[coder1001]

Correct me if I am wrong, but is there anything stopping anyone from starting a new (better) search engine, and promoting it like crazy? Maybe even pay users a portion of the ads revenue for using the new search engine?

I understand there are economies of scale here, but if a few investors got together what's to stop them from achieving this?

[jrockway]

Nobody is stopping anyone from doing this, and people are doing this. Whenever I lock my screen on Windows, I get an unremovable ad from Microsoft that says I can earn money for every search if I just switch to Bing. When you click "help" in Windows, it doesn't give you help -- it opens your a browser for a Bing search for something vaguely related to the problem, and the search returns no useful results. (It doesn't link to as much malware as it used to. Maybe that's because of my ad blocker though.)

The reality is that Bing sucks. Hard. It can't even return Microsoft's knowledge base for a search term that Microsoft explicitly set up. Every time, I cut-n-paste the term into Google and that is how I resolve my question. (Of course being linked to Microsoft's own website! They wrote the software. They wrote the documentation. But their own search can't find it!)

The problem is not Google being anti-competitive here. It's Microsoft that can't compete. They don't have two employees that said "hey, we should set up a monthly sync to make sure all the help in Windows gets linked to our knowledge base in Bing" between someone on the Windows team and someone on the Bing team. And that's the kind of thing that makes your company go out of business. The government can do very little to help you with that.

[nyanpasu64]

You can hide the Windows 10 lock screen ads: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-remove-advertising-window...

Not sure if it works on all Windows 10 editions though.

[jrockway]

Ah, I see that now. It came back after my reinstall. (I'm good at turning off Cortana and sending my web browsing history to Microsoft. This one I missed, however.)

[indigochill]

People use Google because it's what they know and the alternatives for whatever reason do not sufficiently differentiate themselves in ways that the user cares about enough to switch.

In order to be disrupt Google, you don't make a better Google. You identify something Google doesn't deliver and which people care about enough to use your search engine. I don't think anyone knows right know what that hypothetical killer feature is, and most probably assume it doesn't exist.

On another level, though, incumbents have a habit of buying potential threats (which can be a pretty good deal when you're in venture capital land and need to show your shareholders high returns). Google's bought a number of companies with a different take on search over the years, such as Like.com and Clever Sense.

[ffpip]

The reason Google is because of their AI. And the reason their AI is good is because of the massive amount of data they collect by violating privacy. No other company can start right now. Their search engine is years of efforts of collecting every user's data in Chrome for determining 'freshness', page rank and other related stuff.

[jeffbee]

You are making the same flawed argument that the DOJ complaint is making: that Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, some of the largest companies Earth has ever seen, somehow can't afford to compete in search, which is plainly ridiculous.

[oceanplexian]

The DOJ complaint isn't "You can't have a monopoly". In fact there is nothing illegal about having a monopoly in a product or service under US law.

The problem arises when a company leverages a monopoly to suppress competition, implement predatory pricing, or manipulate competition in another market. Using a monopoly in search to compel tying agreements prohibiting browsers or manufacturers from including other search engines or apps would qualify. If it turns out that agents of the company (Directors, VPs, etc) internally communicated an intent to suppress competition that would be more than enough to bury them.

[jeffbee]

I don't disagree with your comments but I also don't see the connection between them and the specific case the DOJ has actually filed against Google.

[macintux]

They could compete, but it would be a money hole. You’d have to spend billions and years to reach some level of parity with Google to persuade enough people to switch, and even then the marketing spend necessary to reach any significant level of switching would be another massive investment.

[jeffbee]

"wah, this is hard" is not an antitrust case. Anyway it's clearly not all that hard since Bing exists. The fact that Apple sells iOS users' attention for six billion dollars a year is strong evidence of Bing's strength. Market prices are set by the 2nd bidder, not the highest bidder. The price Google pays to Apple is what those eyeballs would have been worth to Microsoft, not how much they are worth to Google.

