Maybe it's legitimate, but this story got ramped off the front page of HN faster than I could send it to a few folks.
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Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain
31–40 of 68 posts
Re: Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain
#32I'm guessing what's happening is that Google doesn't really care and is not really incentivised (in the short term) to provide high quality search results. It wouldn't make enough profit to work on that. And if any competitors become threatening enough they have ways of bringing them down that are cheaper than maintaining product or technical supremacy.
Re: Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain
#33Bummer optimizing hiring devs on leetcode skills doesn't lead to better search result engineering.
Re: Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain
#34The framing of this as a Google issue would suggest that other search engines wouldn’t have this issue, but I’m not sure that’s true? The “air purifier” search on DDG seems to give the same set of blogspam results: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=best+air+purifier+for+pet+hai... Can someone with Kagi check to see if Kagi does better here?
Yeah, it's all mostly junk.
Re: Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain
#35> A company that can't figure out the difference between a scam like Better Homes and Gardens and a rigorous review site like Housefresh should be pouring every spare dime it brings in into fixing this problem. Not buying default search status on every platform so that we never try another search engine: they should be fixing their shit.
Google has sucked for years, and the level of sucking has been covered extensively on hn. The one thing that was a real shock was how much more gas was left in the ad model engine. They've managed to grow substantially over the past couple of years largely by pushing advertisers in to a ROAS model that is clearly optimized to make Google more money: gross almost 2x from 2019 to 2023 -- from $161b to $307b. Net income…
Was it actually revenue growth from adverts or was it from a sudden splurge in pandemic-era spending caused by governments all over the world panic-signing up for Google Classroom and buying Chromebooks?
Because I can see pretty much all of the 'growth' that occurred during 2020-2021 being unwound gradually as people realise that a lot of what happened was an absolute disaster for society.
When it comes to making any predictions for the future you really have to write off the 2019-2021 pandemic era figures as a glitch.
Re: Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the US we've proven that it's easiest to just talk about anti-competition regulation to buy votes and then never actually get around to improving or enforcing it. After all, if you solve problems, you lose platforms to run the next election on.
I don’t think that last sentence follows. There are always more problems to solve. They’re just stupid and lazy and loyal to their owners.
There are always more problems, but for example, it's a lot easier to get voters heated over abortion rights than it is over whether or not a national ID should carry biometric data.
Re: Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain
#37The framing of this as a Google issue would suggest that other search engines wouldn’t have this issue, but I’m not sure that’s true? The “air purifier” search on DDG seems to give the same set of blogspam results: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=best+air+purifier+for+pet+hai... Can someone with Kagi check to see if Kagi does better here?
Isn't DDG just a proxy for Bing?
I can't imagine who would go to Microsoft for quality.
Re: Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I believe we've proven that anti-competition regulations don't work You have? How? You barely have any. And the ones you do have you rarely enforce. > Trying to protect consumers by breaking up monopolies and promoting healthy market competition will see you leaving office in a hurry. That sounds like a flaw in your political/electoral system not in anti-competition regulations.
I agree with the sentiment here but.. > You barely have any .. anti-competition regulations this is not true. However, the secrecy implemented around enforcement (bad publicity) causes the casual observer to think so.. There are very large enforcement actions that take place regularly.. they are far from perfect, and the failures tend to be the ones that are amplified in media..
> this is not true. However, the secrecy implemented around enforcement (bad publicity) causes the casual observer to think so..
That isn't the reason it isn't true. The US nominally has quite strong antitrust laws. The statutes are extremely broad in what they prohibit. But the enforcement is lacking and the courts over time have read the laws more narrowly than they were intended to be.
> the failures tend to be the ones that are amplified in media..
The failures are prolific. In a functioning regulatory environment, whether because you don't have regulations that prop up incumbents and don't create regulatory barriers to entry or because you break them up and stop them from buying each other, you wouldn't have industries where any one company has more than 15% of the market. But that is common, not rare, and that is the measure of it working.
Re: Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain
#39The framing of this as a Google issue would suggest that other search engines wouldn’t have this issue, but I’m not sure that’s true? The “air purifier” search on DDG seems to give the same set of blogspam results: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=best+air+purifier+for+pet+hai... Can someone with Kagi check to see if Kagi does better here?
Isn't DDG just a proxy for Bing? I can't imagine who would go to Microsoft for quality.
I believe I've seen DDG's CEO or founder on here claiming that they do not proxy requests through Bing and that they do their own indexing. I think they had been using Bing at some point but I'm pretty sure current DDG results is all DDG indexing. Probably still falling for most of the same tricks which blogspammers use for Google SEO, though.
Re: Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain
#40Amazingly written, hilarious, but I figured out what’s frustrating me: the focus on being a consumer. If you’re using words like “enshittocene” I feel you should think a little more about writing a post focusing on why Google isn’t helpful for product reviews. Google n co are destroying democracy and the planet itself , and to spend our final days complaining that sometimes people buy bad products seems out of touch.…
Google (and Walmart) established their dominant position through clever marketing based on lies. We bought it and only now are starting to realize what we fell for. Google's big lie was "don't be evil." They provided overwhelmingly valuable services for free. They did everything with minimal advertising and generally fantastic performance. Then they merged with an advertising company and pretty soon "don't be evil" w…
This a great, well researched response, and I don’t disagree with the sentiment, but I think we should be careful not go give these companies too much credit. America has, understandably, been investing less in manufacturing over time at a roughly steady rate of decline: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2017/april/us-manu...
manufacturing's share of nominal gross domestic product (GDP) has dropped from 28.1 percent in 1953 to just 12 percent in 2015