
The Google Squeeze - zwieback
https://stratechery.com/2019/the-google-squeeze/
======
brenden2
It's not just Google, I've noticed this across all the major ad platforms:
Instagram, Twitter, FB, etc, have all cranked up the number of ads to prop up
revenues.

I stopped using IG & Twitter largely because it went from having relatively
few ads to where I started seeing an ad nearly every other post. The value of
the platform proportionally declined significantly and I no longer bother
using them.

Google is slowly becoming useless (even with an ad blocker) because you have
to hack search terms in order to get useful results. For example, I append
words like "wiki" or "reddit" to get results that aren't SEO'd. Search for
something generic like "computer" and you can see an example of how hard it is
to get information instead of ads.

It feels like ads are definitely a bubble, and I suspect the next big tech
companies will not be ad based.

~~~
haekjre
Do you even notice the instagram ads? I'm so blind to them while I flick
through I can't even tell if they are for a bank or for clothes or whatever.

> _Search for something generic like "computer" and you can see an example of
> how hard it is to get information instead of ads._

To be fair, "computer" is such a generic term, I can't even imagine what you
expect to see when you search for it.

~~~
zwieback
Isn't that the idea? The Instagram ads are supposed to look like the posts
you're looking at and hopefully your lizard brain stores the ad image as you
scroll by.

~~~
wutbrodo
I wonder to what extent this is a function of how one uses Instagram: ie,
perhaps the parent comment's feed contains posts superficially similar to ads,
while the composition of yours makes ads stand out in content and caption (my
experience is closer to yours on Twitter and upon occasionally IG use).

Tangentially, I find IG's place in the social media panoply to be fascinating.
It's the only service that everyone seems to feel positively about: it doesn't
inspire the loathing that Facebook and Twitter does or the mockery that
Snapchat does (even by their users).

But watching people use Instagram is the closest I see people coming to the
popular addict/junkie metaphor and the stereotype of smartphones and social
media turning us into slackjawed automatons in thrall to a colorful Skinner
Box. It's really eerie.

~~~
behindsight
> It's the only service that everyone seems to feel positively about: it
> doesn't inspire the [...] mockery that Snapchat does (even by their users)

Well there is actually some mockery about the lengths some people go to alter
their perceived appearance[0].

0:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Instagramreality/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Instagramreality/)

------
the_duke
I feel like Google is increasingly becoming useless as a general purpose
search engine.

When I try to find information on a generic topic where I can't exactly tailor
the query, the results are usually filled with low quality, SEO optimized
promotional sites, clickbait articles/YT videos or aggregators. With some luck
there is a good blog post with quality links on page 2 or 3.

Good results are now mostly restricted to areas where Google can utilize
structured data sources (Maps/Business data, Wikipedia, ....).

This is extremely ironic, since Google originally rose to popularity because
it was much better at "real" search than the competitors.

The interesting question is why!

Is Google just not able to compete with SEO tactics? Are they overly fixated
on ML/"AI" techniques that don't work well in practice?

Or are regular search results allowed to become worse on purpose, in order to
maximize ad revenue? It is something a near-monopoly could afford to do.

~~~
pavedwalden
Originally, Google was very effective at looking at the interconnections of
content people had put online and using that to infer which pages were most
relevant. SEO tactics immediately started gaming this system to create false
signals of relevance, but for many years Google did an impressive job of
staying ahead of that game.

I think what finally killed their search quality is the fact that there's no
longer a public human-curated network of websites to draw meaning from. Most
content on the web is bulk-generated crap, personal blogs and websites are
rare, and many passionate hobbyist communities are hidden from crawlers in
places like closed Facebook groups.

