Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones • Hacker News Board

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#551

Post by shiroiushi » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 4:25 AM UTC

stephenr wrote: post #538

shiroiushi wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What "golden egg" do Google have besides an ad-selling business? Google search, Maps, and GMail are the big 3 web services. These don't bring in revenue all by themselves, but they bring users to look at ads which is where they make all their money. There's also Chrome (directs people to Google services and facilitates their use of those services). Finally, there's Android, which is a little different but like Apple…

> These don't bring in revenue all by themselves Thus they're not eggs at all, either golden or otherwise > but they bring users to look at ads which is where they make all their money Ad sales is their golden egg. Practically everything else is an egg truck to sell that one thing.

They're absolutely golden eggs, they just don't bring in revenue directly the way other products do.

Ads by themselves aren't a golden egg. Users don't want to look at ads, and certainly aren't going to pay for them. That's why they came up with those other products, to sell ads to advertisers.

It's just like newspapers: historically successful papers like the NYT didn't get rich by doing great journalism and selling papers to people, they got rich selling ads, with the journalism being a way to get people to subscribe to the paper.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#552

Post by Sylamore » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 4:32 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #149

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those disagreeing, the power of defaults is incredibly powerful , most users are blissfully unaware on how to, or why they might want to change them. Sure, plenty will change it back, but many won't. We've seen this play out with Apple Maps already — Something that may get Apple in trouble too. Remember that Google was paying Apple 20 BILLION for the privilege, and a key reason they had an antitrust case against…

No, defaults aren't incredibly powerful. Chrome utterly dominates Edge on Windows, despite Edge being default. How do you explain that? The reality is that people know what they like, and most will switch to the thing they like most. Especially when it costs nothing.

Defaults matter because many people won't change them, and even people that will change them aren't going to change them every time they touch a new system. Especially when the "defaults" have been that way for decades which brings a sense of gravitational pull back to those tools/sites even if the new defaults change.

Some defaults can absolutely be over ridden by a non-stop barrage of interstitial pages and ad banners imploring your to install Chrome because all the default tools you use are Google sites, which just circles back to defaults mattering.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#553

Post by dehrmann » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 4:32 AM UTC

singularity2001 wrote: post #512

dehrmann wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [Apple] already have search engines for App Store, Maps, Apple TV and News and Spotlight. This is completely different than a general-purpose search engine.

and they even completely fail at this easier task

It's both easier and harder. The scale part is easy (the index is <1TB), but there's almost no training data for feedback.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#554

Post by nox101 » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 4:37 AM UTC

nabla9 wrote: post #121

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…

> So what's going to happen? Apple might make their own search engine. Apple has a team that's been creating a next-generation search engine codenamed Pegasus under John Giannandrea. They already have search engines for App Store, Maps, Apple TV and News and Spotlight. Apple web search development worked as bargaining chip in pricing negotiations with Google. Google paid them $20 billion per year to not compete as mu…

Apple is under anti-trust investigation too. Adding a search engine to their monopoly isn't going to help their case either.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#555

Post by Sylamore » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 4:38 AM UTC

talldayo wrote: post #180

crazygringo wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, defaults aren't incredibly powerful. Chrome utterly dominates Edge on Windows, despite Edge being default. How do you explain that? The reality is that people know what they like, and most will switch to the thing they like most. Especially when it costs nothing.

On top of that, the mindshare of "Googling it" dominates users brains just as much as Kleenex branding does. I'm sure most of us have watched someone use another search engine to look up Google before.

Yeah, I still say "Google it" even though I've been using DDG and more recently Kagi for years - I discovered saying anything else seems to lose people when trying to help them. Even just saying "search for" gives me deer in the headlight responses until I say "search on google".

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#556

Post by EasyMark » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 4:39 AM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #540

Spivak wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the ruling is that no one can pay to be the default search engine then… welp.

I don't know why people keep speculating that this would be the ruling. Paying for default placement is a simple commercial transaction that only becomes problematic when you're already a monopoly and can spend 10% of your billions in revenue to stay on top and keep smaller contenders out. Is there anything in what the judge has said that would suggest that they view the simple act of having a paid default as being a…

yep, the point is to bust up google's monopoly, not to kill other browsers and search engines.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#557

Post by malfist » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 4:43 AM UTC

redserk wrote: post #403

immibis wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you do. You get to choose to buy into the other platform, which is significantly more open. If for some reason you choose not to, then you obviously don't value openness very much.

Have you been paying attention to Google’s moves the last few years or are you just here to blast Apple? They’re not the forever-open platform you’re purporting them to be. Look at the increasing push for device attestation via SafetyNet or whatever it is called now.

I use Google because they're more open, but I agree with you, I am under no pretense that it's open. Just more open than the alternative, barely.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#558

Post by c2h5oh » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 4:45 AM UTC

centum wrote: post #547

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…

Wow, if Google had hired you, your insight would've saved them many billions every single year! They're such fools for spending all that money when it had absolutely no impact on their position in the market!

Before this ruling: whoever pays the most gets to be the default, so google pays. If they don't someone else does.

After this ruling: since nobody gets to buy being the default whatever users want to be the default will be selected. Judging by market share it will be google for $0.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#559

Post by rstuart4133 » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 4:46 AM UTC

alvah wrote: post #550

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" I disagree. 100% they had a better product, but they have absolutely mangled it over the last few updates. Honestly, if I wanted the opinion of randomnumbers45123 on Reddit, I'd just search Reddit. Google achieved dominance ~25 years ago by being better than the alternatives, and the other search engines pretty much withered away rapidly. They (Google) are in a very precarious posi…

For a decade of so I was in charge internal web page for mobile users. I had control over the devices the end users had, the web browser they used, I maintained the back end. In that deployment the best product was Firefox.

There were two major reasons. It could be deployed on all platforms we used (we didn't support iOS). Secondly it was by far the most reliable. We still have the occasional use who would use Chrome on Android or whatever, and at least one or twice a year Chrome would push a broken version. It's odd, as before that I would have put Google's code quality above Mozilla's. At least for Chrome/Firefox it's not, and the difference is large.

Re: Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones

#560

Post by rendaw » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 4:50 AM UTC

shiroiushi wrote: post #539

brazzledazzle wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a coworker insist on using ddg for privacy reasons and he was a bit smug about it even though meetings where he was presenting while searching the web always started with a ddg search and ended with him sighing and giving up by using !g to switch to google. I think, even in it's less than ideal state, people still underestimate how much time google's tailored search can save you when you train it to figure out…

I've frequently found better results by using the !g when searching for technical docs and other programming-related stuff. But for more everyday, non-programming things, I've frequently found the regular DDG results (from Bing) actually better and less filled with SEO crap than Google's.

Often when searching with google I stick !g in front of my query without thinking, and only realize when it shows up in the search bar after the page loads.