
The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture - ajbatac
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001224.html
======
raganwald
On Paul's disagreement scale this comment is right down in the sewer, but
please pardon me while I vent:

How come Jeff is always grumbling about Apple's "Monopoly" on music and now
Google's "Monopoly" on search but he never grumbles about Microsoft's actual
monopoly on desktop operating systems and office back ends?

In this post he even calls out the people who grumble about Miscosoft and asks
them to grumble about Google. But somehow, he never makes the connection that
perhaps people who grumble about Apple and Google might want to do a little
grumbling about Microsoft?

> I find that talent is far less important than enthusiasm.

\--Jeff Atwood

~~~
prospero
I think his stance is that there's (more than?) sufficient grumbling about
Microsoft, and insufficient grumbling about Apple and Google. There's an
obvious bias to his writing, inasmuch as he just takes this as a given and
moves on, but that doesn't mean he's totally wrong.

~~~
rbanffy
The fact Microsoft can still get away with their abuse of monopoly is
sufficient proof there is not nearly enough grumbling about Microsoft.

~~~
prospero
Grumbling doesn't effect change. I'd say that there's more than enough
grumbling, and precious little else.

~~~
rbanffy
Grumbling is one of the few ways grumblers can make the people who can effect
change take some action. Be patient. Action will come.

------
alexandros
Google may not be a monopoly, but they are certainly a single point of failure
for many businesses. As such, these businesses should not be happy that their
continued survival depends on some algorithm not flagging them a 'false
positive'. Monopoly or not, I can't help but think that this is not a healthy
situation.

~~~
coglethorpe
It's not a healthy situation, but that's largely due to the poor results other
search engines provide. I tried using Yahoo! and Live for a while instead of
Google. I had forgotten how awful the results were. It wasn't the formatting
or the speed, but the lack of relevance the results had to my query. It's no
wonder people don't use Google's competitors.

In the mean time, the rest of us have to pray that our site is considered
"relevant" in Google's eyes.

~~~
inerte
It's not even the results for some people, but Google itself.

I've seen studies where the researchers show Yahoo results on Google's
template, and vice-versa, and people still thought that Google had better
results.

Google is a brand nowadays (and a verb ;). The tech will become secondary in a
near future. It's like Coke vs. Pepsi, they taste 99% alike and blind tests
show costumers have no preference on one over another.

I am not saying they don't have an edge on quality these days, but in the
future, just relevant links on the page that appears after you type your
search terms will not be enough.

~~~
axod
Slightly off-topic, but:

"It's like Coke vs. Pepsi, they taste 99% alike and blind tests show costumers
have no preference on one over another."

Sorry, but that's completely wrong. Pepsi is far sweeter. It wins on taste
tests, whilst Coke wins in some tests where people drink an entire can.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cola_wars>

~~~
inerte
I stand corrected, thanks for the Cola war insight :)

I guess I let out my own personal taste and bias and some faulty memory...

~~~
axod
;) I actually can't stand the taste of Coke, but love Pepsi with a passion.
Some people think I'm weird/being petty, but it's just a different taste.

~~~
axod
(Reply to Zack who's comment is dead):

You can tell even by the _smell_. Perhaps you think I'm lying, but when served
a brown fizzy drink in a cup, I can tell with 100% accuracy wether it is Coke,
Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, or Pepsi Max.

~~~
twopoint718
I don't know exactly why but that sounds very funny to me. I would boast of
this ability all the time.

~~~
axod
The long winter evenings of blind taste testing at our house simply fly by ;)

------
KaiP
The reason people find Google less objectionable than Microsoft is that it is
far easier for the average consumer to switch search engines than it is for
them to switch operating systems. So while Microsoft could force out better
competitors, there's no way for Google to stop people from using another
search engine. There just needs to be one that is worth switching to.

~~~
rbanffy
Google also has not yet been convicted on monopoly abuse charges. Microsoft
has. More than once.

And, quite frankly, their continuous defiance and misconduct does not help its
image of a serious company.

------
jsdalton
> I find it profoundly disturbing that if every other search engine in the
> world shut down tomorrow, our website's traffic would be effectively
> unchanged.

Jeff missed a major point here.

What is ACTUALLY a disturbing thought is that if Google decided for any reason
to de-list stackoverflow.com they would lose 83% of their traffic. Like that,
in an instant.

Worse, they would be left with little or no recourse. Joel is probably enough
of a big-wig that he could place a few calls in to Google or raise hell about
it on his blog, but otherwise there is no one to talk to at Google or nothing
to be done. I've read horror stories about this kind of thing here and there,
and it's terrifying.

The comparisons to Micrsoft miss the mark, because Google is a different kind
of monopoly and poses a different set of problems to a different group of
people.

------
lionhearted
The single worst business decision I ever made was migrating a site on a .net
extension over to the .com once the company bought it without making damn sure
not to lose rankings in Google. I had heard that permanent redirects preserved
pagerank/googleness, but dropped from top 5 on some important terms to outside
the front page. This single poor decision/poor execution cost me and the
company tens of thousands of dollars, which is orders of magnitude higher than
the additional credibility the .com would've brought.

I suppose I had to learn that lesson sooner or later, so I'll go glass-half-
full and be grateful that it was on tens of thousands early in life, instead
of more later. But that was a pretty expensive lesson.

