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Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

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Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#161

Post by diogofranco »

m_ke wrote: post #23
richwater wrote: post #12

How does this finding actually help consumers, in real life? They get to choose a search engine (spoiler alert: it will be Google), and life moves on. Except, smaller browser projects now miss on that default search revenue, potentially entrenching Chrome as the dominant browser.

It gives people room to try, especially now with new entrants like perplexity that might offer better results. Google search went to shit and ruined most of the web with it, by creating an SEO industry that's 100% focused on optimizing for their ranking signals.

> by creating an SEO industry that's 100% focused on optimizing for their ranking signals.

The SEO industry will optimize towards ranking on whatever search engine people are using

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#162

Post by pradn »

larubbio wrote: post #143
jd3 wrote: post #99

A couple passages of note: > 112. The integration of generative AI is perhaps the clearest example of competition advancing search quality. Google accelerated and launched its public piloting of Bard one day before Microsoft announced BingChat, the integration of ChatGPT’s generative AI technology into Bing to deliver answers to queries. Id. at 8272:4-7 (Reid); id. at 2670:10–2671:9 (Parakhin). (describing BingChat).…

I remember this article from 2017 about the google snippet for how long it takes to caramelize an onion. https://gizmodo.com/googles-algorithm-is-lying-to-you-about-... The gist of the story is the author wrote an article debunking the recipe myth that you only need 5 minutes. In their tests it was 25 - 45. Google snippet would report "about 5 minutes" and link to the article as a reference. I think the information s…

It's certainly wrong, but its not out of place w/ the sheer number of recipes and blogs saying the same thing. It's parroting "common wisdom" which is wrong.

It's not as egregious as some of the generative AI results spewed out by the lowest-cost-inference LLMs they hooked up to Google search a few months back.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#163

Post by matwood »

mandevil wrote: post #147
CapmCrackaWaka wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Orion exclusively because Kagi is the default search engine. It does have a few more bugs than chrome / safari, but they're well worth putting up with to get native Kagi support. Thank you. It's interesting though - what is Apple's vested interest in only having native support for certain search engines? I now no longer use their browser because of this - I would think that is _some_ kind of loss for them. Mayb…

According to sworn testimony, Apple got over 20 billion dollars from Google in 2022. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-01/google-s-...

That's to have Google be default. It doesn't explain why it's impossible to add others to the list.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#164

Post by ankit219 »

crazygringo wrote: post #142
ankit219 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to see your reasoning. The court's argument is Google is maintaining this dominance via these default deals, not that it got there through them. Given the last 25 years of history, Google's product has gotten worse after these default deals. Previously it established the dominance because it found whatever a user searched for. Arguing otherwise just feels unrealistic. They never had any exclusive deals with an…

There are no exclusivity deals. These are deals around defaults, not exclusivity. Google never paid Apple to remove Bing from the list of choices. That's what an exclusivity deal would do. But it didn't happen, because this doesn't have anything to do with exclusivity.

Oh yeah, i thought the previous user used them interchangeably. I messed it up. I think it's exclusive in a way that no one else could make the same deal. Not explicitly locking others out, but in a significant way, it implicitly did.

The point was they became a monopoly cos they had a good product, and now the product is not as good after these default deals they made with Apple, Samsung etc.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#165

Post by toast0 »

cletus wrote: post #137
akira2501 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but Google didn't buy its way into dominance annd maintain their dominance through exclusivity deals This is a huge claim. Do you have any evidence to back it up?

Google started when the tech sector considered the search problem "solved". You had the likes of Altavista, Yahoo and AskJeeves. There was some variety (eg Yahoo's directory) but no one thought search was going to be a big business. Then Google came along and ripped them all to shreds from 1998-2006 or so. The most important platform was Windows and Google gained dominance there without paying anyone. Sure, you can a…

> Google started when the tech sector considered the search problem "solved". You had the likes of Altavista, Yahoo and AskJeeves. There was some variety (eg Yahoo's directory) but no one thgouth search was going to be a big business.

I don't think the search problem was considered solved. More like unsolvable. Some new search engine would show up every so often and be good, but fall into the same terrible abyss of mediocrity as all the others in 6-12 months. Thus the meta-search engines like DogPile that would search "all" the search engines and give you a blended result.

Google disrupted that by continuing to be good for at least 10 years before it fell into mediocrity. Unfortunately, the web has gotten so big that developing a new search engine is very expensive, and (IMHO) there hasn't been a new good search engine since Google. I've moved to DuckDuckGo, but I think it's only good enough, not good. I was at Yahoo when they launched their self-hosted search in 2004 and it was good, but they couldn't get enough marketshare to keep investing in it.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#166

Post by woopsn »

cletus wrote: post #31

I expect this to be bad for everyone except Google if the ruling holds. Why? Mozilla and Apple will lose significant revenue from having Google as the default search engine and Google will no longer have to pay those billions. What's more, no one else can pay to be the default either (eg the short-lived Mozilla Bing deal). So what's going to happen? Most users will probably still use Google, nobody is getting paid an…

Google seemed to think the many billions of dollars spent annually to insert Google into other products was necessary in order to maintain dominance in the search market. This wasn't disputed right? I doubt they are relieved now that Bing, OpenAI and others have charismatic products that appear to threaten their core competency right as the business is declared a monopoly.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#167

Post by carlosjobim »

jsnell wrote: post #92
SllX wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google pays to be the default, not for exclusivity as evidenced by the list of SEs Apple provides to swap to. I never knew what the hell Apple was doing with the extremely limited set of search engines with the only means to change it being to choose one of the others Apple has included on a static list which cannot be modified by the user.

It's because the only way to get on that list at all is to pay Apple (as revealed in this very case).

You think Ecosia pays any substantial money to Apple?

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#168

Post by nabla9 »

mucle6 wrote: post #157
nabla9 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what's going to happen? Apple might make their own search engine. Apple has a team that's been creating a next-generation search engine codenamed Pegasus under John Giannandrea. They already have search engines for App Store, Maps, Apple TV and News and Spotlight. Apple web search development worked as bargaining chip in pricing negotiations with Google. Google paid them $20 billion per year to not compete as mu…

If apple wanted to or thought they could make a profitable search engine, wouldn't they have already done it?

Not as profitable as monopoly. Sharing monopoly profit with Google is more profitable for both and loss for the consumers.

Both Apple and Google make less profits if they compete against each other, but consumers benefit from two search engines trying to compete against each other.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#169

Post by jd3 »

dartos wrote: post #113
jd3 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised Kagi Search wasn't mentioned once in the ruling given that it's the most compelling Google competitor on the market.

I think openai is the most notable org taking swings at Google. At least Google seems to feel that way. Might just be the Silicon Valley bubble

While true, it is also notable that ChatGPT is not a search engine, SearchGPT is not live yet, and that AI results have only further diminished the quality of search results in Google Search.

If anything, OpenAI has only served to further exacerbate and accelerate the inevitable decline of Google Search.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#170

Post by ren_engineer »

ncruces wrote: post #115
ren_engineer wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the more blatant monopoly abuse by Google is how they use the Google search homepage to shill their other products. They effectively give themselves billions of dollars in free advertising

Because it's much better for the consumer to search for a city, get an interactive map right there on the search results, but no link to jump to Google Maps so they can get an estimate on how long it takes to get there, because that'd be bundling.

I'm talking more about them posting new product launches, I/O livestream, gmail pinned to the top, etc. Embedded stuff in search results is fine for the most part, although their intent their is primarily to prevent click throughs to other sites and increase the chances of an ad click
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