
The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture - gavinballard
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/the-elephant-in-the-room-google-monoculture.html
======
redthrowaway
Can we get a [2009] in the title?

It would be interesting to see some updated numbers on this, especially from
SO. While I don't imagine many programmers are using Bing, it would be
interesting to see where DuckDuckGo ranks.

~~~
spolsky
OK-doke, here's the last month of Stack Overflow search engine referral
traffic.

    
    
      Google 69,081,674 visits
      Bing 520,543 visits
      Baidu 319,294
      Search (CBS) 176,208
      Yahoo 133,833
      MSDN 109.875
      Yandex 80.399
      Naver 89,733
      Ask 30,026
      DuckDuckGo 25,492
      AOL 6,409
      Daum 4,462
      Blekko 659

~~~
redthrowaway
Interesting, thanks. I'm actually surprised that Baidu ranks as low as it
does, given its overwhelming market share in China and the fact that most code
out there is in English. I just did a quick experiment and googled some common
errors, then compared the SERPs to those of Baidu. SO was ranked similarly in
both. Do Chinese programmers not goog...er, baidu errors?

Actually, that leads me to a more relevant question: looking through the
queries that landed visitors at SO, have you done some scraping to determine
what proportion were people googling errors verbatim, and what percentage were
people asking questions or googling a particular topic, eg "scaling rails"?

~~~
yannickmahe
Baidu is probably used more by non technical people, so I guess software
engineers use Google rather than Baidu.

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mekoka
_I'm a little surprised all the people who were so up in arms about the
Microsoft "monopoly" ten years ago aren't out in the streets today lighting
torches and sharpening their pitchforks to go after Google._

Maybe people weren't so up in arms because of Microsoft's _monopoly_ , but
rather what they were doing with it. Apple didn't have a monopoly when I
stopped being a fan.

~~~
epistasis
This is precisely it, Microsoft in the 90s did some really abusive and messed
up things, for example luring away Borland's key compiler engineers with
ridiculous salaries, and then paying them to sit on their thumbs and do
nothing [+], in order to give Microsoft's development tools time to catch up.

I'm not a huge fan of Google, but if you're a startup you don't fear Google
the way you would have feared Microsoft in the 90's. And if you're afraid of
Google, it's because of legitimate competition in the marketplace, not
nefarious anti-competitive practices.

[+] Edit: As pointed out below, the "sitting on their thumbs" may just be
local lore, and not true.

~~~
eurleif
>This is precisely it, Microsoft in the 90s did some really abusive and messed
up things, for example luring away Borland's key compiler engineers with
ridiculous salaries, and then paying them to sit on their thumbs and do
nothing, in order to give Microsoft's development tools time to catch up.

Why not pay them to build better development tools rather than to sit on their
thumbs?

~~~
bad_user
Microsoft's development tools were lagging behind Borland's tools in the 90s,
but those tools were top-notch nonetheless. Did you know that there are people
still happily using Visual Studio 6.0 (1998)?

Also, if you're referring to Anders Hejlsberg, being the lead architect of C#
doesn't qualify as "sit on their thumbs". Considering that .NET is one of the
2 competitive advantages that Windows still has in the corporate environment
(the other being Exchange), I think it was a million dollars well spent.

~~~
pauljburke
Actually, I'd put excel (& the massive amount of custom code and extension to
it, at least in financial services) way above both of those.

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bad_user
I was referring to servers, not desktops.

~~~
pauljburke
It pains me to admit it but the point still holds. I've lost count of how many
places I've seen that have an excel farm cranking stuff out over the last 15
years. Even when they don't go down that path, microsoft technology works
(quiet in the back) really well with the rest of the microsoft technology
stack (in comparison to with anything else anyway, although it's better these
days).

------
martian
Noting that this article is from 2009, I think it makes some valid points. By
owning people's entry to the internet, Google has a monopoly.

But I don't think it's so much a monopoly on search that's interesting, as it
is a monopoly on entry. Google is everyone's front door to the Internet. There
are a few geeks like us who know about URLs and TLDs, but generally people
just google what they're looking for.

And on that note, I think there are other monopolistic gates to the internet
being opened. Like the portals of old, Facebook is setting itself up to be the
other Front Door on the Internet. Part of that is wrapped in what people care
about most: other people. So it makes sense that you go to Google for things,
places, and ideas; and you go to Facebook for people.

Google realized it was missing that category of nouns and built Google+.
Facebook knows it's missing a lot beyond people and is looking to expand into
other nounish categories, but it's also looking to expand into verbs: listen,
watch, read.

I don't think Google has a monopoly forever -- I think it's fighting tooth and
nail to stay at the top. I think there is fierce competition going on at all
levels here, Facebook being the obvious example. And let's not forget Apple,
Comcast, and other media providers who are using their control of media
experiences to leverage control over people's experience of the Internet.