~~~
z3t4
I wonder what the next search engine algorithm will be... I've been thinking
about up-votes/down-votes. And I could swear Google experimented with Random
ranking a few years back, which gave very good results, but it was a bit
annoying when you forget to bookmark a site, and not finding it when searching
for it again the next day. But I'm thinking random plus voting, so if you find
a good site, you upvote it, if you find spam you downvote it. If you want to
find that good site again, you just check your upvote history. Random sorting
give small interesting web sites a chance to get found. When doing a search
you can use sliders to fine-tune the order using popularity (upvote/downvote
ratio), last updated, first found, region, and a checkbox to only show links
you haven't already clicked on, or haven't already voted on. And there could
be an option to discover sites you would probably like, based on which links
you have upvoted, and what people that upvote sites simlar to you also up-
voted - but you have not yet clicked on. The problem with upvote bots have
already been solved by social networks like Facebook, where using like-farms,
follower-farms etc are not very effective. You should not be too baised on the
votes though, or you would end up with echo-chamber loops like with Spotify
and Youtube. The key is randomness! A random brute force-like algorithm is
often just as good and sometimes better then a sophisticated system. It would
be hard to game/cheat a random algorithm.

~~~
lethologica
All of this almost has me wishing for a human curated list of high quality
sites for each topic, though that would obviously have its problems, too.

~~~
SiVal
Yeah, I remember talking to a student over at our local college a few years
back who had started doing that with a classmate. They called it Yet Another
Hierarchical... something or other. Jerry, I think his name was. I probably
should have joined them. It turned out to be quite an experience.

------
Agustus
The funny moment of all this is how Google is becoming the type of search
browser that existed in 2000. Altavista, webcrawler, yahoo, and others were
the default search engines, but then they started to let advertisers override
the search results to be inserted in the search results. Initially, the
results were clearly delineated, but over time, they fell in and the note of
it being an “ad” fell away.

To be fair, the internet is being conflated into a platform to drive people
into walled gardens, and google is trying to deal with helping people into
them.

I wondered how long it would take for the site to descend into the dark
patterns that caused google to ascend.

~~~
whywhywhywhy
Image Search has also been completely ruined by their push for ML based
results without even checking if it's better.

Years ago I could Image Search a frame of a film and get the film title almost
every time, now I get a generic "Street" or "Man" search term and then a bunch
of photos that have streets in them with a similar color palette which are
never from the film.

They've got so excited by the tech that they can identify an object or setting
that they've forgotten just finding the same image elsewhere online and using
the context of the web page would give a better answer.

~~~
rainburg
Luckily, there's an alternative: images.yandex.com

It effortlessly does both reverse image search AND image objects search.
Results are usually so good, it almost seems like Google decided to cripple
their image search on purpose.

~~~
wilkystyle
The fact that Yandex includes the OCR'd text in any image you search from is
awesome.

------
sunstone
Two things surprised me about this article. First, I thought Yelp had an
abysmal reputation. Threatening businesses with a poor review if they didn't
buy an ad. Taking money for boosting a businesses rating. Was this all just
FUD from its competitors?

And second, I find Amazon's product search to be almost complete crap. I can't
count how many times I've moved back to Google to do a product search because
I know the product is out there I just can't remember the name, Amazon comes
up with nothing and google has it on the first page. Again, is this only me?

~~~
kajecounterhack
You're not alone.

A friend rented out her place to a tenant who was a total nightmare and then
he went and made a yelp page for her as a person, because she's a real estate
agent, defaming her on yelp (not for real estate business, but for being his
landlord). So there's now a yelp page with her face on it and angry "reviews"
from this tenant and his partner, and she has no way to remove it. Yelp
refuses to do anything.

Amazon product search usually works for me but I often use google to make sure
there isn't a better price somewhere else on the internet. So I end up
repeating my search terms to Google anyway.

~~~
ertemplin
Can't businesses opt-out of Yelp by sending a cease and desist letter or
eventually suing Yelp?

Restaurants can't opt-out because they would no longer be discoverable on the
internet, but a real estate agent should be able to opt-out of Yelp and still
be reasonably successful.

~~~
0xffff2
What exactly would Yelp be ceasing and desisting here? Surely things like the
name, location and contact info for a business are public information that can
be freely reproduced. Everything else on Yelp (primarily user reviews/photos)
aren't the property of the business in the first place.

If anything I'd expect the example in GP's case to be a rare instance where
even US defamation law might be helpful to the landlord. I don't see that
extending to businesses in general though.

