
How did Google get so big? - jonwachob91
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-did-google-get-so-big/
======
wallflower
If I could give a six word response for the technical side: "Jeff Dean, Sanjay
Ghemawat and team".

To paraphrase some Cal/UC Berkeley professor that I cannot remember, he said
that the problem with scaling is that when you go up a magnitude or more, you
may need a qualitatively different solution for the same problem. Jeff Dean
and Sanjay Ghemawat and their team have time and time again managed to design
and build state-of-the-art, qualitatively different solutions (MapReduce,
BigTable, Spanner). And now their team's attention is on AI...

2016 (might be more recent ones) update on AI at Google
[http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/3/16/jeff-dean-on-
large...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/3/16/jeff-dean-on-large-scale-
deep-learning-at-google.html)

Video of full lecture:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSaZGT4-6EY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSaZGT4-6EY)

EDIT: Sanjay Ghemawat and Jeff are like the dynamic duo of large scale systems
engineering.

~~~
grosjona
I think that Google's dominance has almost nothing to do with technology and
almost everything to do with customer lock-in.

For me, duckduckgo.com is as good as Google but I still use Google because
it's the default search engine for Chrome's address bar - And that's where I
do all my searches from these days. If Duckduckgo made their own browser which
was of the same quality as Chrome then I would definitely consider using it
and switching to Duckduckgo for search as well.

~~~
magicalhippo
For me it's because with Google I don't need to go to page 5 to find
interesting results.

I've tried to use DuckDuckGo several times, each time I've quickly found
myself trawling page after page of results, reverted to Google and found the
stuff I was after on page one.

~~~
monkeydust
100% same I wanted to love ddg but it's just not as good

~~~
amelius
If only they implemented "!g" as a simple button, I'd use DDG more often.
Typing "!g" requires 6 touchscreen actions on mobile :/

------
nostrademons
On the market end - Google got huge because they inserted themselves as a
critical part of peoples' usage of a resource that got even huger.

As late as 2013, my coworkers and I would mock the Wall Street analysts who
covered Google because (you could tell from their questions on the earnings
call) they assumed that the Internet was no longer growing. So all the focus
was on CPCs and Google's ability to monetize, when _the number of queries had
quadrupled_ over the previous 4 years. You can hold monetization absolutely
constant and if usage is growing 400%, your revenue will grow 400%.

Just two days ago Google's earnings came out and people were wondering how
they still managed 20% YoY growth. Some of that undoubtedly came from Cloud &
other emerging businesses, but I'd bet that _the Internet is still growing_.

CoinBase is trying to pull off the same thing with crypto - they're a critical
onramp for people wanting to get started with a new, fast-growing technology.
Regulators & the press always fight the last war, though - they're focused on
Google and Facebook rather than on the next wave of giant monopolies.

People always underestimate the potential size of consumer markets, because
their perspective is human-centric. Before they & their friends adopt a new
technology, it's a toy or a fad and will never catch on. Afterwards, everybody
they know already uses it, so of course it's old news. Few people realize that
"everybody they know" is less than one millionth of all of humanity, or that
if you're in a developed country you will get innovations 10-20 years before
the rest of the world does, or that if you're in a tech metropolis in a
developed country you will get them ~5 years before the rest of the country.
"The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed."

~~~
jonny_eh
Coinbase is not the next Google. They provide no actual value, beyond making
it easy to join a bubble. Google's value proposition in the early days was
enormous, very obvious, and continues to this day.

~~~
nostrademons
_If_ you have already accepted cryptocurrencies as the wave of the future,
Coinbase provides enormous value. You can't do much in the crypto world
without owning some cryptocurrencies, and they are the largest, easiest to
use, and generally most trusted way to exchange $USD for Bitcoin or Ethereum.

Most Americans have not accepted that premise (and I don't exclude
myself...I'm on the fence as for whether crypto is a bubble or the future of
world commerce). However, I'll point out that in 1996 when Larry/Sergey/Scott
Hassan were first working on Google, it was far from obvious that the web
would be a big thing. Streaming audio (via RealAudio/WMP/etc.) was a year in
the future; most Americans had 14.4K connections that made it impossible (my
first MP3 took 2 hours to download a 5 minute song). E-commerce was clunky and
sluggish, and the big "order everything online!" push was 2 years in the
future. There were only 36M users online, roughly the same order as the number
of Bitcoin users in the U.S. (Bitcoin has more international adoption though).
Interactive websites were almost unknown, because the technology really didn't
support it. Most people used the web for porn, or to lookup song lyrics and
share their favorite bands, or to share scientific information.

