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Eric Schmidt: “Our competitor is Bing”

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Re: Eric Schmidt: “Our competitor is Bing”

#31

Post by walkon »

jrockway wrote: post #27
antpicnic wrote: post #20

Google needs Bing to be moderately successful to avoid an anti-trust lawsuit. Bing is a win for Microsoft either way. If it gets about 30% market share, then Bing makes Microsoft money and forces Google to invest more in search. If even the largest software company after investing billions can't stop Google's growth in search, then Microsoft and others will claim that that Google is a monopoly. So it should be subjec…

Isn't anti-trust designed to prevent people from abusing their monopoly position? For example, Microsoft was the top OS vendor. They wanted to dominate the highly-lucrative Web Browser Vendor business. So, they forced everyone using their popular OS to use their web browser. The government thought this was an abuse of the monopoly, but the charges didn't stick. What Google's doing is nothing close to that, though. No…

I agree with your main point, but not the Microsoft example of abuse: they forced everyone using their popular OS to use their web browser

They didn't force anybody. One of the first things I would do with a fresh install of Windows back in latter 90s was open IE to download Netscape. Having IE on there made it enabled me to easily learn about and get different browsers. I don't understand how that is so bad. Where was the antitrust on Winsock? What? Forced to use their TCP/IP stack?! Consumer-based OSes should have certain software by default.

Wasn't this more a bit of prescience on Microsoft's part? I mean, now we have Google developing a "browser" OS. Can't get much more coupled then that. What if that becomes the monopoly OS in 5-10 years?

Re: Eric Schmidt: “Our competitor is Bing”

#32

Post by aufreak3 »

Isn't it likely that FB is making google more ad money without google having to lift a finger? On FB, a good chunk of links to "outside world" stuff pass around. Websites do fbconnect 'cos FB&twitter drive traffic to them. Google places contextual ads on these sites and in youtube videos without anybody needing to search for anything. Even youtube has "share on FB" button.

I don't think FB can keep their soc graph to themselves for much longer .. if as ES says people will just give the data to google ... just as they probably do for FB now. (You can tell FB to crawl your gmail contacts and link up.)

So by that argument I can buy ES's "FB is not our prime competitor" statement. Apple is somewhat obviously not a competitor since google can also push ads to iOS devices and pull data like location.

That leaves Bing .. which makes me scratch my head. The only reason I can think of for google considering Bing to be their main competitor is to avoid antitrust suits by not looking like a search monopoly.

Side note: FB's ads are pretty funny actually. I keep getting "Download Chrome, a fast browser" ads on my FB page despite the fact that I'm viewing the page in Chrome.

Re: Eric Schmidt: “Our competitor is Bing”

#33

Post by asnyder »

jrockway wrote: post #27
antpicnic wrote: post #20

Google needs Bing to be moderately successful to avoid an anti-trust lawsuit. Bing is a win for Microsoft either way. If it gets about 30% market share, then Bing makes Microsoft money and forces Google to invest more in search. If even the largest software company after investing billions can't stop Google's growth in search, then Microsoft and others will claim that that Google is a monopoly. So it should be subjec…

Isn't anti-trust designed to prevent people from abusing their monopoly position? For example, Microsoft was the top OS vendor. They wanted to dominate the highly-lucrative Web Browser Vendor business. So, they forced everyone using their popular OS to use their web browser. The government thought this was an abuse of the monopoly, but the charges didn't stick. What Google's doing is nothing close to that, though. No…

I don't know about you, but to me Google is already pretty scary. Google has the power to completely destroy your business. They have little to no human communication, thus not allowing for any real follow-up, they're like this god, or black box. You have to hope and pray your begging will correct things.