~~~
twopoint718
I also have a naive question, does a .com really have "additional credibility"
over something else? Why? How about independent of what other websites are
doing?

~~~
froo
Its more due to the brand association people have with the .com domain.

When you're telling friends about sites "I found this great site, its called
facebook" - for those people not in the know, the natural thing people do is
to use the .com extension.

It's also why the .com domains command a higher premium on the domain name
aftermarket.

------
dmoney
This page, linked from the article, is also a nice read:
[http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2008/03/mr-googles-
guid...](http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2008/03/mr-googles-guid.html)

 _Whimsley Hall is now strewn, like Miss Haversham's house, with cobwebs and
dust. Most visitors no longer come in by the front door to take a tour.
Instead, Mr. Google (a travel agent who doubles as our butler) directs them
straight down to the basement where the family archives are kept and tells
them to look at one particular historical document called The Netflix Prize:
300 Days Later. They read this and then they walk right out._

------
bdfh42
My brother has a site that has just gone dark on Google. This is a site that
uses no SEO "techniques" - it's just a plain site with content and a form to
buy a product (not software) that actually uses Google's own "Checkout".
Oddly, it turns up OK on Google's image search but never makes it into the
regular key word search results.

Obviously, investigations are on-going but it is a worrying that a site
supporting a legitimate commercial venture should just disappear from Google
and thus (in effect) from the Internet.

~~~
andreyf
This happens randomly. My Rutgers site (one page, edu domain), was de-listed
for a couple of weeks (didn't exist, even when I specified
"site:rutgers.edu"), then just re-appeared. I also noticed this with Oliver
Steele's functional.js page - I was used to typing "functional js" into Google
to find it, and at one point, it disappeared for a week or two from ranking
alltogether, only to mysterious re-appear again.

Maybe it's some clever way to check whether or not people track their SEO? De-
list sites, and watch if the person reverts to an earlier version of the page,
or submits it for Google to crawl?

------
bradtgmurray
I'm not sure if Jeff knows what a monopoly is.

~~~
raganwald
Google is effectively a monopoly, however the issue here is that they do not
_appear_ to be misusing their monopoly. Microsoft has been convicted of using
illegal tactics to build and maintain their monopoly like licensing agreements
that effectively shut competitors out of the OEM operating system business.
Apple has been accused of abusing their monopoly by leveraging their position
in music players into dominance in online music sales and then enchaining the
two the way Microsoft enchained Office and Windows dominance.

What, exactly, have Google done to shut competitors out of the search
business? What agreements have they forced on advertisers to discourage them
from advertising with anyone else?

And while they ship other products that leverage their competence in search,
they do not _appear_ to enchain them. For example, they dominate in online
search and have a strong position in online mail. And yes, they can leverage
scale to sell advertising on both properties. However, their does not appear
to be a link between the two products. For example, when I perform a web
search it does not appear to use my mail inbox to influence the relevance
rankings of online search.

So far, Google appears to be following a different strategic path than
Microsoft did.

~~~
jcl
On the other hand, they effectively pay Mozilla to make Google search the
Firefox default homepage. They also distribute a free mobile phone operating
system that is heavily integrated with Google services. And they make a web
browser (advertised on the main Google page of other web browsers) that
incorporates features important to widespread adoption of Google applications
(Gears, high performance layout and Javascript engines, robust process model).

~~~
raganwald
Paying Mozilla to be the default search engine is merely using money from a
successful business to promote the same successful business.

 _They also distribute a free mobile phone operating system that is heavily
integrated with Google services._

You might have something there, that is very similar to some of the things
Microsoft and Apple both do.

------
bo
Have there existed good alternatives or proposals for alternatives to google
that people haven't heard about possibly because google doesn't return them?

------
kleevr
Any thoughts on how google-integrated tools like HNSearch (webmynd) will play
a role in the present-future of the post-google-"search monopoly"?

