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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

#221

Post by apexalpha »

legitster wrote: post #81
causal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. People use Google because it's the default, not because they will go out of their way to keep using it. The minute Apple changes the iPhone default, all but a few iPhone users stop using Google.

> People use Google because it's the default, not because they will go out of their way to keep using it. Is this actually true? Microsoft has bent over backwards trying making it inconvenient to get Chrome + Google on any new device. There's even the whole "Edge is the #1 browser to install Chrome" meme. Normies just really like Google.

Not just normies, its just the best search engine…

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#222

Post by hoistbypetard »

toast0 wrote: post #165
cletus wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> Thus the meta-search engines like DogPile that would search "all" the search engines and give you a blended result.

There was a brief window where people would look at me like I was some kind of crazy wizard when they saw me use DogPile.

Prior to that, I used Watson[1] to accomplish something similar.

[1](http://www.karelia.com/watson/)

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#223

Post by tootie »

knuckleheads wrote: post #37

> Mehta’s decision is expected to trigger a separate proceeding to determine what penalties Google will face – and the company is also likely to file an appeal As a Google antitrust watcher, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop with what remedies the court will actually recommend to correct this monopoly. If you ask 20 experts, who all otherwise agree that Google is a monopoly, you might get 40 different answers ab…

I can envision a gnarly Venn diagram of search, ads, AI, analytics, Chrome. You could easily make this 5 separate companies (ads and analytics were acquired), but you probably just need to split it somewhere in the middle.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#224

Post by macintux »

toast0 wrote: post #165
cletus wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Discovery in the mid-90s was excruciatingly bad. Google really did rescue the web in that regard.

I remember searching AltaVista for GNU’s website (at the time, they didn’t have their own domain, or weren’t using it) and I’m pretty sure I had to go to page 2 or 3 of the results to find it.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#225

Post by asddubs »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #177
hugh_kagi wrote: post #21

We face a number of challenges simply letting our paying customers change their search engine: 1. On iOS the list of allowed search engines is simply baked into OS, we have a fiddly extension that hooks outbound calls to /search and redirects them but I wish we didn't need to. 2. On Chrome, we use an extension to change the default search engine and enable search auto-complete etc, but Google has a policy that such a…

1. That sounds like an Apple issue, not a Google issue 2. That sounds perfectly reasonable. Google doesn't want people to bundle other things for users who want to install just a different default search (and not "your hotbar" like the Netscape days). 3. I'm not sure what you're talking about, is Chrome on Linux default search configured differently than Chrome on Windows?

>2. That sounds perfectly reasonable. Google doesn't want people to bundle other things for users who want to install just a different default search (and not "your hotbar" like the Netscape days).

I suspect it's the other way around. They don't want random extensions to mess with your search engine because they get kickbacks from yahoo or whatever. Though if the extension is named for a search engine I don't think it should apply.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#226

Post by fuzztester »

alberth wrote: post #90

Warren Buffet recently sold ~55% of his Apple stock. I wonder if this was related. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41155376 --- Granted, Buffet also invested $40B and it's worth 9x today. When you have $320B in gains , it's only prudent to begin to take some of those gains off the table. https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/6-words-explain-why-warren-bu... .

that point also appeared recently in The Guardian, although under a different title.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#227

Post by SllX »

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).

We don’t actually know that. I do sometimes wonder if that’s the case, but you shouldn’t state something as a fact without anything to back it up.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#228

Post by te_chris »

gregdoesit wrote: post #215
hugh_kagi wrote: post #21

We face a number of challenges simply letting our paying customers change their search engine: 1. On iOS the list of allowed search engines is simply baked into OS, we have a fiddly extension that hooks outbound calls to /search and redirects them but I wish we didn't need to. 2. On Chrome, we use an extension to change the default search engine and enable search auto-complete etc, but Google has a policy that such a…

I’m one of the paying Kagi customer who wants to make Kagi my default iOS search engine, but cannot. It’s maddening that even though I paid for both my iPhone / iPad and for Kagi, Apple for some reason makes it impossible for me to make this choice (that I already made by paying for Kagi). On Chrome at least this is possible, even if it’s additional steps (I have not used the extension though there.)

Some few billion reasons*

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#229

Post by Twirrim »

zufallsheld wrote: post #198
mrob wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox makes you jump through hoops too. To enable the UI for adding custom search engines you need to set the undocumented preference "browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh" to true.

At least on mobile Firefox for Android, that's not true. It's there by default.

You can change between ones that you have a search tools extension for, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/category..., but you can't just put your own custom search engine in.

That said, keyword searches are awesome and I use them for a whole lot of things, including effectively custom search engines. I have keyword searches against, e.g., internal confluence docs so I only have to enter "con " and firefox will load the confluence search page, or "people " to bring up our internal phonebook with a search for the employee. I don't think I've ever needed to add my own entirely custom search engine to the browser.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#230

Post by Ferret7446 »

currysausage wrote: post #187
Ferret7446 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. That sounds like an Apple issue, not a Google issue 2. That sounds perfectly reasonable. Google doesn't want people to bundle other things for users who want to install just a different default search (and not "your hotbar" like the Netscape days). 3. I'm not sure what you're talking about, is Chrome on Linux default search configured differently than Chrome on Windows?

> That sounds like an Apple issue True. But guess who’s paying Apple good money in order to remain the default search engine. Who knows what else might be part of this deal?

Moving the goalposts? This is about the list of allowed baked in search engines, not what the default is.
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