It wasn't until the early 2000s, after the dot-com bubble burst and yet people
continued using the Internet (and found a lot of new uses for it, like
dating/socializing/paying for things/watching videos/sharing photos/finding
lodging), that it became apparent that it was really here to stay. Not
coincidentally, those were Google's biggest growth years.

~~~
jotz
In 1996 the internet was in every imp University campus worldwide and every CS
dept had multiple labs working on a lot of the what most people take for
granted today that allowed the internet to scale.

No such thing is happening with bitcoin. You can't scale something to internet
levels if its banned in half the worlds research labs.

~~~
nostrademons
"Every imp[ortant] University campus" is a tiny subset of "all people". The
total population of 4-year college students in the U.S. is 13.4M, roughly the
same as the number of Coinbase users. In 2005 Facebook was in every important
university campus worldwide, and yet people (including myself) continued to
call it a fad until they started making billions in 2012.

------
ransom1538
Ads.

Previously to buy ads you had to call someone, get dinner with some weird guy,
make tons of calls, get crappy click rates, trust the other companies
'reporting', pay for impression ads (wtf). It was a mess. You also had to do
this with 23 DIFFERENT companies, which were _all different_. Google wasn't
the first, but they did follow through and make a great way to advertise with
self serve.

Selling ads is awesome. No overhead, no rotting inventory, no operations mess.
It scales infinitely naturally. It is clean easy cash. Everything else they do
is a huge side show to distract people.

~~~
buboard
Google didn't invent online ads, not even the auctioned ones. Also, their
innovations in the online ad space were generally limited to their search-
based ad business.

~~~
karmelapple
And Apple didn’t invent the smartphone, but they reimagined it in a way that
basically made things 10X better in UX, just like buying ads on google is 10X
better than the process described earlier.

~~~
acct1771
s/better/easier, to be safe

------
ur-whale
Why is Google being big a problem? Who are they hurting by being big at this
time?

[edit]: to elaborate, I was under the impression that the whole point of anti-
monopoly regulations was to _protect consumers_ from monopolistic predatory
practices, not to prevent monopolies from actually existing per se.

Hence my question: is there anyone actually being hurt by the currently
limited choice of search engines or phone operating systems?

Also, what prevents someone from trying to build a much better one?

If Google starts to misbehave as a monopoly, fine, let the USG (themselves a
monopoly, btw) do their thing go after them.

But as long as they provide a superior service for free (yeah, I know, you're
the product, blah, blah), I'm not sure I'm seeing the problem.

~~~
zjaffee
It's not so much they are hurting anyone, since they have made it virtually
impossible to compete with them.

Say you do a search for a particular location, the first thing that pops up to
the the top of the page is a box with some information pulled from wikipedia
and a link/image of it on google maps. Search for a band, and you see the same
with links to youtube and google music. Search for online storage and you see
the same thing.

While google has been audited time and time again to prove that their search
engine totally allows competitors to make an impact against some of these
sorts of things. Even without the box, the builder of the worlds most used
search engine is certainly very good at search engine optimization for their
own products.

~~~
tills13
if they're _purposefully_ ranking their own services above competing services,
then yes, I agree they should be fined until they stop. _however_, more often
than not, their own service is _exactly_ what I'm looking for - be it
GPM/YouTube/Maps/etc.

It's not really their fault they're head and shoulders above the
competition/the de-facto provider for most of the content people search for
every day (well, maybe it is their fault, but it's not a bad thing).

~~~
bepotts
Exactly. I really don't understand why people try and muddy the waters around
Google products. I'm not forced to use Google; Google products are just damn
good.

Having a monopoly in a market due to the fact that your product is just _that_
good isn't a bad thing, and punishing companies for being successful sets an
awful precedent (which is why breaking up Google isn't going to happen). From
search, maps, email, YouTube, and to photos, Google products are widely used
because they're completely free (aside from the data collection portion) and
they're best in class.

Please don't lie to us and act like Google's monopoly position is hurting the
market. I'm sure Google is doing some shady stuff on the edges, but nothing so
egregious to warrant antitrust action.

~~~
zjaffee
Why are their products that good? What is it that makes content creators
publish on youtube rather than on other platforms. I'd argue that a huge part
of this is the fact that youtube gives creators more visibility than other
places, and since google is able to leverage search in addition to their
advertising business to bring more eyes to youtube is the reason for the
platforms success.

I think your confusing googles monopoly not hurting the market with not
hurting their consumers. But to suggest that they don't make it near
impossible for anyone to compete against them is absolutely them hurting the
market. Namely, the equity value of google would be more balanced with other
smaller firms, and in turn we'd see more very rich people rather than fewer
people with net worths well over 10 billion.

