[adventured]

Google has an extremely blatant monopoly in search. That has been the case for over a decade now.

The competitors to Google, outside of a few markets like Russia and China, are trivial at best.

Google's search competitors are so weak, all they've collectively done is lose market share for 20 years. The social competitors to Facebook - Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, etc. - are no more threatening to FB's monopoly than DuckDuckGo and Bing are to Google's search monopoly.

When companies like Google and Facebook have monopolies, what they do in response is lie: they claim competition is everywhere. Microsoft used that lying tactic as well. They pretend they're not really in the search space specifically, they're an ad company in general, and they're only a small N% of the whole global ad market. So Google likes to lie and pretend they compete with every input box on the Web, and every ad served anywhere on earth; naturally their share of all text input box usage is merely 1%.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Google has an extremely blatant monopoly in search

Tough thing is it grew to a position of dominance, on the user side, organically. (On the ad side, the story is more complicated.) Facebook grew on both sides by gobbling up potential competition, e.g. Instagram, WhatsApp, et cetera.

[adventured]

I agree. I regard Google search as one of the greatest technological accomplishments in world history. The service it has been to humanity can't be overstated. It wasn't just slightly better, it was radically better in every way. It was faster, it produced better results, it even had greater integrity (less clutter & junk, less abusive ad approach by not mixing results & ads, etc).

A dominant, extreme majority market position by itself isn't valid justification to break a company up or apply anti-trust (in the US). Monopolies are of course not illegal in the US. Google's search product remains superior and it's unlikely to be directly, seriously challenged by a threatening competitor. It's the change in integrity that might take them down. Call it greed. The greed eats the ecosystem, pushes for a greater share of the pot, then the ecosystem cries foul to regulators, identical to Microsoft's mistakes derived from greed. If a monopoly platform can't control itself properly - in terms of human nature, it's probably extremely difficult to restrain that level of economic power while existing in a low feedback, low consequence bubble - then the authorities will probably step in and do it. When it comes to monopolies, you can eat this, maybe you can eat this and that, you can't eat this and that and that and that and that. It's pretty much that simple, you control yourself or eventually the guys with the guns will do it for you (if only out of concerns for preserving their own power).

[mlthoughts2018]

I sincerely believe that with a little shoe polish, a little more sincere effort into information retrieval mathematics, and better marketing, DuckDuckGo would be a superior search product.

Currently I use DuckDuckGo for probably 85% of searches. There are specific search cases that don’t work well, and specific types of automatic categorization and presentation (e.g. sports scores, rich location data) that Google is well ahead on.

But in many mundane searches, the result quality is indistinguishable and the lack of personalized tracking would break any ties strongly in DuckDuckGo’s favor, so strongly that it’s obviously worth it to split searches between two different engines on a case by case basis.

And in fact, I like some things about DuckDuckGo better, particularly I like the visual experience of its Open Street Maps results better. It’s not as information rich as a Google Maps result, but Google Maps is visually too cluttered and often suffers performance issues that a lower-tech maps service doesn’t. (DuckDuckGo also lets you select from a few choices for the maps backend, including Google Maps).

Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure Google will remain far ahead as the search product leader.

I only mean that in terms of the implementation and actual user experience, DuckDuckGo doesn’t have far to go before it would be entirely a substitute product that completely replaces an average search experience on Google.

(I’m speaking as someone who had worked on all types of personalization features for an Alexa top 400 site’s product search engine — so I have a lot of work experience informing my opinion that the actual distance, in terms of the investment to reproduce feature parity, between DuckDuckGo and Google is not that high.)

Google’s original efforts to create internet search were amazing. But now the underlying search tech is totally a commodity, including most of the fancier machine learning and information retrieval features. It’s why they have to integrate advertising so tightly to it. Search features alone don’t differentiate it as a product anymore.

I do hope a service like DuckDuckGo invests in that last 10% of the squirrly little extra features it needs to provide to seriously compete for overall market share.

[amelius]

I wish DDG would include a button in the search results that says "Search in Google instead".

That way, I would actually use DDG as my main search engine because it would be easy to resort to Google in specific cases.