[Osiris]

See Bing

[bun_at_work]

This is not what the DOJ is complaining about. The case is that companies that aren't huge can't compete, because they can't scale.

[pythonaut_16]

I don't understand that argument.

By that same argument, companies that aren't huge can't compete with Walmart, UPS, McDonald's, etc.

That argument basically breaks down to "Small companies can't compete against huge companies without finding a way to become huge themselves."

Isn't that just capitalism?

[root_axis]

The quality of google search is good for consumers, it also isn't anti-competitve to improve the quality of your product, even if you're using resources and knowledge from unrelated businesses to do so.

[doar1p]

The ideal outcome of this lawsuit is Google being forced to open up their vast amounts of data obtained by being the 90+% market monopoly. Only then can other search engines even begin to compete.

[throwaway6734]

How is this different than Coke and their brand?

[arrosenberg]

How is Coke leveraging their strength in the beverage market to dominate another market?

[AnimalMuppet]

Because Coke doesn't collect massive amounts of data from their customers to feed AIs?

I think you may have replied to the wrong post, because your post doesn't make a lot of sense as a reply to the parent.

[blitz_skull]

Theoretically there’s nothing stopping them. But I personally think realistically it’s too far gone for this current generation. Computer literacy is too low.

The same way an entire class of people (looking at you, Grandma) think that Microsoft Windows IS the computer, many people think Google IS the internet.

And to some degree they aren’t wrong.

Overcoming that perception is going to be insanely expensive and time-consuming. Not to say it shouldn’t be done. Not to say it couldn’t be done, but man, talk about an uphill battle. Especially as Google will naturally mobilize their own machine to crush this new competition.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I guess the question is, to what degree is this like worrying that people identify Xerox with photocopiers? People are still gonna be saying "googling" in a decade, certainly, but there are lots of ways that could go that don't help Google as a company.

[blitz_skull]

I think the biggest difference is the degree of interaction. I'm 25 and have used a photocopier a whopping 5-10 times in my life. It's a non-impact.

The internet, however, is different in both the frequency of interaction and the import of being transparent.

Also, as far as I can tell, it would be an order of magnitude cheaper to start a new photocopying machine because the tricks and tactics that Xerox could ostensibly use to slow down your new startup are relatively benign.

Google controls (more or less) the way anyone, anywhere (who isn't tech-savvy) will find you as an online business. Kinda scary.

[commandlinefan]

> is there anything stopping anyone from starting a new (better) search engine

Nothing, but that's always been the case, with every monopoly. There was nothing stopping anybody from running telephone lines and competing with AT&T in the 80's except for AT&T's massive incumbency head-start.

[aikinai]

You chose the perfect example to disprove your own point. Other companies could not run phone lines. There are plenty of hard monopolies, and they’re very different from soft, virtuous cycle monopolies.

[commandlinefan]

Hm, ok, you're right - there was regulatory capture in place at that time, but when the phone companies started running lines in the first place in the 1800's, they had to work around the local regulations at the time as well. Worth noting that the AT&T breakup didn't involve restricting the artificial monopoly, but limiting the power of a single entity to control the market as they had.

[jcfrei]

As described in the article: It's a chicken and egg problem. More people using a search engine, leads to more data for analytics, more analytics lead to better results and again more people using it.

[solipsism]

The part you chose to put in parentheses is the hardest part. No matter what you did to improve the search experience, Google could match it at lightning speed because of their scale.

[fnord123]

aiui they still return results for pinterest and quora so it can't be that good.

[gilrain]

The argument is that Google would use its monopoly in other areas to defend its monopoly in search. For instance, what if the most popular browser (Chrome, conveniently for Google) just... didn't work very well with this new search engine? Entirely innocent technical details, of course... a wonky library here, a faster protocol there which they can adopt first. Pretty soon, the new search engine is "the slow one" through no fault of its own.