~~~
tylerhou
There are Google products which are inferior compared to their competitors,
and usage rates show that as well: YouTube Gaming/YT livestreaming are
basically platforms that only host people banned from Twitch.

~~~
ApolloFortyNine
Youtube live will keep vods for life and has had a DVR feature since release.
Twitch doesn't do either.

They tend to release great products, their problem is that they just don't
always do it first.

------
tinbad
"Some were investigated, but only superficially, the government just really
isn't enforcing our antitrust laws. And that's what's happened. None of these
acquisitions have been challenged."

Behemoths like Google emerge every time new inventions lead to the creation of
new markets followed by mass adoption during a relatively short timeframe,
when regulations don't exist yet. It has happened in history time and time
again (Standard Oil, Detroit Big 3, etc.) It's not entirely preventable, but
it requires awareness foremost and then the (political/societal) will to deal
with it.

~~~
talltimtom
Regulations do exist... Europe seems to be the only once even superficially
enforcing them.

~~~
RestlessMind
Which successful companies came out of EU in the last 20 years? How well do
they stack up against US (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber etc) or China
(Tencent, Alibaba etc)? If not many, does that mean EU entrepreneurs are
_hindered_ by the regulations?

One might also argue that European model is better because it might prevent
one company from dominating the market. But if that is the case, why does EU
face technology dominance from American companies (smartphones, search,
e-commerce, operating systems etc), rather than having that marketshare
captured by European companies?

~~~
philg_jr
How about...Nokia? Seimens? SAP?

~~~
adventured
The US has approximately 100 tech companies worth $10 billion or more. Europe,
with over 2x the population of the US, has about two dozen.

Seimens is a very old - 170 years old - industrial conglomerate. That's like
using GE, Berkshire Hathaway or 3M as an example.

Nokia is barely a good example. They're a $30b market cap company, Google can
sneeze and lose or gain that in a day. Texas Instruments and Broadcom are
worth 3x what Nokia is; Cisco is worth 7x Nokia. In a land of giants, Nokia is
pretty small.

SAP is a very serious tech company, and by far the only good big tech example
Europe has today. They're slow growth, have a $140b market cap, with $4b in
profit (equal to about a month of Apple's profit). They're less than half the
size of Oracle and will be eclipsed in size by Salesforce in the near future.

ARM was one of the more exciting European opportunities, until Softbank ate
them. NXP might be able to make some good growth moves now that they're
apparently not ending up in the belly of a US giant. I could see them forging
a good path as an independent.

Spotify might have a bright future. They have to make a decision soon about
whether they're going to be culturally an acquiring and aggressive growth
company, or whether they're going to watch that extreme valuation (which they
can probably never justify given the margin situation) disappear and get
acquired in the next market downturn. If they play their cards right, they
could be a legitimate long-term $30b-$50b market cap media/tech company
(legitimate as in actually backing that up with earnings).

I think Europe's big opportunity, broadly speaking, is in artificial
intelligence over the next decade plus. That's a solid inflection point where
some new big companies will emerge. Europe has tons of AI talent to make
something happen there (if they don't all sell out to big US or Chinese tech).

~~~
giobox
> I think Europe's big opportunity, broadly speaking, is in artificial
> intelligence over the next decade plus. That's a solid inflection point
> where some new big companies will emerge. Europe has tons of AI talent to
> make something happen there (if they don't all sell out to big US or Chinese
> tech).

I can only see this happening if the the US doesn't continue sucking up the
best talent in the field, which is unfortunately very often the case over the
last 20 years. Europe is pretty un-competitive in terms of remuneration,
especially for those at the leading edge of AI work. Many European markets
need to wake up and start treating their software engineering grads better,
today it too often feels like they get lumped with 'the IT guys' rather than
seen as a creative instrument for new business ideas. How you fix this culture
I have no idea though.

I actually think a more difficult immigration environment in the USA could be
a potential factor in improving Europe's fortunes, if it stems the leak of
smart people leaving. The recent change in posture over things like the H1-B
visa, the likely rescinding of the right to work on an H4 dependent visa
especially (this would prevent a huge number of immigrant spouses from being
able to work if their partner moves to the US - this makes a job in the USA a
much harder sell for married couples), could have a pretty big chilling
effect.