For example, lets assume you have a somewhat successful product, getting pretty good search results for your category, and one day your site throws some errors, or it goes down, or something of that nature, your site is now no longer showing for your category. They don't tell you anything, not even if you use their Webmaster tools, all you know is that according to their search query result performance that all of a sudden you stop showing up for any other term than your name. Previously you were showing up for many terms. After you correct these issues, which you can only really guess at, you submit a re-consideration request describing the issue, your solution, and why you think whatever thing you think is the problem should be corrected. Now you wait. Not for some response, but just an automated reply saying that your response has been dealt with, not whether they did anything, or if in fact you had an issue. This will come 2-3 weeks later, your business may already be dead. But if it's not, and magically you show up for Google results again, and webmaster tools shows you that your previous search terms have relevance, you will most definitely not be in your previous position. Time to get out there again, get fresh in-links, and re-build your business.

This is the current status quo. This is very very scary. Even Credit Cards have to tell you why you were rejected, not enough credit history or something like that, you can even get one free credit report in response that will explain things. Not Google. I would sleep much better at night knowing that there was some process that would tell you if there's a problem, and if possible what the reasons were, in general terms. Once you correct them you should be able to submit that you did, and hopefully that would address the situation in some reasonable amount of time.

It's crazy that most of us are ok with a search engine dominating 70% or so of search, without any ability to resolve conflicts, ask questions, or anything. We can only click buttons and hope that after enough times the great Google will listen.

Re: Eric Schmidt: “Our competitor is Bing”

#34

Post by aufreak3 »

aufreak3 wrote: post #32

Isn't it likely that FB is making google more ad money without google having to lift a finger? On FB, a good chunk of links to "outside world" stuff pass around. Websites do fbconnect 'cos FB&twitter drive traffic to them. Google places contextual ads on these sites and in youtube videos without anybody needing to search for anything. Even youtube has "share on FB" button. I don't think FB can keep their soc graph to…

To put it another way, when I hear "google is a search company", I take it to mean "google's business depends on searching the internet" instead of "people use google to search the internet" - the former being much wider in scope than the latter.

Re: Eric Schmidt: “Our competitor is Bing”

#36

Post by jrockway »

asnyder wrote: post #33
jrockway wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't anti-trust designed to prevent people from abusing their monopoly position? For example, Microsoft was the top OS vendor. They wanted to dominate the highly-lucrative Web Browser Vendor business. So, they forced everyone using their popular OS to use their web browser. The government thought this was an abuse of the monopoly, but the charges didn't stick. What Google's doing is nothing close to that, though. No…

I don't know about you, but to me Google is already pretty scary. Google has the power to completely destroy your business. They have little to no human communication, thus not allowing for any real follow-up, they're like this god, or black box. You have to hope and pray your begging will correct things. For example, lets assume you have a somewhat successful product, getting pretty good search results for your cate…

This doesn't bother me. If my website got delisted from Google, I'd find traffic in some other way. If my ads didn't get run by Google, I'd just advertise somewhere else.

Honestly, Google is not that big of a company. I checked out the Fortune 500 list, and Google is not even in the top 50. Amazon.com, Bank of America, and CVS Carkemark know a lot more about you than Google. And they don't care -- you come to them, and they sell you their product, and it's often a good deal for both sides. Google is just like this, except smaller.

In the IT industry, we like to think that Google is important. We see their logo a lot, we hear how nice it is to work there... but they are really small potatoes. Advertising is nothing. Giving people money, giving people drugs, selling gasoline, shipping books to your house overnight, and making light bulbs and jet engines is a lot more profitable than sending clicks to your website. Sorry, that's the reality... there is a lot more evil to be done in the world than Google is capable of. (Look at the number of Fortune 500 companies that are primarily military contractors. Their corporate mandate is to cause people to die as efficiently as possible -- Google manages your RSS feeds and cat pictures! Sorry, not evil.)

(Why isn't Google as heavily regulated as banks? Because they really don't matter that much. Yeah, you can search for your name on Google and see content that you put up on the web under your name. But the banks collect information about you, to make business decisions, without you ever even knowing. Right now, their computers are deciding whether or not you are a credit risk, and if they decide you are, they are canceling your credit card. That vacation you wanted? Gone. That house you wanted? Never. That's power that Google simply doesn't even come close to having!)

