google don't define search as web search but rather "search of any kind of data source you can imagine". Thus Amazon is a search competitor because people often go straight to Amazon and type in what they want rather than go to Google first and maybe see shopping results.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#386

Post by sievebrain »

xg15 wrote: post #231
briandear wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ok, we built our awesome EuroSearch. How do we get it on the start pages of Firefox, Chrome and Android?

Pay higher referral fees. Or did you think Firefox used Google search for free?

Re: How did Google get so big?

#387

Post by smt88 »

gretch wrote: post #365
smt88 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They asked him what kind of company Google is. They weren't asking for an essay on a Shakespeare sonnet or anything close to that end of the spectrum.

You don't think the kind of reply he gave is pretty combative for the interviewing for a job at said company? You recommend that as a path forward for people who interview at your company or at Google in the future? Look I understand sometimes people don't want to work at a certain company. But typically it's better to decline the interview than to show up and be smug or righteous about it.

So his options are 1) be delusional about a company's product, or 2) work for another company?

No one at Google has qualms about working at an ad company? No one at Facebook does?

For some people, a job is a job. It doesn't have to be a calling or a mission. I personally wouldn't work in ad-tech for personal reasons, but clearly most of our industry would. Are 100% of those people fine with what their company does? Clearly at Facebook they aren't.

Honesty isn't combative, and if the interviewers say that honest answer in that way, then it would reflect their own misgivings about Google's business model, wouldn't it?

Re: How did Google get so big?

#388

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

TomMarius wrote: post #230
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't separate a technology from it's use. Technology is created to be used. Besides I could just as easily say some knowledge is good and some knowledge is bad. If you want to say that "knowledge is definitely not bad" then I'm going to ask you your own question - can you support that statement?

> You can't separate a technology from it's use. Technology is created to be used. False. Every day, dozens of thousands of people in academia engage in basic research (actual term), something that does not lead to "usable technology" most of the time. > some knowledge is good and some knowledge is bad Are you saying that guns kill people? I thought that people kill people, using guns.

>Are you saying that guns kill people? I thought that people kill people, using guns.

I don't understand why you're resorting to metaphor, I think what I said was pretty clear. Can you support the statement that all knowledge is good?

Re: How did Google get so big?

#389

Post by jhall1468 »

stuckinarut wrote: post #377
jhall1468 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any examples of these things taking place in reality or is it just "possible" stuff. And Google did not kill RSS lol, it was always super niche.

and yet the users of RSS continue to lament the loss of Google reader.

Never said otherwise. The problem is, there weren't very many of them.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#390

Post by decebalus1 »

ChristianBundy wrote: post #177
mirimir wrote: post #109

OK, so I watched it all happen. Back in the day, I loved AltaVista. And then I dicovered Google. And found that it consistently gave me better results. At least at first, Google grew because its stuff worked better than the competition's. Still, it is pretty clear that Google now excludes competitors through discrimination in search results. But it's hard to prove, because search algorithms are so bloody complicated.…

I use (and love) Searx. It has two features: - many search engines are used at once - searches are proxied through a third-party provider For example, if you type "ipv6" into searx.me you'll get results from Google, Bing, Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and dozens of other sites. It's not perfect privacy, but I generally get better results than using only one search engine and there's a small boost to privacy. The only th…

Thank you, stranger! This is awesome. I was in need of something like this for a while now.
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