------
lern_too_spel
Stoppelman's Yelp is a bad example. I don't want to visit a page that pesters
me to install their app _instead of showing me the reviews I came to read_. If
Yelp's ranking has been lowered, good riddance.

~~~
nialv7
I don't really want to defend behaviors similar to Yelp's. Because it's indeed
annoying. But let's play devil's advocate here.

Part of the reason why Google can have a clear and good user experience, is
because they can afford it. On the other hand, for smaller company, not
meeting user count goals could mean not getting funding and die. This will
force them to nag the users to get them to install the app, even if doing that
could annoy some of the users.

And this is pretty much a classic example of why monopoly is bad.

~~~
tylerhou
Monopolies are bad because more capital means that you can create a better
product?

If beating Google was as simple as needing more money to build a better
product, then why couldn't startups just pitch that to investors and raise
more funding? Probably because beating Google is harder than throwing money at
a random startup's app.

At that rate you might as well outlaw venture capital funds because they
disadvantage people trying to bootstrap their own startup.

There are certainly many reasons why monopolies are bad, but having capital is
not one of them.

------
sseth
Let's ask a question : How did Google defeat another giant - Microsoft - in 2
major markets where Microsoft had a head start and deep pockets? How did
Chrome beat IE, and how did Android beat the several generations of Windows
Mobile and Windows Phone?

Clearly Microsoft had no dearth of talent or money. So how come it could not
keep Google at bay? In my view the answer lies in the fact that Google's
engineering led culture meant they could follow a release cadence that is
unheard of for such large systems. Chrome was releasing every 6 weeks, and
Android every 3-6 months or so in the early days. Meanwhile we had 1.5 - 2
years between each Windows Phone release.

When Chrome started, IE had nearly 70% market share and the benefit of being
deployed on nearly every computer on earth. Microsoft was in the mobile phone
market from 2000. In 2011, IDC predicted Windows Phone would overtake the
iPhone. Both Google and Microsoft were taken aback by the iPhone, but Google
was able to turn on a dime, Microsoft was not. Google achievement has been to
stay agile even as it grew big - in my view this remains the secret to their
success.

~~~
Theodores
Google did a great job of putting the user first. You never felt like you were
being sold something, a refreshing change from the MSN 'homepage' at the time.

You also did not feel that you were being given something for free that had a
catch to it - see HN story today about prisons getting 'free' tablets.

Make no mistake, Microsoft can do free very nicely too - Internet Explorer in
the Netscape days was partly ascendant for doing 'free' very well at a time
when Netscape was emerging from 'shareware'. But with Microsoft 'free' you
always felt that you were a pawn in their plans for global domination, to blot
out the rivals.

I think that Google came along with a great series of products and services
that put the user first with an ethos that Microsoft, Apple and others just
did not 'get'. Although Chrome was marketed with billboards and a link in the
search results, the real work on adoption was done by the users recommending
the superior, user centric product to their workmates, friends and family.

~~~
sseth
This is a great point.

And i think Microsoft could have done this too. But perhaps the conflict
between improving the open web vs pushing their own operating system was a
conflict they never resolved internally, giving Google the time and space it
needed to outflank them. And Google moved fast enough, and as you have said,
created a great enough user experience, that it could quickly establish a
strong foothold.

I think if Microsoft had truly been focused on keeping IE as the best browser
in the world, it would have been difficult to displace given its dominance.

------
css
> Steve Kroft: Were any of those acquisitions questioned by the antitrust
> division of the Justice Department?

> Gary Reback: Some were investigated, but only superficially, the government
> just really isn't enforcing our antitrust laws. And that's what's happened.
> None of these acquisitions have been challenged

Granted, most of Google's 200+ acquisitions would not trigger any scrutiny,
but this line is mind boggling.

~~~
paulpauper
I think only 2 acquisitions have had a impact. the one for adwords/adsense
patent and one other. The rest have been to poach talent and other stuff or
were duds.

