Early in this article, there's this sentence: Google’s results are really good.
Reminds me of the comedian who, when asked, "How's your wife," would say, "Compared to what?"
Google's real monopoly is on the user data
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data
#12> But the real question is, given that Google has around 90% of the search market share, and so has around 90% of the available user data, is the advantage it gives them so unfair that it should be illegal? In the U.S. it’s not illegal to be a monopoly but to use your monopoly position to prevent competitors from entering the market. (This is why it’s not illegal for a small town to have a single gas station, for exa…
They also hurted Firefox a lot by promoting Chrome on every Google search query.
Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data
#13And they own Youtube... That will be a massive benefit when it comes to training AI-powered robots I think. Conceivably, an AI that's seen every plumbing-related video on Youtube would be superior to any human plumber you can imagine, assuming a good mapping between the human hand movements in the video and its own robotic arms. And so on for other domains.
It's a scary thought to me that 90% of online videos are hosted on YouTube. If Google were to ever fail, I know that won't happen, but I think the internet would be truly broken if for any reason YouTube is down.
For me personally it wouldn't matter too much if YouTube would be gone. I think I have several days or even weeks I don't use YouTube at all. But I agree for alot of people the entertainment factor (and for some the educational one) would be hugely broken if YouTube went offline.
Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data
#14> But the real question is, given that Google has around 90% of the search market share, and so has around 90% of the available user data, is the advantage it gives them so unfair that it should be illegal? In the U.S. it’s not illegal to be a monopoly but to use your monopoly position to prevent competitors from entering the market. (This is why it’s not illegal for a small town to have a single gas station, for exa…
They also hurted Firefox a lot by promoting Chrome on every Google search query.
They hurt Firefox by giving them money. If not for the big fat google pay check Firefox would have had to be a good browser instead of the piggy bank for the personal projects of its former ceo.
Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data
#15Whenever this comes up I'm glad having read "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism".
Not an easy read by any means, but it's core hypothesis is spot on IMO: Google (and others) core business is aggregating and processing as much user data as possible. Every product they create and every decision they make aims to increase or protect their access to data.
Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a scary thought to me that 90% of online videos are hosted on YouTube. If Google were to ever fail, I know that won't happen, but I think the internet would be truly broken if for any reason YouTube is down.
as an avid youtube junkie, I mainline it right to the jugular several times a day, and if it went away maybe I could finally find the time to tackle my ever growing todo list
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Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also hurted Firefox a lot by promoting Chrome on every Google search query.
They hurt Firefox by giving them money. If not for the big fat google pay check Firefox would have had to be a good browser instead of the piggy bank for the personal projects of its former ceo.
That's hardly the only possible outcome of the scenario; we might not have it at all.
Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data
#18Whenever this comes up I'm glad having read "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism". Not an easy read by any means, but it's core hypothesis is spot on IMO: Google (and others) core business is aggregating and processing as much user data as possible. Every product they create and every decision they make aims to increase or protect their access to data.
after hearing about this book, I understood why every shop nowadays is pushing their clients to relinquish as much personal data as possible.
It seems like their real business model is to gather customer data in order to sell it to brokers, and the shops are the bait
Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data
#19Story time: many years ago, user testing of search ranking worked with a process called "side by sides". This where for a certain group of people they would compare search results in production with an experiment and they would see which were preferred. The goal of Google is to make the result the user wants #1 on that list. So you would have known searches and you could compare the old result and the new.
This was actually labor-intensive on Google scale and thus expensive. It also had problems. For example, certain results might be time-sensitive. Searching for "Simone Biles" now should have her Olympic results near the top of the list. Run that same query in 2 years and the desired result will be different.
Also, user behaviour changes over time. If you had user search data from 2000, how would you deal with Reddit search results now? Or the SEO content farms that came later?
You need ongoing user behaviour data to continually refine search results. It's a constant arms race.
So along comes Chrome. Originally then-CEO Eric Schmidt didn't really see why Google should get into the browser business. This was in the 2000s. But we were still in the grip of the IE dominance although it was waning and Firefox was floundering. In the 2000s browser support was a much bigger problem than it is today. It's why we got things like jQuery.
But Chrome went ahead and even from Chrome 2 or 3 it was so much better than anything else. One big innovation was a process-per-tab. FF was known for freezing the entire browser because each tab was a thread.
But why did Google invest so much in this? Search results.
Chrome gave Google insights into how users interacted with search. Side by sides no longer became necessary because Google had direct insight into how users interacted with search results, whether they clicked on a link and immediately left (ie bouncing, this absolutely hurts how Google ranks your site and Google uses it to downrank SEO content farm sites) and what link gave the user the result.
This accumulated knowledge and insight from the user's browser is something that no one other than possibly Microsoft could theoretically compete with.
Why did I tell this story? Because this article talks about Google's search dominance and doesn't mention Chrome. You cannot talk about one without the other. If you don't mention Chrome, I really question your knowledge on the subject.
Disclaimer: Xoogler
Re: Google's real monopoly is on the user data
#20And they own Youtube... That will be a massive benefit when it comes to training AI-powered robots I think. Conceivably, an AI that's seen every plumbing-related video on Youtube would be superior to any human plumber you can imagine, assuming a good mapping between the human hand movements in the video and its own robotic arms. And so on for other domains.
It's a scary thought to me that 90% of online videos are hosted on YouTube. If Google were to ever fail, I know that won't happen, but I think the internet would be truly broken if for any reason YouTube is down.
In a sense, I am slowly preparing for a variant of that event now by archiving items I wanna keep using youtubedl.
I can't honestly say youtube disappearing won't have an impact, but it will not be the end of the world even I won't get to archive all the items I want. Something will replace it. And if it doesn't, that is ok too.