------
grumpy-cowboy
Tired of all this ads. I understand that some level of Ads is required
(nothing's free!). But this becoming ridiculous (and I'm not talking about
personal data mining). Instead of just whining about that, I decided to move
away from this:

\- My email/calendar/contacts on paid Fastmail.com account using my own
domain. I don't want to deal with all the work required to maintain an email
server: spam filtering, prevent being falsely flagged as a spam server, ....
And I use an alias per account I have. For example: amazon@mydomain.com,
hn@mydomain.com, ... So if my email got spammed/stolen, first I'll advise the
site and I'll just create a new one (ex: amazon2@mydomain.com).

\- Host my own federated servers like Matrix, Mastodon, Peertube, Pixelfeed,
...

\- Host my own Git "social server" with public and private repos.

\- ...

I think we have to come back to what the Web/Internet was before: a federation
of servers working together (ex: Usenet). When I talk about that to people,
they don't understand. I then use a simple example of this: email servers. You
can have an email account on any servers on the internet and send a message to
anyone who have an email account on another server. You CAN'T do that with
FB/Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp, ...

Big corps shoot themselves in the foot. People have limits and they are not
that stupid. When you taste a new (old) way to exchange with other people
without being flooded with Ads (Mastodon, Matrix, ... or simply emails), you
can't come back.

edit: formatting

~~~
sm4rk0
_Some_ people do have limits, but the crowd, on the opposite, is lazy and
hypnotized. From their perspective, you're the one missing out all the fun and
ease of digital life/world. It's _you_ (a black sheep) who can't be reached
via the most obvious communication channels (FB, WhatsApp, Viber, etc).

------
javajosh
_Google being evil, yet again. In fact, while I understand the frustration of
Expedia and Trip Advisor, I think it is a bit more complicated._

I don't think so. I think that the hotels module may be useful, but it's also
confusing. In particular, it breaks the user expectation that Google search
will give you the best results from the open web, and not give you a "module",
particularly not one with paid placement. That is, IMHO, Google is
overstepping its bounds as a search engine by providing (even useful) modules.
And I think this has a negative cognitive impact on users (in particular, it
ruins their intuition about what they are seeing, who's paying for what, and
why).

~~~
inapis
Only for people like us, technically inclined and on this forum and probably
those who saw Google being born and innovate its way to the top of the market.
Most of the people I know find google's results insanely useful. It's no
longer a search engine or an app. You want to find out something? You "google"
it. They do not distinguish it as "just" a search engine.

>it breaks the user expectation that Google search will give you the best
results from the open web,

That expectation is no longer true. That probably died a decade ago when
Android started gaining steam all over the world. And certainly not true for
those who don't remember the world before smartphones or when gmail offering
unlimited storage was "big" deal.

~~~
javajosh
Users don't like it when you change context, the underlying assumption of the
interaction. Usually they can't articulate what's bothering them. In this
case, they are sub-consciously expecting "fair" results, e.g. something
consistent with the "Google Bargain" back in the beginning, that Goog would
give you great, fair, results, ranked by utility, and add only a few simple,
mostly text ads that you are easy to tune out completely if you want to. The
Bargain has changed in many significant ways over the years, and things like
the Hotels Module certainly subvert the Bargain in a serious way, and I would
argue it's unsettling to people (although I don't have hard data on that).

------
emsy
A year ago or so I was listening to podcasts on YouTube while falling asleep.
I didn't mind an occasional ad. Then they ramped up the ads like crap. Easily
every 5 minutes or so (the funniest ones were the "Troubles falling asleep?"
ads that jolted me awake). I stopped almost completely ever since. The sad
thing is that I would gladly pay for the service, but I'm not going to pay a
company that uses my data AND my money. Plus I have to use it with an account
at google. No thanks. I have no hopes for an ethical competitor to arise,
there's simply no market for it.

~~~
kumarm
YouTube premium costs 10$ a month. Anyone living in first world (while posting
on hacker news) countries and spend hours a week on youtube shouldn't be
complaining about ads on youtube.

~~~
oska
How about complaining on behalf of all the people who can't afford $10 a
month, like teenagers, people in lesser developed countries, etc? You're happy
for them to be spammed with toxic advertising while people who are better off
get an opt-out?

------
Despegar
They heyday of Google were the years Eric Schmidt was CEO and the short time
Larry Page was CEO before the ill-fated Google+ strategy.

After that he seems to have burned out, spun a tale about being a capital
allocator with the whole Alphabet charade, then retired.

Sundar Pichai's mandate has been plainly obvious: generate profits (that
mandate became more explicit with hiring Ruth Porat as CFO).

