Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 888 posts

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#151

Post by aiauthoritydev »

asdff wrote: post #146

If they did this 15 year ago, I bet google reader would still be actively maintained today. More innovation is possible when there are smaller companies working on fewer things. Yes there are economies of scale with large entities, but you then run up against the economy of shareholder attention if your little effort within the larger organization is not the current golden child of the day. When you work at a smaller…

Google engineer's time was not worth Google reader. If you think it was a useful product you could have created it yourself for profit.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#152

Post by mensetmanusman »

asdff wrote: post #150
mensetmanusman wrote: post #139

DeepMind wouldn’t have happened to the level it did had google been broken up prior.

What might deep mind have looked like today if it were given the same resources in an academic or national lab setting and no ultimate profit motive?

Sans access to the worlds top supercomputer infra.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#153

Post by tgma »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #52
dehrmann wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't some of the early GPT work come out of Google?

The popular transformer paper, which went on to be used in things like ChatGPT, was authored by Google employees. But “come out of Google” is giving the organization too much credit and the individual too little. Also transformers were themselves a continuation of prior work like multi head attention. And it is possible that transformers were not needed - see this discussion from the other day: https://news.ycombinat…

Come on... that's so unfair. There is a reason such individuals chose to work at Google and not Apple or Amazon for example and were able to "individually" come up with such work without being pestered by their management to do other stuff.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#154

Post by giobox »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #139

DeepMind wouldn’t have happened to the level it did had google been broken up prior.

There was no shortage of other deep-pocketed suitors trying to buy DeepMind too during the Google acquisition back in 2014 - I think DeepMind would have likely found a reasonable home regardless.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#155

Post by aednichols »

enraged_camel wrote: post #124
geor9e wrote: post #113

HN is a special place but among the average folk, I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are. Especially with so many companies scraping the whole web for AI data, and so many GPUs chugging on that data. I suppose they are all focused on replacing the concept of search results with LLM prose. Ironically bing is down at the moment https://downdetec…

The alternatives are bad because the ones that were even remotely good were bought and killed by Google over the years. This includes ones we all have heard of as well as countless others. This is a common tactic of tech giants, and the direct consequence of it is… what we have today.

Google has acquired a lot of ad competitors, but I can't remember any general-purpose search engines. It seemed more like they died out naturally over a long period. I welcome new information if that's not right.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#157

Post by mm263 »

geor9e wrote: post #113

HN is a special place but among the average folk, I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are. Especially with so many companies scraping the whole web for AI data, and so many GPUs chugging on that data. I suppose they are all focused on replacing the concept of search results with LLM prose. Ironically bing is down at the moment https://downdetec…

> it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are

Kagi

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#158

Post by idle_zealot »

bhelkey wrote: post #144
idle_zealot wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The closest thing to a unique offering that they have is YouTube. What other services don't have perfectly reasonable replacements ready and waiting?

Android makes up ~70% of the global phone marketshare [1]. Google maps makes up 70% of the mapping marketshare [2]. Chrome makes up ~65% of the browser marketshare [3]. Those are three of the nine products Google has with over a billion users [4]. [1] https://backlinko.com/iphone-vs-android-statistics [2] https://www.thestreet.com/technology/big-tech-working-to-cha... [3] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-sha…

Excellent job demonstrating Google's broad market dominance, and that alternatives exist to replace them should antitrust action be taken.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#159

Post by arghwhat »

mm263 wrote: post #157
geor9e wrote: post #113

HN is a special place but among the average folk, I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are. Especially with so many companies scraping the whole web for AI data, and so many GPUs chugging on that data. I suppose they are all focused on replacing the concept of search results with LLM prose. Ironically bing is down at the moment https://downdetec…

> it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are Kagi

After having been a paid subscriber for a number of months, I have to say that it still wasn't cutting it. I still ended up falling back to google all the time.

Plus, https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#160

Post by Abekkus »

elevatedastalt wrote: post #143
voisin wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are. I have such a hard time understanding your position on this. Google search results are absolute trash now, compared to DuckDuckGo.

DuckDuckGo can have a seat at the table when they implement their own search index. Putting a sticker on Bing and Yandex results doesn't make a Search company.

If they are actually nominally offering privacy over bing and yandex, while selling anonymous ads on that sticker, that is a valid USP.
Post reply on HN