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How did Google get so big?

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Re: How did Google get so big?

#351

Post by TomMarius »

xg15 wrote: post #222
briandear wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the consumer being harmed? That’s the only question that matters in anti-trust. That mom and pop can’t compete isn’t a symptom of a monopoly, it’s a symptom of mom and pop not doing more to be the best choice. Mom and pop could compete if they had a better, cheaper product. If you want to compete — be better than the competition. Many startups are not — that isn’t the fault of Google.

Yes, e.g. by stiffling sale of alternative Android-based operating systems, as the EU just concluded. Google uses their market power and control over Android to give competing OSes a disadvantage, whether or not they would be better than Android/Google Play.

Using the EU as an argument is like bringing a friend that agrees with you to confirm your statement. Use actual arguments, please.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#352

Post by pixelpoet »

mrdmnd wrote: post #282
int3 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, I had no idea the guy who wrote the light transport thesis also built Adwords.

He's also the chief contributor to the S2 Geometry Library.

Thanks for this, anyone know what he's up to now?

I can't believe he left CG behind :(

Re: How did Google get so big?

#353

Post by ElectronShak »

>And so if I'm an advertiser and I say, "I want 24-year-old women in Nashville, Tennessee who drive trucks and drink bourbon," I can do that on Google

I think facebook would do a better job for the advertiser in this case.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#354

Post by mrep »

eftychis wrote: post #104
izzydata wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to be implying it is inherently a bad thing. Is trying to stop innovative companies also a hindrance to technological progress?

Innovative companies on their own are not really innovative really. A monopoly enforces their opinion and product in the world. If you don't like their price or approach too bad for you. You are kept out of the game (it is a monopoly right). As has been mentioned a bunch of times here, Google and Facebook have all too naturally embraced Microsoft's (and prior monopolies' ) approach of embrace, extend, and extinguish.…

> Youtube loading faster on Chrome due to Google going ahead with their own suggested implementation without consensus

Are they blocking other browsers from utilizing said efficient tool because claiming that they are purposefully slowing other browsers is disingenuous as they are almost certainly just optimizing efficiency between their various products (chrome and youtube).

Blaming google for optimizing their systems without supporting every other possible system under the sun is beyond ridicules. Nobody has the engineering capacity to perfectly optimize their services for every use case.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#355

Post by golfer »

monkeydust wrote: post #190
magicalhippo wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it's because with Google I don't need to go to page 5 to find interesting results. I've tried to use DuckDuckGo several times, each time I've quickly found myself trawling page after page of results, reverted to Google and found the stuff I was after on page one.

100% same I wanted to love ddg but it's just not as good

DDG doesn't have stock prices, movie listings, or any of the useful "onebox" type information that Google has. It's just not as useful IMHO.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#356

Post by maym86 »

trishume wrote: post #325
hellllllllooo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One example: By preventing phone manufacturers who use Android and Google services from also selling phones with other operating systems they are killing the opportunity for another phone OS from gaining traction. We could have missed out on the opportunity for something better than Android being developed and we'll never know. It's called dumping; flooding the market with something free to kill competition and make…

If I'm not mistaken, they contractually limited manufacturers from selling devices with Android forks , according to Google to avoid experience fragmentation. AFAIK the terms didn't limit any other operating systems not based on Android.

Yep actually I retact part of my original comment. Thanks for the correction.

The dumping part is still valid because any OS that isn't free and relies on licencing can't complete with an OS that makes it money from a secondary business like search and advertising.

Google gave away Android to make sure it dominated mobile advertising. Any OS reliying on profits directly from licencing the OS cannot complete.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#357

Post by nl »

dmead wrote: post #313
wallflower wrote: post #8

If I could give a six word response for the technical side: "Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat and team". To paraphrase some Cal/UC Berkeley professor that I cannot remember, he said that the problem with scaling is that when you go up a magnitude or more, you may need a qualitatively different solution for the same problem. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and their team have time and time again managed to design and build st…

"And now their team's attention is on AI..." is quite the hype thing to say. Just because you can build a bigger bridge doesn't mean you're a good car designer.

Dean's PhD was in neural networks.

Also TPU2 is the only decent alternative to NVidia hardware in production, so that's a decent sign.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#358

Post by southerndrift »

sseth wrote: post #342

Let's ask a question : How did Google defeat another giant - Microsoft - in 2 major markets where Microsoft had a head start and deep pockets? How did Chrome beat IE, and how did Android beat the several generations of Windows Mobile and Windows Phone? Clearly Microsoft had no dearth of talent or money. So how come it could not keep Google at bay? In my view the answer lies in the fact that Google's engineering led c…

Microsoft's problem for Windows was that they wanted to make money of selling Windows for mobile phones instead of giving it away for free.

Chrome's success could be due to Google having an ad for Chrome at the top of the most visited site of the internet.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#359

Post by erikpukinskis »

0xEFF wrote: post #268
snikeris wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the Google SRE book makes the point that they couldn't have achieved their scale w/out approaching ops from an engineering perspective. Linearly hiring ops people as services scale would have been too expensive.

Approaching operations from a software development perspective wasn’t unique to Google. Also ops is engineering and has been since before Google existed.

Ops is probably more reasonably called engineering than most so-called “software engineering”.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#360

Post by ocdtrekkie »

joshuamorton wrote: post #310
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happy to be proven wrong that a Googler has accomplished such a task. As I stated in two of these comments: There appears to be no place to report an ad on Google Search. Can you explain where this feature is, because I've explicitly looked for it many times. I see a dropdown that offers me a single option: "Why this ad?", which of course, just tells me it's based on my current search terms since I have personali…

>I'm happy to be proven wrong that a Googler has accomplished such a task. As I stated in two of these comments: There appears to be no place to report an ad on Google Search. Can you explain where this feature is, because I've explicitly looked for it many times. As far as I know, there should be a "send feedback" button on the bottom of pretty much any page. It could be used for something like this, although I have…

Hey Joshua, just a note: Five hours ago, I confirmed you were right, the ad was gone. But it looks like the same site is back in business: https://www.google.com/search?q=mapquest
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