~~~
mdorazio
From an outside perspective, it’s not even just “generate profits”, but also
morphed into “focus only on high-margin, high-revenue products and kill
everything else”. Which makes perfect sense for shareholders, but pretty much
turned Google into just another soulless BigCo.

~~~
wutbrodo
The story is that, around the time Larry Page became CEO, he went to Jobs for
advice, who gave him exactly this advice. Obviously Google never sunk as far
as becoming Apple, but this fits the narrative of killing Google's soul to
make it a little more like a place like Apple.

~~~
scarface74
There is nothing similar to Apple’s business model to Google’s.

\- Apple’s users are its customers. I give Apple money and they give me stuff.
Google’s customers are advertisers and others trying to reach users.

\- Apple is mostly concerned with its own platform and doesn’t have services
across platforms with a few exceptions (iTunes on Windows, Apple Music on
Android, Apple TV+ everywhere). Google wants to be ubiquitous.

------
yRetsyM
Many people seem to complain about the low quality Google search but don't
often offer any better alternatives. I can't help but feel like sometimes the
quality of the Google search results reflect the quality of the web in
general: stocked with a whole lot of spam content that people actually
consume.

How do we fix the web?

~~~
zanny
Someone suggests DuckDuckGo in practically every single post that even
mentions Google.

~~~
ebg13
In my experience, DDG search results are worse, not better, and people who say
otherwise are mental or lying.

I discovered the other day that DDG uses Bing for image searching because
without safe searching enabled it randomly returns tons of pornography for
innocuous searches like "filled torus".

~~~
gregorygoc
> it randomly returns tons of pornography for innocuous searches like "filled
> torus"

so I tried to search for that one, disabled safe searching and I'm coming back
disappointed (no porn)

~~~
sm4rk0
My experience was very different:

WARNING: NSFW!

[https://ibb.co/88Lx5yC](https://ibb.co/88Lx5yC)

------
zwieback
With travel booking it's hard to have sympathy for anyone, I don't really care
if "evil" Google defeats or buys up the other brand. I pretty much feel ripped
off no matter what service I use.

I also call up the hotel directly most of the time to see if I can get a
better rate or room, often works.

With air travel I want the one with the best grid to win, if I have to launch
a new search every time I try a new date or nearby airport it's a no-go for
me.

~~~
lotsofpulp
I have no idea why people would ever choose to deal with a middleman than the
merchant directly, especially when they have their bank as the arbiters in
disputes since they're paying with credit cards.

~~~
crazygringo
Because the middleman can be _significantly_ cheaper.

This is for straightforward business reasons: if you're visiting a hotel's
site directly, you clearly already have a strong interest in it, and are less
likely to be comparing by prices.

Whereas if you're advertising rates on an aggregator, you're competing much
more strongly on price, and are forced to provide discounts.

And for a significant number of people, it never occurs to them to check an
aggregator to save money.

When traveling, I'm almost always saving 30-50% off the prices listed on
hotels/lodging on their sites simply by using one of the aggregators.
(Discounts tend to especially skyrocket when booking day-before.)

Does that answer it?

~~~
lotsofpulp
The hotel brands I stay at (Hyatt/Hilton/Marriott/etc) offer the cheapest
pricing directly on their website, with best price guarantees giving discounts
or free nights if another website offers it for cheaper. I've never seen it
cheaper anywhere else though, so I'm pretty sure they have their computer
systems configured not to allow it to happen.

And I reserve a cancelable price so that I can always see if they lowered the
price before the cancelation deadline, sometimes yes, sometimes not.

Even if I wasn't staying at a brand that offered a best price guarantee, I
would still contact them and offer them the chance to win business directly by
being lower than the aggregator and avoid paying commission.

~~~
crazygringo
Yes, that's been my experience too with the big business hotels.