Re: Eric Schmidt: “Our competitor is Bing”

#37

Post by InclinedPlane »

jrockway wrote: post #28
kenjackson wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty big whole for Bing to miss. Probably doesn't track as well since it requires a mistyped query -- most people doing comparisons of relevance compare correctly typed queries. But a big hole for real world usage... at least I'd think so.

I agree. The first thing I would do, if writing a search engine, would be to do Google-style phrase corrections. (Although lately, I find it too aggressive. When googling obscure error messages, it usually "do you mean"-s it into a less obscure error message that I already understand. Sigh.)

Indeed. I think google might be falling into the trap of believing that the better search is the one with more results when in many, most?, cases the exact opposite is the case.

Re: Eric Schmidt: “Our competitor is Bing”

#38

Post by InclinedPlane »

inerte wrote: post #7
TrevorJ wrote: post #5

Seems pretty logical to me. As much diversity as Google has, they are still a search company. A lot of the tech they leverage in other areas seems to come from competencies they acquired while improving search. I never understood why people think they are positioned against FB.. Google and FB don't solve very many of the same problems.

> I never understood why people think they are positioned against FB.. Google and FB don't solve very many of the same problems They don't, but they share one common goal: Get money from advertisers, who are targeting people looking for some thing. This "some thing" is obvious on Google, its users are in buying mode even before entering the query term. Now, if (and that's a big if), FB can connect advertisers and buy…

People don't search facebook much. If anything, facebook is hostile to search, seemingly by design.

The secret of ad dollars is that not all visitors are equal. People who use google search are already looking for something, often something to buy, such users are the most susceptible to ads because the ads can actually be helpful. In contrast, ads inserted into the UI of a social networking site are far less valuable. In order for facebook to compete with google they'd have to reinvent themselves substantially.

Re: Eric Schmidt: “Our competitor is Bing”

#39

Post by nl »

walkon wrote: post #31
jrockway wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't anti-trust designed to prevent people from abusing their monopoly position? For example, Microsoft was the top OS vendor. They wanted to dominate the highly-lucrative Web Browser Vendor business. So, they forced everyone using their popular OS to use their web browser. The government thought this was an abuse of the monopoly, but the charges didn't stick. What Google's doing is nothing close to that, though. No…

I agree with your main point, but not the Microsoft example of abuse: they forced everyone using their popular OS to use their web browser They didn't force anybody. One of the first things I would do with a fresh install of Windows back in latter 90s was open IE to download Netscape. Having IE on there made it enabled me to easily learn about and get different browsers. I don't understand how that is so bad. Where w…

It's always the details that matter.

Shipping the browser wasn't the problem. The problem was that they stopped system vendors installing Netscape and/or making it the default browser.

Doing that is fine if you are in a competitive market, but if you are a monopoly then it's anti-competitive and abuse of market power.

Re: Eric Schmidt: “Our competitor is Bing”

#40

Post by aranazo »

jrockway wrote: post #27
antpicnic wrote: post #20

Google needs Bing to be moderately successful to avoid an anti-trust lawsuit. Bing is a win for Microsoft either way. If it gets about 30% market share, then Bing makes Microsoft money and forces Google to invest more in search. If even the largest software company after investing billions can't stop Google's growth in search, then Microsoft and others will claim that that Google is a monopoly. So it should be subjec…

Isn't anti-trust designed to prevent people from abusing their monopoly position? For example, Microsoft was the top OS vendor. They wanted to dominate the highly-lucrative Web Browser Vendor business. So, they forced everyone using their popular OS to use their web browser. The government thought this was an abuse of the monopoly, but the charges didn't stick. What Google's doing is nothing close to that, though. No…

Unfortunately Anti-trust action is often used to drag companies into the unholy Congressional Lobbying racket.That's the way it worked out with Microsoft. Google's lobbying budget seems to scale with it's size so maybe it will escape serious action.
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