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Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain

pluralistic.net

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Re: Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain

#51

Post by nicbou »

20after4 wrote: post #7

It's the very definition of selling out. This seems to be a very common trend with the vast majority of all previously respected institutions (at least in the USA). They have all sold out (literally sold the company, in many cases) and have now abandoned all principles (or pretenses) of decency and provision of value to customers. Now they are just trading on past integrity that is no longer reality. They will coast…

"Trading on past integrity" is a really nice expression. I was struggling to explain my feeling that "everything is a brand now", and this is it.

Everything that has a good reputation gets financialized and run into the ground, then the shareholders move on.

Buying anything has become a game of "has that already turned to crap".

Re: Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain

#52

Post by feetsoup »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #38
mistrial9 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

>In a functioning regulatory environment [...] you wouldn't have industries where any one company has more than 15% of the market.

Is that realistic? Intuition is telling me that's very idealistic but I'm prepared to be surprised

Re: Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain

#53

Post by musicale »

stevage wrote: post #43

I feel like there is another big point being hinted at in these articles but not quite stated: Better Homes and Gardens is committing fraud and lying to website visitors.

> Better Homes and Gardens is committing fraud and lying to website visitors.

If it isn't outright illegal it's certainly disappointing.

Is the current Meredith company a different organization from the one started by the magazine's founder, Edwin Meredith?

Re: Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain

#54

Post by musicale »

> Last year, Google did a $70b stock buyback. They also laid off 12,000 staffers (whose salaries could have been funded for 27 years by that stock buyback). They just laid off thousands more employees

Presumably 12,000 google employees working for 27 years could deliver more benefit to google (and to the world, and probably to google's shareholders as well) than a stock buyback?

Re: Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain

#55

Post by smackeyacky »

While it seems google is partly to blame for SEO garbage they should be filtering, they can’t really be responsible for the fact that the internet is mostly overwhelmed by machine generated garbage. Copies of copies of garbage that google simply wasn’t designed to handle.

Re: Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain

#56

Post by wyclif »

AJ007 wrote: post #21
tdoggette wrote: post #2

> 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…

What about Brave search? Does anyone know what they are doing behind the scenes? It's ad-free by default, and emphasizes privacy as a core feature.

Re: Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain

#57

Post by chucke1992 »

AJ007 wrote: post #21
tdoggette wrote: post #2

> 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…

Yeah, I think the future will be a more fragment, AI-driven search that will be integrated into everything via plugins in browsers, apps and native integration. You reading something -> search information about something, or find the community.

Re: Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain

#58

Post by chucke1992 »

from-nibly wrote: post #48
wyclif wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google could fix it tomorrow if they wanted to, but the fact is they don't because there's no incentive for their business, which is advertising. As Upton Sinclair once put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

They absolutely can't. They've innovators dilemma'd themselves. Their cash cow is not making sense any more and they can't investigate any new technologies to save themselves. They came out with Gemini really late and they look like they don't know what they're doing. They are going to be late to the next disruptor too

Google is basically becoming IBM of this era.

Re: Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain

#59

Post by Ferret7446 »

blihp wrote: post #10
mikece wrote: post #4

So... the problem isn't that Google search isn't good but that (1) the ads sold are many and to some people who are scammers, and (2) enough of how the search engine algorithm works has become common knowledge and exploited by SEO experts seeking to inflate the relevance of sites by using what they know of how Google ranks search results. But for this to become a problem Google first had to come up with a system bett…

No, the schemes being used are decidedly low tech for the most part and trivially detectable. Google's result quality isn't dying a death of a thousand cuts due to hordes of disreputable actors, it's dying a death of Google being dependent on a small basket of sleazy companies that they're economically in bed with.

If it's trivially detectable, you could enlighten all of us on how you do it.
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