I'm talking mainly about everything else that isn't a humongous chain, which
is actually the vast majority of properties in most cities -- boutique hotels,
small hotels, 4-unit guesthouses, generally with 15 rooms or fewer. (Just my
personal preference as to where I like to stay.) The difference between "list"
price and aggregator price can be enormous -- usually because I'm booking the
last room. (The actual last room, not a fake one -- the property disappears
from the listings after I do.)

And maybe it would be the "morally" right thing to do to contact them directly
and get them to match the price, but it's not worth the hassle and risk to me
-- being put on hold for 10 minutes, dealing with someone on the phone for
whom English isn't often their first language (when traveling abroad), time
zone differences when nobody's at the front desk, risking the room
disappearing while waiting for an e-mail reply, and above all the chances of a
date or price or other mix-up when transacted verbally.

If I do it through the aggregator, I lock in the room instantly, with instant
e-mail confirmation that all the details are correct. Zero worries, zero
mixups.

~~~
lotsofpulp
There is no moral imperative to contact the merchant directly, it's the
merchant's choice to use a middleman if they want the benefits of price
discrimination or marketing power.

However, I assume I would be better taken care of by the merchant if I contact
them directly rather then go through an agent, although I can see if you are
going to a very small merchant who needs the agent more, then you may get
better service from the agent.

------
csomar
> This seems like unequivocally a good thing, no? Booking knows it can’t
> depend on the Google channel, that its future is best secured by innovating
> and building a customer experience that convinces users to go to Booking
> directly. That is competition working to the benefit of customers!

This is my impression too. I avoid Expedia like the plague. I only use
TripAdvisor to read the forums. Booking doesn't even rely on SEO. They don't
have a forum or don't make content. Booking has _lots_ of dark patterns when
booking but it just works and it has lots of choices at pretty good prices.
The experience and the convenience is why I was booking at Booking.com in the
last 5-6 years. I don't even use Airbnb. Booking has apartments too.

Expedia and TripAdvisors are similar to _tourist traps_ in the touristic hot
spots. They leveraged their SEO positions to grab whatever money they can get.
Now that Google has figured out they can get some of that money, they got in.
It's very easy, just move the juice to the partners and charge them money for
that.

Expedia/TripAdvisor/Traditional-travel-agencies will need to turn their
businesses around otherwise they are going the way of Thomas Cook.

------
dsalzman
I find it really refreshing how Ben reflects on his past writings and admits
when he was wrong than explains why his initial thinking was false. Really
makes him a powerful thinker and writer.

------
keenmaster
Apple has to be mulling an entry into search. Apple Search would be the
default search engine for iPhone users, the majority of whom conduct almost
all searches on their phone.

Being the one aggregator to rule them all has so many advantages. Google can
extract outsized profits from almost every single industry because people are
too myopic/lazy/indifferent to go directly to the source.

Apple could change the game. It could use its war chest to build a search
engine as good or better than Google. It would forsake some profit because
Apple Search would, through deep iOS integration, improvement of Siri, and
bolstering of upcoming AR offerings, create ever greater lock-in to the Apple
ecosystem. Furthermore, Apple's entry would give bargaining power back to
content providers, galvanizing content creation on the margins.

There is an iron rule in business: competition will eventually erode profits.
It's not a matter of if, but when. Will it be in 5 years, 10, 30, or 50?. GE
used to be a seemingly unflappable industrial powerhouse. Look at it now.
Google can stay way ahead of the competition if it continues to leapfrog on
AI, but as soon as it becomes more iterative, or if the government decides
that it's a monopoly, its decline would be non-linear. Apple faces another
dilemma with a similar outcome. If some technological shift or government
intervention opens up the App Store and iMessage to all mobile hardware,
profits would drop precipitously. The only antidote is massive R&D and
innovation.

~~~
ninkendo
Apple already has a search engine.

Swipe down on the home screen and type some stuff, and you get “Siri suggested
websites”. It also answers basic questions and gives previews of relevant
parts of the sites.

~~~
keenmaster
I meant whole-internet search, not local device search (Spotlight) and Siri
suggestions.

~~~
ninkendo
It does whole-internet search. Give it a try!

~~~
keenmaster
I don't think so. It pulls results from other search engines, including
Google.