The future is going to be interesting!

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drhayes9
I think one reason people aren't sharpening pitchforks and lighting torches is
because every other search engine is one click away. Switching search engines
is pretty frictionless compared to switching OSes.

~~~
earl
In theory. Do the nontechnical people in your life even know other search
engines exist? I doubt those in mine do.

~~~
dhconnelly
According to Alexa, Yahoo! is the #4 site on the internet, and Windows Live is
the #7 site. So the millions of people who have Yahoo! and Windows Live for
their homepages (and this is very common--remember that IE is still the
dominant browser, and it defaults to Windows Live) are aware of those search
engines.

The reason Google is the search leader is not because nontechnical people
don't know of the alternatives. It's the leader because it's synonymous with
search and people think it's the best.

~~~
ootachi
Google is often set as the default search engine for IE in preinstalled OEM
configurations (and frequently these days Chrome is the default browser). For
antitrust reasons Microsoft can do nothing about this.

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jmduke
Okay, am I missing something?

Microsoft wasn't a monopoly because their software pervaded rampantly;
Microsoft was a monopoly because their entire business model bastardized the
notion of vertical integration by making alternate software (ie competition)
impossible, furthered by the costs of developing IE being (allegedly) baked
into Windows.

Is the "Google = Monopoly" argument that their bundling of
GMail/Search/Plus/etc./etc. is discouraging competition?

~~~
Samuel_Michon
_"Microsoft wasn't a monopoly because their software pervaded rampantly"_

Sure it was, but it's not illegal to have a monopoly. However, using your
monopoly in one market to break into another, that's frowned upon. Google
might have already been doing that with the promotion of Chrome on their site.

Also, Google's integration of Google+ in their search results pages sure is
giving their own social network a leg up over sites like Facebook and Twitter
[1]. Whether that legally means they're abusing their monopoly, I don't know.

[1] [http://searchengineland.com/examples-google-search-plus-
driv...](http://searchengineland.com/examples-google-search-plus-drive-
facebook-twitter-crazy-107554)

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cpeterso
Any suggestions from people who have switched from Google to another search
engine?

I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo, but I gave up after a few days.
DuckDuckGo's results were very good for popular/mainstream terms, but Google
is much better at deep "needle in haystack" searches.

I later switched from Google to Bing, but I gave up after one day. Bing's
results were very random and stale. And Bing is ugly. :)

~~~
white_devil
You could always just use DDG by default, and then resort to Google only when
you really need it. That's what I've been doing for 1 - 2 years now.

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ok_craig
I'm really interested in hearing how people think this problem should be
fixed, since Google having such a large market share is _necessarily_ a bad
thing. I see a lot of criticism, but no solution offering. But it's implied in
all the anti-Google comments that either Google needs to stop making its
product better, or it needs to be forcefully hampered by the government. Is
this a correct assessment? If not, what are the alternatives?

~~~
sdrinf
One alternative might be celebrating startups, and entrepreneurs, who publicly
declare (pro- or retroactively) refusing acquisitions -from Google, or
otherwise.

One of the non-obvious consequences of this monopoly is all the other ways by
which you could've navigated the Internet, that has been bought, paid for,
then rapidly shut down by Google.

Note there are many other ways you can acquire information that is relevant,
and timely for you -social&topical communities, Q&A sites&channels, decision
trees are but a few- it just happens that search got an early start on the R&D
economies of scale.

~~~
ok_craig
I can get behind your first suggestion. Social influence can be huge, and it
doesn't require a legal club to beat a company down with.

Do you think it's necessarily a bad thing when smaller companies get bought by
Google? What you don't mention in the case that all startups refuse a buyout
is that the #1 search product improves at a much slower rate. Their technology
may be interesting and useful, but in itself not enough to draw consumers,
while if it were integrated into a larger product, it could bring that new
technology to many more people much more quickly. Do we gain more by using
technologies as individual products than we do by using them as parts of a
larger, integrated whole? Probably sometimes we do. But always?

I can't say I'm familiar with all the things you mention in your last point.
But if I knew about all of them, understood their purpose and what value they
served, do you think I would use them all? I feel like I would probably just
type a Google search, which could potentially search all of those for me. I
know social, I know Q&A - it doesn't really seem to me that with just those
services, I would have a set of tools as powerful as Google itself. I use them
on occasion, but for specific things. Search engines are general purpose
question answerers - it seems like this is why they're more popular. I think
if all of those services were out first, and _then_ Google came along, it'd
still be the most powerful and grow to be huger, because in general, it's more
useful.

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bad_user
The other Elephant in the room - with rich Javascript interfaces, crawlers are
only feasible to build if you have enough resources - i.e. only companies like
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are able to do it. Web pages are becoming
increasingly less accessible and Google has a lot to gain by this trend.

The writing on the wall is pretty clear - Google has a monopoly in search and
the only way they can be disrupted is through alternative means of finding
content (like social networks).

Which is why, as much as I like them and their products, I find the
integration with Google+ downright scary and dangerous for the health of our
ecosystem.