~~~
fipple
There's Android, YouTube, 510 Systems, and the constellation of acquisitions
made to create Google Apps, at a minimum.

~~~
Alupis
> There's Android, YouTube, 510 Systems, and the constellation of acquisitions
> made to create Google Apps, at a minimum.

Buying Android hardly would have triggered anti-trust investigations given
Apple's significant market share at the time, and the many other significant
competitors (BlackBerry and Nokia just to name two).

Same goes with YouTube - Google bought it before it was a smash success, and
before people thought that sort of thing would be a major viewership center.

510 Systems and their self driving car really still isn't a money-making
center for Google (nor is self-driving technology for anyone at the moment).

Google Apps is a hard sale against Office 365, etc...

I just don't see how any one of these acquisitions, on their own, would have
caused government Anti-Trust inquiries... unless your point is Google operates
in too many different markets?

~~~
refulgentis
nit: Android was purchased long before Apple entered the market. Doesn't
change your argument, no one was expecting vendors to rush to a new OS because
of the iPhone revolution.

~~~
yodacola
But Google was already aware of the iPhone the time they purchased Android.
This has been their strategy for competition.

~~~
skewart
As others have pointed out, Google bought Android long before Apple released
the iPhone.

Even after Apple did release the iPhone, the strategy behind Android was
entirely focused on competing with Microsoft, not Apple. Google was terrified
that Microsoft would get into the smartphone OS market and achieve a dominant
position, and then muscle Google out of mobile search and advertising. That's
why Android is open source (well, mostly). Google made the Android OS free for
manufacturers to use with their phones as a way to get them to use Android
instead of a Microsoft OS.

The strategy worked brilliantly. Android has done exactly what Google wanted
it to accomplish. Microsoft has never gained any meaningful market share in
the smartphone market. And between Android and various deals with Apple,
Google has a tremendous presence with smartphone users.

------
wilsonnb2
So if Google is a monopoly, what should be done about it? Split it up into
separate, competing mini-Googles? Keep fining them more and more money until
they stop anti-competitive practices? Split off Maps/Android/Drive/etc into
separate companies so that Google can't use their search monopoly to dominate
those fields?

I'm genuinely not sure what the best way to go about this would be.

~~~
ProAm
Im pretty sure this is why Alphabet was formed, they sort of split themselves
up as a preventative measure.

~~~
neap24
I've always been curious about that. Is a parent company + subsidiaries immune
from anti-trust laws in the US? I mean, I'm sure Alphabet still shares Google
search data across its subsidiaries--which is the real monopoly power concern.

~~~
fixermark
It's probably a lot less about anti-trust and a lot more about bankruptcy
protection.

With the companies logically divided, Alphabet can choose devote $XYZ money to
some specific initiative and have a guarantee that they're liable for AT MOST
that much money. If the sub-company completely mis-manages its assets and goes
belly-up, its failure doesn't impact e.g. Google or Waymo (in any deeper way
than opportunity cost of the money going to the other sub-company instead of
those). Bankruptcy responsibility stops at the owning company and doesn't
trickle up to the assets of the company that owns that company, in general.

It's a common pattern for movie studios---Hollywood studios build out a short-
lived company to own every film production to insulate themselves from
liability and financial disaster.

------
mirimir
OK, so I watched it all happen.

Back in the day, I loved AltaVista. And then I dicovered Google. And found
that it consistently gave me better results. At least at first, Google grew
because its stuff worked better than the competition's.

Still, it is pretty clear that Google now excludes competitors through
discrimination in search results. But it's hard to prove, because search
algorithms are so bloody complicated. And because SEO warfare is so intense.
Google can just claim that any discrimination is just collateral damage.

> Google is the gatekeeper for-- for the World Wide Web, for the internet as
> we know it.'

Sad but true. So other than DDG, are there any good privacy-friendly search
services? Startpage seems to just repackage Google. Also, are there any search
services that are less censored than Google?

> [Google] denied it was a monopoly in search or search advertising, citing
> many competitors including Amazon and Facebook.

That's a joke, right?

~~~
ChristianBundy
I use (and love) Searx. It has two features:

\- many search engines are used at once \- searches are proxied through a
third-party provider

For example, if you type "ipv6" into searx.me you'll get results from Google,
Bing, Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and dozens of other sites. It's not perfect
privacy, but I generally get better results than using only one search engine
and there's a small boost to privacy.