~~~
ninkendo
"Siri suggested websites" (the thing I mentioned in my first post) are not
from other search engines, they're from Apple's.

Same goes for the "Siri suggested website" when you type some terms into
Safari. The top website on the autocomplete list is selected by Apple's search
engine.

~~~
keenmaster
Ah, my apologies for the misunderstanding. I was not aware of this. My point
still stands, since relatively few people treat Spotlight as a discrete search
engine. Its layout and features are not conducive to anything but the most
elementary research. Moreover, it is not accessible through web browsers.

~~~
ninkendo
Yeah, my post was definitely intended in a sort of "it's crazy but it's true"
way, because yeah, Apple has gone through insane amounts of engineering effort
to create a working search engine that crawls the entire web and does a decent
job of selecting top websites, but you can't use it anywhere except in a few
chosen UI elements inside iOS/macOS. The whole thing is hidden in plain sight.

~~~
keenmaster
The fact that they went through all that trouble makes me even more convinced
that they're considering a bigger entry into search. They're dipping their
toes in the water.

------
dna_polymerase
Google Search becomes less and less usable/desirable. The pressure for growth
by Wall Street and the lack of profitable products besides Search would be the
existential threat to Google Search.

Well, it would be in theory. The problem is mobile. Since both major OS are
tightly controlled by Google and Apple, Google Search won't be challenged by
any alternative. Apple won't give their search profits away to push DDG or any
other company, and Google wouldn't even think about that.

Any search engine that wants to cut into Google's market share has to start on
the desktop web, buy the iOS integration for billions and would need to
develop an alternative to Android, or call on regulators to force Google into
showing a selection screen as they did to Microsoft.

------
telltruth
On a bigger picture, it is concerning that all big tech is now growing by
squeezing their existing assets as opposed to by gaining more users. For
example, Microsoft Windows used to cost me $20/yr in licensing cost, no wait
coasts $100/yr. Similarly number of ads in FB, Twitter and Google has gone up
by 5X. All these stunning quarterly results are mainly coming from squeeze. I
wonder how long this can go on.

------
cavisne
The quality of a product is subjective, but I dont see any example in this
article of big tech squeezing out a competitor with an inferior product.

Yelp (despite the glossy profile in buzzfeed news) has not really advanced the
product in a long time. Their site was always extremely frustrating, forcing
you into using the app. And they were super slow to add things like delivery.

In comparison Google Maps is a search engine for the physical world. They’ve
done all sorts of complex things like using street view to correctly place a
business on the map, adding duplex for making reservations. Even for reviews,
I trust the reviews from the meal delivery apps a lot more as they are based
on real orders. If I want a detailed review, sites like Eater and local blogs
are more useful (and are ranked higher than yelp now). These are all areas
Yelp could have invested in, instead they kept the product largely the same.

Likewise with Expedia, their website uses every dark pattern in the book, and
they got completely blindsided by Booking.com with a superior agency business
model (that also means it makes more sense to go straight to their website).

I used to use yelp for reviews, now i use google. Likewise I used to use
google for products, now I use Amazon. Flights and hotels I’m mostly using
google. In all cases it’s because the product is better.

------
ryanmarsh
_This is by far the most compelling pitch I have heard Yelp give for itself:
“The big companies are full of spam and misinformation, while we take the time
to get reviews right.” It is hard not wonder just how much more popular Yelp’s
product might be if this message were spread as stridently as its anti-Google
arguments._

If only it were that simple. Yelp does not personally review reviews. Nobody
from Yelp has ever called me to make sure I got my review right and I wasn't
being unreasonable. Ensuring that reviews aren't spam is an algorithmic
problem. Yes Yelp has some features which provide hints to the algorithm but
at the end of the day it's about ML. For every upvote from a fellow reviewer
on Yelp, Google has 100 other data points on me as a reviewer. So who is going
to get the algo right, Yelp, or Google?

My personal experience has been that 4.2 stars on Google means the meal will
be good, 5 stars on Yelp means it's a trendy trap with bad food and worse
service which I will not enjoy.

Go figure.

------
tinyhouse
I like the Booking.com approach of focusing on their product and website so
that users come to it directly (I must say though that there are many things I
don't like about their site, like all the "1 last room at this price book
quickly!!"). Yelp shot itself in the foot by not letting mobile users read
reviews without downloading the app. It's not worth most people to download
the app for it.

For travel I usually go to Kayak directly. Their site is simple and useful.
But I must admit that seeing all the options on a map is pretty useful and I
often use the hotel module in Maps. For me Maps is the best product Google
ever made since their initial search engine.

------
bryanlarsen
> This is by far the most compelling pitch I have heard Yelp give for itself:
> “The big companies are full of spam and misinformation, while we take the
> time to get reviews right.” It is hard not wonder just how much more popular
> Yelp’s product might be if this message were spread as stridently as its
> anti-Google arguments.

Probably because the blowback would be louder than the message. The heresay
I've heard is that they hide the good reviews if you don't pay them, and hide
the bad reviews if you do.

------
scarface74
_The first and most obvious way that Google showed users more ads was by
literally inserting more ads into mobile search results_

So if it wasn’t already clear why Google never allowed any type of content
blocking framework in Chrome for mobile and iOS has had it for five years, it
should be clear now.

So Google pays Apple a reported $8 billion a year to be the default search
engine while Apple still builds in a framework to block those very ads.

------
SkyMarshal
This article doesn’t seem to directly address the overarching reason Google is
sidestepping irrelevancy - the increasing value of data and AI analysis of it.

As data becomes even more valuable than oil [1], few orgs are as well