~~~
nostrademons
That's not really true - John Resig hooked Rhino up to a good-enough DOM model
in a weekend:

<http://ejohn.org/blog/bringing-the-browser-to-the-server/>

No, you're not going to match Google's crawling infrastructure or data
extraction libraries. But if you just want to grab pages off the web, parse
them, and handle JavaScript from those pages correctly, you can easily rig
something up between Mechanize/html5lib/V8 or Nutch/Tika/Rhino.

~~~
bad_user
Crawling a couple of pages is different from crawling the entire web on a
recurring basis. It was hard enough without the emergence of Javascript-
enabled pages.

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bediger
He makes a legit point, and he even raises the "Microsoft Monoculture" issue,
asking why the folks alarmed about MSFT aren't alarmed by GOOG. I think they
(and we) should be alarmed.

Nevertheless, where are all the people, pundits, piemen and PR flacks that
arose back when Dan Geer et al raised that monoculture issue? Whenever someone
seriously raises a software monoculture as an issue, The Big Guns come out to
discredit that someone, and to dismiss the issue. Where are the pundits now?

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eslaught
_> But where's the healthy competition? Where's the incentive for Google to
improve?_

People here might not like this answer, but honestly, Facebook. Look at
Google+. You can like it or not, but it's clear that it's the biggest change
to Google's product in a while.

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bishnu
I mean the difference is that a search engine is a search engine - it's not a
platform a whole bunch of people need to be using to be more effective.
Ditching Microsoft in the 90s meant ditching Office, the best selection of
games, etc. Whereas every other search engine works just as well (potentially)
as Google search.

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phear
<http://mashable.com/2012/01/12/bing-overtakes-yahoo/...The> latest from
mashable. Google still waaay ahead in 1st place. Notable is that when Bing
first came out many blogs were talking about what was wrong with it and why it
would die. They've slowly come a logn way(helped in part by Yahoo's problems).
Do they have what it takes to be the thorn in google's flesh that xbox is in
Sony's?

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west13
I haven't looked at every comment to see if anyone has stated the obvious:
search is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more data you have, the better your
results. The better your results, the more data you get.

No one will make up ground on Google until a radical new algorithm is
invented, and Google doesn't buy it :)

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resnamen
I don't think it's a matter of data access. I would argue that Bing has parity
with Google in most respects (they have the same Internet to crawl,
partnerships with some data providers for things like flight search, etc.),
and they even have decisive advantages in other areas, like access to huge
piles of social data. So why aren't they as good or better?

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chrischen
Google doesn't lock people into its search. People have a choice and they
obviously choose Google.

~~~
Kliment
Website authors don't have a choice though. It's be on google or don't exist.

~~~
chrischen
That's not Google's fault. Google made a better product and consumers freely
chose this. If Google arrives at a monopoly because of building a better
product there is nothing wrong with this, but if Google arrives at a monopoly
through manipulation and anti-competitive practices and then further using
that monopoly position to sustain the monopoly then that's wrong.

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tzury
That is a must I would say in our era.

See, given one of the fundamentals in the Unix philosophical idiom is _Make
each program do one thing well_.

In an era of Software as a Service, it is _Make each service do one thing
well_.

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mbesto
Let's be clear first on what Google's product is and what it's selling.

Google's product is pageviews (or eyes). It sources these pageviews
effectively for free (from you and I) and sells them to companies. The end-
user who does the search is a marginal piece of the product that Google is
selling.

Therefore you can't say Google has a monopoly on search, because there is no
market for search, since no one is paying for a product called search.

edit:spelling

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rorrr
Here are the numbers for one of my sites, not related to IT in any way:

    
    
        Google   94.3%
        Yahoo     2.6%
        Bing      1.8%
        Yandex    0.63%
        Ask       0.37%
        AOL       0.23%
    

EDIT:

Here's another non-IT site with 13 million monthly visits:

    
    
        Google   89.9%
        Yahoo     6.4%
        Bing      2.96%
        Ask       0.37%
        AOL       0.21%
        Yandex    0.12%

~~~
whatusername
So my 2011 figures (for a site for English Speaking SF/Fantasy fans) are about
GOOG: 95% / Bing: 3% / Yahoo 2%

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BillSaysThis
This blog post is from 2009!!! An in-page search for 2012 gets zero results.