The only thing you have to look out for is the "images" tab. It's usually
fine, but unless you turn on the adult content filter there's almost always
and least one pornographic image somewhere in the results. I'm not sure which
search engine is responsible for those results, but I should probably just
disable that search engine for my queries.

~~~
mirimir
Cool!

And that reminds me. I had forgotten MetaCrawler. As I recall, that was my
favorite between AltaVista and Google.

------
skadamat
Ben Thompson from Stratechery has some good thoughts on what makes Google
tricky to regulate:

\- Google:
[https://stratechery.com/company/google/](https://stratechery.com/company/google/)

\- Regulation:
[https://stratechery.com/topic/regulation/](https://stratechery.com/topic/regulation/)

His vastly oversimplified point is that most anti-trust regulation focuses on
supply. Owning all of the printing equipment and distribution networks in
newspapers gave you leverage. Google is instead a demand-side aggregator (they
don't own the content on their product, but own the choke point, which is the
consumer facing user experience of having a single, simple, easy to use search
engine).

------
Yhippa
Does anybody else here remember the late 90's when you had to try multiple
search engines to get something close to what you were looking for? Google has
largely solved that problem and are (IMO rightfully) rewarded for it.

I really like Google and their products. They simply make my life easier. I
will admit it would be interesting to see what would happen if search was
split up: would that tech improve at a faster pace than it does now? Or would
we end up back in the late 90's?

------
grosjona
>> Jeremy Stoppelman: They will make you disappear. They will bury you.

I love hearing rich people whine about the monopolies held by even richer
people. So much hypocrisy. Without the Silicon Valley tech oligopoly, Jeremy
Stoppelman would probably never have been able to raise so much money for Yelp
in the first place.

------
pimmen
A good investor gave me this little nugget;

 _You can tell how mature a company is by how much they talk about their
competitors. Startups and players who are really struggling never talk about
competitors and try to steer the subject away from them, lest the customer
finds another deal. Monopolies often talk about their competitors, because it
hides that they 're monopolies. Google likes to say that they compete with
Microsoft with their Docs suite, with Apple in mobile OS and with Tom Tom on
the navigation market. If they were anything like your local startup the only
thing they would say is "we're a digital advertising company focusing on
search ads, we have 90% of the market and are among the oldest still in the
industry"._

------
cncrnd
Here is my 2 cents.

On HN people are always complaining that google services are unreliable
because google shuts down a lot of stuff.

Well I think that's because they try a lot of things too. It's really amazing
how they have managed to excel in lots of places. Maps, Office/GSuite, Email,
Cloud, Chrome, Android, Waymo, Search...all of these are companies on their
own.

Google manages to innovate by trying a lot of things and shutting down what
doesn't work. It's like a startup incubator, and perhaps it motivates
employees with the potential for big bonuses upon success just like a startup
does.

------
hkmurakami
They attracted (some of) the best talent.

------
YZF
Let's not underestimate timing and luck. Google was there at the right time
during the history of the Internet with the right technical solution and the
right people. There are lots of very smart people who can do great things but
if they're not at the right intersection of time, technology and business, and
if they don't get lucky, nothing happens. The company has been steered
reasonably well but without that initial trajectory they wouldn't be where
they are today.

------
gnusci
I believe they are selling the metadata which is a very hard to define
information about all machine processed information of every human that use
their systems. Now-a-days it is a mine for several large scale social
objectives, and so very precious. The way and form they sell it may differ
depending of the end-front application. Nevertheless, interesting how they did
figure out that people information is a mine of money. So we are their product
:)

------
ElectronShak
>And so if I'm an advertiser and I say, "I want 24-year-old women in
Nashville, Tennessee who drive trucks and drink bourbon," I can do that on
Google

I think facebook would do a better job for the advertiser in this case.

------
HillaryBriss
> _Google is worth more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars right now
> and you don 't get that big by accident._

why did CBS News bother to say this? pretty much no one has ever believed a
company gets that big by accident.

------
SketchySeaBeast
"Bing, their competition, has 2% of the market. They have 90%."

Who has the other 8%?

~~~
yaks_hairbrush
Off the top of my head: Yahoo! and DuckDuck Go might be ahead of Bing.

~~~
bduerst
DDG is essentially a reskin of Bing search.

Yahoo! is also Bing.