[gbear605]

Check out Bangs on DDG [1]. Just insert "!g" into your search text and it automatically redirects your search to Google. It works for thousands of other websites too. (Wikipedia's !w is one I use all the time)

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

[amelius]

Yeah, I know about bangs, but on mobile they are cumbersome to use: I have to tap my screen 7 times to change from DDG to Google:

    1. tap DDG search bar
    2. tap space
    3. tap shift key
    4. tap "!"
    5. tap shift key
    6. tap "g"
    7. tap enter key

If DDG included a simple button, it would be 1 tap. Of course, I can't blame them for not linking to Google, but this way I will stick with Google.

[mlthoughts2018]

Wouldn't it be amazing to create a rent-seeking feeder website similar to e.g. Expedia, Priceline, Hipmunk, Orbitz, etc., that sits on top of data provided by other providers (in those example cases, data from airlines and so on, but in the search engine case, data about the characteristics of search results).

Then a user can go to my site at www.mycashcow.com or something and type in a query, which behind the scenes farms out queries to other search engines, gets characteristics about their results and predicts which of the search engines you would most prefer for this particular query, and then navigates you to that search engine's results page.

This way you always use one portal to search, and to the extent that you approve of its underlying prediction model, it automatically routes you to your preferred search engine for a given task, without needing to open a different tab or even click a button.

Expedia-like sites have been able to do this because by acting as aggregators, they solved a general search traffic problem for a fractured set of service providers (hotels, airlines, etc), which in some cases have to make some of the data publicly available. So the providers could not easily avoid a race-to-the-bottom commodity effect or avoid paying the aggregator sites for preferred placement. Seamless is doing this now with local food delivery.

We would get destroyed by Google if we tried this though, because then it would mean Google traffic would depend on Google actually functioning as a quality search engine, rather than happening to be a monopoly search engine (good quality, sure, but still monopoly) and reaping benefits in the form of advertising integration. Advertising would only pay for Google ads if the traffic driven to Google from www.mycashcow.com was in line with what they wanted, which would incentivize Google to either pay me to rank them higher, or do things like ceasing to track users because that would make them competitive with what users like about DuckDuckGo.

Since Google could sue me so hard regarding whether I am allowed to farm out a "pre-query" to their search engine, analyze "their" search results data, and recommend if a user would prefer it to the other options, I don't think this business could get off the ground unless it was created with a pre-arranged collusion with Google from the start.

[amelius]

Why would it be illegal to combine data from different sources? As a user, I'm doing this all the time. So why would it be different if a machine does it for me?

Of course, if somebody is making money off of it (mycashcow.com in your example), then it might be a different story.

[RRL]

It's better to think of Search as less of a historic plain text input field on a landing page, and instead to open it up to where people discover new ideas, products, and opportunities. Facebook and Amazon are enormous in this model. Amazon so much so that WPP and other advertising giants are less afraid of Google & Facebook, and instead incredibly terrified at what Amazon has and where Amazon is going.

[jacksmith21006]

But is it the fault of Google their competitors are weak? Should we now reward creating a better product? You can use whatever search engine you want and Bing is actually two less charcters it just sucks so no one uses. That is not the fault of Google is it?

Look at browsers and Google has most of the market even though you have to download to get when the PC comes with MS browser. Why?

Google came late to search as well as browsers and simply won because of a much better product that continue to improve far faster than competitors. Why on Earth would we penalize this?

[criddell]

Being a monopoly is fine. The problem starts when a company abuses it's monopoly power.

It doesn't make any sense to say a company that has achieved monopoly status can abuse its power as long as they acquired their monopoly legitimately.

[xtian]

> Being a monopoly is fine. The problem starts when a company abuses it's monopoly power.

This is dangerously incorrect. A market economy requires competition to function correctly. Any monopoly — but especially one in a major market — is a hazard to the health of the broader economy and the society that depends upon it.

See: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/amazons-antitrust-par...

> The long-term interests of consumers include product quality, variety, and innovation—factors best promoted through both a robust competitive process and open markets. By contrast, allowing a highly concentrated market structure to persist endangers these long-term interests, since firms in uncompetitive markets need not compete to improve old products or tinker to create news ones.

[criddell]

I'm talking legally and from a US perspective.