US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#481

Post by cactusplant7374 » Sat, May 10, 2025, 10:23 PM UTC

guhcampos wrote: post #430

hmottestad wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crawling the web is costly. I assume it's cheaper to use the results from someone else's crawling. I don't know what Kagi is using to argue that they should have access to Google's indexes, but I'd guess it's some form of anti trust.

Let me add more: crawling the web is costly for EVERYONE. The more crawlers out there, the more useless traffic is being served by every single website on the internet. In an ideal world, there would be a single authoritative index, just as we have with web domains, and all players would cooperate into building, maintaining and improving it, so websites would not need to be constantly hammered by thousands of crawler…

Bandwidth is cheap. I also like seeing more traffic in the logs.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#482

Post by buildfocus » Sat, May 10, 2025, 10:25 PM UTC

eastbound wrote: post #416

sfpotter wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used Kagi or Google recently? Kagi works way better.

On every Kagi comment, there is “Have you used Kagi recently? It’s improved a lot!” — to the level that I suspect they have bots to upgrade the brand image, at least to search which comments to respond do. I’m saying that because yes, I’ve used Kagi recently, and I switch back to Google every single time because Kagi can’t find anything. Kagi is to Google what Siri is to ChatGPT. Siri can’t even answer “What time is…

> On every Kagi comment, there is “Have you used Kagi recently? It’s improved a lot!” — to the level that I suspect they have bots to upgrade the brand image

Odd to dismiss a point purely because it's consistently made, especially without much apparent disagreement. Perhaps more likely: there are just _many_ happy Kagi customers in the HN community.

As one data point: I use Kagi, and agree with GP, and I am not a bot (activity of this HN account predates existence of Kagi by many years).

That doesn't dismiss your experience of course, lots of people use search engines in different ways! Personally, I found the ads & other crap of Google drowned out results, and I frequently hit SEO spam etc where site reranking was helpful. I'm sure there's scenarios where that doesn't make sense though, it's not for everybody (not everybody can justify paying for search, just for starters).

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#483

Post by rs186 » Sat, May 10, 2025, 10:28 PM UTC

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #367

I'm not sure people understand what the consequences of taking away Google's ad revenue is. If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed. The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, i…

Let them die. The world will be a better place.

Some of the services you mentioned are already very irrelevant:

* Fitbit -- no explanation necessary

* Google translate -- I don't know about if people use their APIs, but for me personally, I have not used translate for a few years. ChatGPT has been my go-to.

* Google Pay -- it has a smaller market share than Samsung Pay.

Then next tiers of services -- they are doing ok but there are plenty of competitors in the field:

* Gmail, Drive, Docs, Groups, Forms, Cloud, Flights, Fi

I even use some of them, but I really don't care if they go away.

Life gets a bit more difficult if Maps, Chrome and Android are gone all of a sudden. Maybe we'll be back to using Garmin. Heck, I love the idea that everybody uses Nokia, Bing or Garmin for navigation, and we actually have a decent website -- like the Yelp or Zagar in the old days -- for restaurant reviews. I still see "#1 Rated Zagat" stickers from near two decades ago at many restaurants.

Anyway, personally, for the vast majority of the things listed here, I don't see them going away being a bad thing that would even affect as many people as you think.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#484

Post by MyPasswordSucks » Sat, May 10, 2025, 10:29 PM UTC

snackernews wrote: post #456

eastbound wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On every Kagi comment, there is “Have you used Kagi recently? It’s improved a lot!” — to the level that I suspect they have bots to upgrade the brand image, at least to search which comments to respond do. I’m saying that because yes, I’ve used Kagi recently, and I switch back to Google every single time because Kagi can’t find anything. Kagi is to Google what Siri is to ChatGPT. Siri can’t even answer “What time is…

“Kagi is bad. As evidence I present Siri.”

[flagged]

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#485

Post by light_hue_1 » Sat, May 10, 2025, 10:35 PM UTC

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #367

I'm not sure people understand what the consequences of taking away Google's ad revenue is. If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed. The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, i…

Good. Every one of those products makes our lives significantly worse.

Almost all of these products are subpar garbage that would never survive in a competitive world. Almost none of them have done anything different or interesting or new for over a decade.