~~~
earenndil
I thought they have a number of sources, of which bing is the primary, but
sole?

~~~
bduerst
They also use Yandex for Russian pages, and then there's a hodgepodge of sites
that webmasters manually submit/index (i.e. 1990's level of indexing).

So DDG is essentially Bing.

------
wdr1
> Last year, Google conducted 90% of the world's internet searches.

Does that mean _all_ of China is <10%? That seems surprising.

------
jorblumesea
The government allowed it, just like any monopoly or pseudo-monopoly. Anti-
trust laws apparently are not in vogue.

------
pkamb
"google" became a verb

------
TimJYoung
I've been trying to reconcile the libertarian perspective on this topic with
my more-liberal leanings, and I've got to say that I'm perplexed.

Can any libertarians here share their thoughts on the role of government in
producing tech monopolies ? Is there any role at all ?

IOW, would we see the same problem if there were still private AOL,
CompuServe, and Prodigy networks _instead_ of just the one Internet ? And yes,
I'm putting aside the question of whether the absence of the public internet
would be good or bad for society.

I can't see how you wouldn't just end up with one company buying out the
others and becoming a monopoly, anyway, but I'm open to ideas as to how that
would be mitigated by competition. There's also the issue of companies with
deep pockets, or investors with deep pockets, just doing "free" until everyone
else is gone, which, for some reason, seems to be in vogue now. But, I suspect
that private networks would be very careful about letting any one participant
acquire too much network power in one area.

~~~
ghein
Do you believe in free speech? Do you believe in free choice? Do you think
that individuals in a city/state/country should be able to talk to others in a
different city/state/country?

Is the Great Firewall of China a good thing or deeply evil?

Anyone is free (outside China and a few other places) can install their
favorite version of Linux, use Opera/Firefox/whatever, use protonmail, search
on duckduckgo.

Why should the government FORCE people to use a different source of
information than the one that they prefer?

Advertisers are leaving local monopolists/oligopolists (local TV stations,
newspapers, cable, yellow pages) and choosing a different, cheaper, more
effective, and more flexible option to reach customers. Producers and
consumers were very badly served by these old incumbents, why should the
government step in to protect those old and malevolent businesses?

It's the same thing as Uber vs Taxis. Taxis are racist, expensive, government
enforced oligopolies that exploit the drivers, have bad service, don't want to
take credit cards (don't even mention Apple/Google/Samsung/AliPay), and aren't
available when you really need one. Do you prefer app enabled car service or
the old style Taxi, like the ones using terrorism in Barcelona to protect
their monopoly?

We have an information commons with infinite choice and network effects. Same
as with language. If you're comfortable using criminal law to require
individuals to speak a certain language in private, then sure government
should control what companies and products people can choose to engage with.
The New York Times, Cox, Bertelsmann, and Reed-Elsevier would love that, along
with Xi Jinping. Just realize that you are consciously strengthening old
corrupt oligopolies and annihilating free speech and freedom of choice.

------
cromwellian
There's an implicit assumption in most of these discussions that beating
Google Search is a matter of money and scale, and while there are some
evidence for that (e.g. unreasonable effectiveness of having lots of data), it
is not a certain conclusion, it is only a conclusion if your goal is to beat
Google by making an incrementally better classical search engine. It is indeed
hard to beat something by offering something "about the same", when the cost
for the consumer is already effectively zero from a monetary perspective.

But this doesn't rule out someone coming up with a disruptive, radically
better search. Take this as a thought experiment, somewhere out there, is
another Albert Einstein, working on his magnum opus, an AGI based search
engine. He has a mind blowing advancement in AGI, like GR was in Physics, that
will completely eclipse classical search AND deep learning approaches _AND_ he
knows it.

Demos shown to investors are mind blowing, and he quickly raises enough funds
to launch a competitor. There is whisper and talk all around the valley.
Google tries to make an acquisition, but he and his investors turn it down,
because they can see how valuable the tech is. By the time Google realizes
their offer should have been much bigger, it's getting traction and taking off
like a rocket ship. Now Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Amazon, Microsoft, are all
looking to acquire it.

Yes, there are arguments that being the "default" is hard to dislodge. But
Chrome dislodged IE. Google Search dislodged AltaVista and Yahoo. iOS and
Android dislodged Windows. But better technology _if it is better enough and
marketed correctly_ can convince consumers to switch. Remember, Chrome was
fighting a common refrain that "browsers are done, and who needs another
browser?" Efforts like the Chrome Comic Book
([https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html](https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html))
and eye-catching early Chrome ads
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0))
was able to overcome consumer inertia of having IE pre-installed.

When the iPod, and a rumored Apple Phone was proposed (but before it was first
demoed), we had the same naysayers claiming that a new upstart in a space they
had never been in before couldn't possibly defeat the established players like
Blackberry or Nokia.

But if you create a sufficiently, radically better product, you in effect,
create an entirely new platform or market, NOT simply a competitor within the
existing market. This is what any hypothetical competitor to Google Search has
to do. They need to change what Search means. It can't mean SERP and PageRank,
there are marginal gains to be had. It has to be a radically different kind of
search experience.