positioned to capitalize on it than Google. With their massive trove of user
activity since almost the dawn of the Internet age, combined with the purchase
of Deep Mind, the kind of business and strategic intelligence Google can
deduct will be invaluable.

Being more effective at selling ads, as the article addresses, is just the
start of it.

[1]: [https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/the-worlds-
most...](https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/the-worlds-most-
valuable-resource-is-no-longer-oil-but-data)

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dwoozle
Why isn’t this antitrust? Google using its search monopoly to muscle into
hotels and other markets?

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kong75
When I click on the product ratings of some of the PLAs on Google, I am
redirected to the landing page. But actually I am supposed to be redirected to
a page aggregating the ratings from different sources hosted by Google.

I think Google might be suffering from revenue pressure since navigating users
to the advertisers' landing page will let the advertiser pay Google directly.
And obviously it will harm the user experience since the ratings are actually
aggregated from different sellers and will be incomplete on the landing page
while the user wants to see all the ratings and reviews when he clicks on
them.

------
40acres
A major antitrust issue is that too much competition is annoying for users.
I'm not going to check every airline carrier when booking a flight, I will use
an aggregator. Same thing for hotels, restaurants, etc.

Look at the current streaming environment: it's becoming highly fragmented and
I predict when the dust settles there will only be 3 major players, there's
only so much content an individual can consume and is willing to pay. Google's
role as the aggregator for queries will be incredibly difficult to disrupt as
long as there is _some_ friction to using another service.

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buboard
It's still very cumbersome to type a search on mobile, and having to type a
url first or launch another app is almost half a minute more. That alone
drives people to google. The rest is just google taking advantage of users
that have fallen in its trap. IMHO, if these major companies like expedia
stopped going after mobile aggressively , that might inconvenience users
enough so that they would switch to use a desktop for their travel searches of
deals, where they have much more control

------
muddi900
>In this case the unique product is demand — users. And this is where I am
tempted to defend Google: at the end of the day, the company has the dominant
position in its value chain largely by providing a better product.

This is the gist of it; Google, despite all the ads, and SEO spam, and other
unscrupulous crap, still has the best tech. I use DuckDuckGo as my primary
search engine, atleast on desktop, but I still have to swithc to google 1/5ths
of my critical info searches.

------
asdfasgasdgasdg
I thought the quote from the Yelp CEO was interesting. I mean, if Yelp was
actually more skilled at helping the customer find the relevant data than
Google, then that would be a compelling reason to use Yelp. But is his claim
accurate? Is Google search optimizing for attention?

It's hard to see how that could be, honestly. Nobody browses search result
pages for fun. Whether they're succeeding or not, it's hard to picture Google
optimizing result pages for anything other than "get the user on to their most
relevant (and/or lucrative) destination as absolutely quickly as we can
manage."

If I were Yelp, I would not try Stratechery's arguments here. What they should
be saying is, "Google's search results for restaurants are crap. If you use
us, _your valuable time and money will be better spent_ than if you trust
Google." Honestly, this is what I always worry about first when I look at
online reviews. Is it honest and is it an accurate predictor of how I will
feel if I choose this product? I have to confess, Yelp has not done a much
better job engendering that trust in me than Google has. Not that I trust
either very much, especially about restaurants. But if Yelp were able to crack
that nut, I would be hugely grateful, and a loyal fan for life.

------
zpatel
I had identified the problem of google information dominance and inefficiency
long time back and release a prototype micronest.com/searchly

The solution would be very complex but i had the problem identified..Now
working to release an enterprise version inspired by this.

------
jaimex2
The 'Peak Google' based on Peak Microsoft estimate I'd say missed it's mark
because Google hasn't been smacked down with an anti-trust yet.

------
tempsy
Oof. I mistakenly shorted Yelp before their earnings release expecting the
same results, but they ended up jumping 15%. Not that they've performed well
YTD.

------
e_carra
Thank you for this very informative piece. This is one of those articles that
when you finish them you feel you have much more context than before.

------
johnward
I've seen 4 ads on Google SERPS but I've seen as many as the first 5 results
being ads on Bing. This is getting out of hand.

------
meh206
Google has many services that should become public services once they're
identified as a monopoly.

------
uoaei
{$BIG_N_TECH_CO}'s customers are the advertisers.

They are serving their customers, and they're doing it well.

------
blairanderson
Amazon Advertising is also squeezing the shit out of search result pages.

------
lifeisstillgood
on a related note, is there anyone with a swardley map for this industry?
Would be interested in seeing it next to Stratechary

------
totorovirus
If you really want ad free, non-capitalism polluted search results, why don't
you ask the government to make better one? And we all know it's not the answer

------
ronilan
A side note: for anyone not aware (or confused by Silicon Valley tradition on
constantly rewriting origin stories), TripAdvisor started in the dot com
bubble as a B2B site. They clearly stated their business model was to provide
reviews to other sites. Only that after the bubble burst, TripAdvisor had none
left. They then basically invented modern SEO: long descriptive URLs, pages
pulled out of a db with keyword variations in mind, constantly refreshing
content with user submissions, and, the killer, buying links to influence
Google’s naive ranking methods (which quickly evolved this to buying entire
sites for their SEO potential). The billion dollar public valuation is
entirely the result of a decade long SEO play.

(Source: was in online travel related business at the time. Was the first to
buy links form Matt at SeatGuru, later acquired by TripAdvisor)