All these products do is use the search monopoly to take away the opportunity for us to have good versions of them.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#486

Post by rs186 » Sat, May 10, 2025, 10:35 PM UTC

hamilyon2 wrote: post #447

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #367

I'm not sure people understand what the consequences of taking away Google's ad revenue is. If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed. The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, i…

Android in this list stands out. If Android goes away, I am not sure who is there to pick up The OS of the world, not IOS, certainly, but who? All else, good riddance. More competition will make better products.

I can imagine manufacturers that are fully in the Android ecosystem come together to maintain Android, including Xiaomi, Samsung, Oppo etc. There won't be as many feature updates, but it's not like Google puts a lot of resources in Android, or Android is delivering many features these days -- Google moved/laid off many people on Android teams, and many of the recent updates are very minor features. Just look at what's new in Android 14 or 15 -- barely anything. I stopped getting excited about or even caring about major version updates for a while. The pace has already slowed down quite a bit compared to a decade ago, and the ecosystem is very mature and stable.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#487

Post by rs186 » Sat, May 10, 2025, 10:38 PM UTC

cyberax wrote: post #475

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #367

I'm not sure people understand what the consequences of taking away Google's ad revenue is. If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed. The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, i…

> Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies. I dispute that. Google Docs/Drive/Mail are supported by enterprise subscriptions. Android Auto is also a commercial product that can live off license fees. Fi/Fiber/Pay/Waymo are also not free services, and can survive on their own. Free GMail/Forms/Groups/Translate can probably survive off ad revenue that they can get from third parties. They are pret…

To be fair, nobody outside the company knows if Fi/Fiber/Pay are viable businesses, or they are on life support but still around because of the unlimited cash Google has. One can guess they are profitable because they have been around for quite a while and still kicking. But nothing says they won't be the next thing in Google graveyard -- plenty of services seemed to be doing ok before a major reorg sent them to death.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#488

Post by const_cast » Sat, May 10, 2025, 10:40 PM UTC

dantheman wrote: post #392

mondrian wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because everyone worships Thiel's "competition is for losers" and dreams of being a monopoly. Monopolies being the logical outcome of a deregulated environment, for which these companies lobby.

Throughout history there are very few monopolies and they don't normally last that long; that is unless they get are granted special privileges by the government.

They always inevitably end up being given special privileges.

Because, contrary to what we would all like to believe, once a company becomes large we don't want them to go under, even if they're not optimal.

There's a huge amount of jobs, institutional knowledge, processes, capital, etc in these big monopolies. Like if Boeing just went under today, how long would it take for another company to re-figure out how to make airplanes? I mean, take a look at NASA. We went to the moon, but can we do it again? It would be very difficult. Because so many engineers retired and IP was allowed to just... rot.

It's a balancing act. Obviously we want to keep the market as free as possible and yadda yadda invisible hand. But we also have national security to consider, and practicality.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#489

Post by trollbridge » Sat, May 10, 2025, 10:42 PM UTC

guhcampos wrote: post #430

hmottestad wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crawling the web is costly. I assume it's cheaper to use the results from someone else's crawling. I don't know what Kagi is using to argue that they should have access to Google's indexes, but I'd guess it's some form of anti trust.

Let me add more: crawling the web is costly for EVERYONE. The more crawlers out there, the more useless traffic is being served by every single website on the internet. In an ideal world, there would be a single authoritative index, just as we have with web domains, and all players would cooperate into building, maintaining and improving it, so websites would not need to be constantly hammered by thousands of crawler…

I already get hit by literally hundreds of crawlers, presumably trying to find grist for there AI mills.

One more crawler for a search index wouldn’t hurt.

Re: US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

#490

Post by const_cast » Sat, May 10, 2025, 10:42 PM UTC

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #481

guhcampos wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me add more: crawling the web is costly for EVERYONE. The more crawlers out there, the more useless traffic is being served by every single website on the internet. In an ideal world, there would be a single authoritative index, just as we have with web domains, and all players would cooperate into building, maintaining and improving it, so websites would not need to be constantly hammered by thousands of crawler…

Bandwidth is cheap. I also like seeing more traffic in the logs.

Yeah not that cheap. There's a few articles on HN now about small, independent websites being essentially DDOS'd by crawlers. Although, to be fair, mostly AI crawlers.