------
pnloyd
Google not so much big as there are dominant and overvalued.

------
Goosey
Disclaimer, I work for Yelp (a backend infra team)

TFA includes, although not clearly enough, at least one example of exactly
this behavior (Google being big hurting consumer's) in their scheme to squash
Yelp by inserting their own local results (with big ui) on the front page.
There have been multiple studies showing the content on Yelp is far more
evolved than Google's content (in # of ratings, # of reviews, average quality
of reviews, # and quality of photos).

This is even with Google leveraging it's dominant market share in the mobile
space to proactively push users to rate business simply by an AI connecting
the dots on location. These nag alerts are not even something that can be
disabled without also disabling all of Android location-tracking! Which is
very irritating for me as I find many such features (for example, location
history has saved my rear several times when I lost items.)

This isn't a fanboy battle like Sega vs Nintendo.

I'm not anti-google, hell I'm totally bought into their ecosystem (have had an
Android since the g1, use a Google home, Google WiFi, Android TV, use all
Google's office suit, Gmail, etc).

But even if you personally dislike Yelp (that's fine), it is simply a fact
that Yelp has superior content in the local niche. Google is intentionally
burying a competitor which has a verifiably huge quality advantage in the
local review niche rather than improving their product/content enough for it
to compete naturally. This IS anti-competitive behavior which IS hurting
consumer's.

It even has downstream impacts on consumer's experiences within Yelp itself!
Another comment complains about Yelp bugging you to install the mobile client
rather than just show the result - this is absolutely a response to the
existential threat of Google continuing to use their search monopoly to
prevent fair competition. For better or worse it's the best shelter from the
Google: at least until they start doing the same thing with Play Store...

This isn't even only a Yelp problem. Why does Expedia, for example, push users
so hard to get the mobile app? Because Google has inserted their own travel
booking widgets at the top of the results as well! Why is venmo killing off
the website version in favor of mobile only? Maybe it has something to do with
what you see at the top of a Google search for 'send money'.

The thing that is SO important to stress is that even if you are a Google fan
(as I am), or perhaps ESPECIALLY if you are, anti-competitive behavior like
this only results in hurting consumers by killing off competition. Turns out
competition results in improvements for consumers.

And it's actually a big deal.

------
84axa
CIA

------
microdrum
Google got so big by causing its server-side adtech businesses to collude in
such a way as to restrain trade and forestall competitors.

~~~
fixermark
Collude with whom?

~~~
microdrum
By 'collude' I just meant worked together. The operative legal word is
'restraint of trade.'

------
ttul
IMHO Google should be regulated as a utility. Search is obviously as key to
modern life as is electricity, water, highways, etc. Why do we leave this
critical infrastructure completely under the control of one corporation, which
is itself under the control of just a tiny handful of billionaires?

Now, I mostly agree with Sergey and Larry’s investments, and I love the long
term approach and big picture view they take. But Google is still too
powerful. The democratic will of the people is being disregarded here, and
that is simply wrong.

~~~
samschooler
I agree that Google has a large control over the search market (and others),
but it does not need to be regulated as a utility. Largely because you can
just... switch. Really easily in fact.

I've been using DuckDuckGo.com as my primary search engine for the past 3
years and have never looked back. The results are most of the time better
(sometimes worse, but so it goes).

------
v7p1Qbt1im
Hijacking this thread to share a very unpopular opinion: It requires an entity
with the amount of resources, tech, talent and data they have to develop an
AGI and eventually ASI.

I personally would prefer them to develop it, than say Amazon. Or worse
Tencent or Baidu i.e an authoritarian government. This has been Larry and
Sergey's motivation from the get go. This is obviously naive but I believe the
ad machine and the power and money that came of it is only a means to an end.
A real AI has always been the target.

Yes an open source consortium like OpenAI would be better but that is honestly
not realistic. Who knows, it might go the way of Kubernetes and TensorFlow.
Open source the framework and offer the best service to run it on.

Unless there is a massive war on the horizon this development is inevitable.
There are downsides, as with all powerful tech. But in 300 years humanity
might live in post-scarcity society and finally be done with the fear and hate
for each other that comes with inequality. Sorry for the emotional rant.

This is blind optimism. I prefer to life like this. But we might of course
also end up in a Blade Runner/Resident Evil/1984 type situation.

Generally looking forward to your opinions.

