Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 761 posts

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#381

Post by kyleplum »

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.

> Is this actually true?

I mean Google obviously thinks it is otherwise they wouldn't be paying Apple $20 billion a year.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#382

Post by rkagerer »

lozenge wrote: post #329
everfrustrated wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only easy now because Microsoft had a lot of runs in with the US and EU regulators on this specific issue in the past.

And because MS wants to increase its userbase on IOS and macOS. Meanwhile Windows Start Menu is locked to Edge and Bing.

Meanwhile Windows Start Menu is locked to Edge and Bing

Why does software suck these days.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#383

Post by datavirtue »

immibis wrote: post #310
gregdoesit wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

You chose to buy a platform with severe restrictions. It's not like we can blame monopoly power, because Android phones are easy to get. It was legitimately your choice - it seems like for some reason you wanted the restrictions.

Burn

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#384

Post by lmm »

bee_rider wrote: post #304
mminer237 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if not explicitly conditioned, which I don't believe came out as being the case in this case, there's still an inherent motivation. Google will pay more for a default on an OS where it's hard to switch the default than it will for a default where it's easy to switch away. Google might pay $20 billion for defaults on iOS as-is where 99% of people stick with Google, but if Apple started asking users if they were s…

It seems plausible. Mostly I think people should be explicit and clear about their accusations. Something that doesn’t make a ton of sense to me in this theory is that, despite it being hard to add a new engine (which is not great), it is easy to switch away from Google on iOS. And the big search engines are in their pre-populated list. So it seems Google and Apple have engaged in a conspiracy to keep people from swi…

> That doesn’t make a ton of sense, right? Google is probably not more scared of Kagi than Bing.

Google certainly should be more scared of Kagi than Bing. Bing is a known quantity that's not going to suddenly shoot ahead of them. A smaller, newer competitor might. Just like how it wasn't Lycos or Jeeves that dethroned Yahoo, it was the two guys in a garage.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#386

Post by callalex »

bee_rider wrote: post #327
throwaway88222 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who worked at Mozilla, on Firefox browsers, I can guarantee you that none of this is a coincidence. I have never seen the search contract so I don't think I am breaking any kind of NDA but I have been close enough to engineering and browser planning and product management to know that Google dictates (negotiates?) in great detail every aspect of search in the browser. This is not a simple "you can use Goog…

It used to be pretty common for computer-illiterate people to add a bunch of extra search bars and other weird hotbars, often of ill-repute, by accident. Maybe Apple just didn’t want to repeat that.

The status quo in fact encourages going back to the toolbar-infested days of yore. The only way to use a non-bribe-paying search engine in Safari is to install a browser extension with access to every webpage. There are standards that work just fine for switching search engines without any extensions or toolbars but Apple explicitly rejects those standards.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#387

Post by beej71 »

shuntress wrote: post #267
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…

> They simply have a better product This is the key. I'm not saying Google couldn't be better. But if it were possible to build a better index of the Internet, Google would do it. Spam garbage overrunning the web is the underlying issue.

Depends on the definition of "better", I think.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#388

Post by refulgentis »

pradn wrote: post #162
larubbio wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your assumption basis is completely wrong, not only on when it came about. Bizarrely, Google spelled out that the AI answers weren't from an LLM in post-debacle PR, like it was a good thing

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#389

Post by ajross »

jcfrei wrote: post #324
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).…

Google's main game is not serving better and better results: It's generating more clicks for advertisers on the first couple of results. The antithesis to Google's business model is someone asking an AI a question and receiving a bunch of direct answers for a monthly fee. Google's business model is people trying a bunch of queries (essentially shopping around), clicking on a whole set of links (each time costing the…

(So, disclosure that I work at Google, but nowhere near anything to do with search or ads.)

That is wildly distorting the way online advertisement works, mostly by a sideways denial that "advertising works" at all. The business model is that people who sell "X" want a link to their product displayed when potential customers consume content related to "X". There's nothing unclear or weird about this, and it's not fundamentally any different form print ads in the 1930's.

So to the extent that "Google's main game is not serving better results", that's true, in the same way that Apple's game is not selling a better mobile operating system. iOS and search both generate revenue by making the product they're actually selling more effective.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#390

Post by fragmede »

rkagerer wrote: post #382
lozenge wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And because MS wants to increase its userbase on IOS and macOS. Meanwhile Windows Start Menu is locked to Edge and Bing.

Meanwhile Windows Start Menu is locked to Edge and Bing Why does software suck these days.

Because the money for it is stuck in weird places. I can't write some small bit of software and just sell that for a decent price. People don't pay for software these days, so my best hope is to give it away for free and then running ads. And then, if it's any good, someone will come by and make an open source clone and give that away for free, tanking sales/ad revenue. So the money in writing software is by working at a huge company that has found money with software, like Google and selling ads.
Post reply on HN