~~~
runn1ng
I won’t cry for TripAdvisor and Expedia, their websites were awful.

Booking Group websites (booking.com and agoda) are still doing great in 2019
as the article states, because they don’t suck

~~~
arkades
What’s better than TripAdvisor for finding sights and experiences?

Very much not a rhetorical question.

~~~
basch
Yelp, Google, Facebook, Foursquare, are all alive and well, as is a lot of
local journalism. Subreddits about specific cities also hit well sometimes.

Now if i could just aggregate all their results into one listing per
event/location.

~~~
ianmobbs
Almost like...TripAdvisor

------
gwern
> By increasing the shard integrity check rate, we potentially moved failures
> that were going to be found in the future into Q3. While discovering
> potential problems earlier is a good thing, it is possible that the hard
> drive failures recorded in Q3 could then be artificially high as future
> failures were dragged forward into the quarter. Given that our Annualized
> Failure Rate calculation is based on Drive Days and Drive Failures,
> potentially moving up some number of failures into Q3 could cause an
> artificial spike in the Q3 Annualized Failure Rates. This is what we will be
> monitoring over the coming quarters.

Wouldn't survival analysis on interval-censored data handle this problem
automatically? All of your observations of failure presumably are actually
interval data, where all you know is that the drive failed sometime in between
the last good check and the first bad check. Then it doesn't matter if some
time periods have large intervals and others have small intervals, that just
affects the precision of estimates.

~~~
Nicksil
I think you're looking for this thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21515084](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21515084)

~~~
gwern
Oops.

