
High-Profile Study Turns Up the Antitrust Heat on Google - IBM
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-29/high-profile-study-turns-up-the-antitrust-heat-on-google
======
AVTizzle
>> "Wu co-authored the study with Michael Luca, an assistant professor at
Harvard Business School, and data scientists at the local reviews site Yelp,
which has been one of Google's primary opponents in the global antitrust
fight. Wu was paid by Yelp for his work on the paper."

That's a fun fact.

~~~
littletimmy
It is an unfortunate fact of academic life that you need a grant to complete
your study. Take a look at studies that come out of HBS or Stanford GSB; more
often than not they are sponsored by big banks and investment firms.

I do feel as uncomfortable about this as you do. This sort of sponsoring ruins
academic objectivity.

~~~
CrazyCatDog
There is no need for grants in top b-schools. Whereas other academic
departments pay faculty 9-months out of the year, even third-tier b-schools
will pay for 2/9 or 3/9 of your salary in the summer if you publish just about
anything.

Larger studies? No problem, the dean has you covered. The brilliance of
b-schools is that they can mint $ with certificates and exec Ed, all of which
is available to them at low overhead (namely the university collects a lesser
cut).

It's preposterous to believe that faculty at the very top need to whore
themselves out to industry for funding. What they will do to get their hands
on data, however, is unspeakable. Yelp, Dropbox, eBay, etc. are merely
providing data to the researchers, and more often than not, they have a say on
what gets published. The truth always does eventually come out (e.g. negative
company information) but it does so behind conference/seminar doors, not in
print.

~~~
meepmorp
I'm just guessing here, but you don't seem like you have much familiarity with
academia and how funding works.

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hahainternet
I'm just beginning my reading of this 'paper' but so far I'm not convinced.
From what I can tell, they compared Google's pages with and without Yelp
reviews, but Yelp won't give this data to Google. Therefore it's complete
bullshit, they're comparing a hypothetical product that cannot exist and
arguing that Google is being anticompetitive because users prefer this
nonexistant product.

~~~
IshKebab
Yeah it seems you're right. The article makes it sound like they are comparing
a page with Google's "knowledge graph" results at the top, with one where
those are removed and the normal search results are at the top.

But what they are _actually_ comparing it with is a made up results page where
they replace Google's knowledge graph reviews which come from Google+, with
reviews that come from Yelp. Obviously there are far more Yelp reviews than
Google+, so people thing that page is better. But that totally ignores the
fact that Yelp reviews are not trustworthy.

Edit: Here is the (very blurry) comparison:
[http://i.imgur.com/PMnSt0m.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/PMnSt0m.jpg)

Notice that it doesn't mention that the reviews on the left are from Yelp.

~~~
dublinben
>Yelp reviews are not trustworthy

How are they any less trustworthy than Google+ reviews?

~~~
hahainternet
Yelp has been accused (with some convincing evidence) of running a protection
racket. Phoning companies and offering to make their negative reviews less
visible. When the company refuses, their positive reviews are 'flagged for
review' or similar, affecting their score.

I have no evidence to support this, but it has been corroborated by people you
can easily search for.

~~~
kissickas
I discovered the great case of Botto Italian Bistro when it floated to the top
of HN a few months ago for asking its customers to write them 1-star reviews
on Yelp after Yelp tried to scam them.

[http://www.bottobistro.com/](http://www.bottobistro.com/)

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fauigerzigerk
_> “Google appears to be strategically deploying universal search in a way
that degrades the product so as to slow and exclude challengers to its
dominant search paradigm, ” the paper concludes_

So Google is hurting competitors by degrading its own product (if you believe
this study commissioned by a competitor). This sounds to me like a situation
that is perfectly self limiting and self correcting.

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at-fates-hands
It's interesting that for years people have been hammering them about being a
monopoly and looking for angles to try and get the DOJ to go after them.

While it's clear they're giving preference to their own content, it's a shaky
argument since I know I can go to multiple other search engines and compare
results.

You have a harder time convincing me as well since this is not like the
Walmart in BFE North Dakota where people have to drive an hour before they can
find another competitor - it's the internet. A few clicks here, a few clicks
there, and you have plenty of other options.

Sorry, but you can't call it a monopoly if people are just too lazy to find
another search engine to compare results with.

~~~
jdmichal
People really need to understand that _antitrust_ and _monopoly_ do _not_ mean
the same thing. The existence of a competitor does not automatically make
antitrust behavior OK. The main focus of antitrust law is how an action
effects consumers; effects on competitors are only interesting in the sense of
effecting consumers. (With the understanding that more competition generally
means more choices for consumers, which is held as a Good Thing™.) I would
suggest giving the Wikipedia antitrust article a good read, as a start:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law)

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hussong
There are some areas (e.g. weather), where Google's own content is a lot more
useful (because of its simplicity) to me than third-party sites. On others
(e.g. shopping in DE) not so much.

~~~
greggman
Except at least in my experience their results are Awful. I'd be really
curious to know how often their predictions actually matched reality.

Not to mention flat out bugs

[http://techsuxor.blogspot.jp/2011/05/google-weather-on-
mobil...](http://techsuxor.blogspot.jp/2011/05/google-weather-on-mobile-is-
missing.html?m=1)

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norea-armozel
I'm split on this issue. To me, it should be Google's job to both provide a
list of viable candidates from its advertising segment and that which is found
on the wider web. I just wish that Google would return to the way it use to
mark the difference between the two. Anymore, it seems they want to confuse
users between their advert search results and the actual web results. But it's
clear that this is an inherent conflict of interest that can't be solved, at
least in my opinion, by using a sledgehammer approach of antitrust laws.

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jacquesm
Any google code that explicitly mentions another google product in their
search engine rankings algorithm would be evidence of anti-competitive
behaviour. Absent that I don't see how you could make an outside observation
stating that google engages in anti-competitive practices. There may be a lot
of smoke but that's the only thing that I would call a fire. So if they want
to prove this google will have to open up their search engine code base, which
I really don't see happening.

~~~
threeseed
This happens today though. Google search for "bars" shows a custom component
at the top which links through to what is a mini Yelp site complete with
reviews. It isn't aggregating reviews from the web they are specifically
"Google Reviews" from Google+ users.

This sort of behaviour is very similar to what got Microsoft in so much
trouble. Going from one market "search engine" to another "reviews". Normally
adding features like this would be fine but because Google is so powerful as
to make/break web businesses it can easily be seen as anticompetitive.

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dylanjermiah
"The new study, which was presented at the Antitrust Enforcement Symposium in
Oxford, U.K., over the weekend, says the content Google displays at the top of
many search results pages is inferior to material on competing websites. For
this reason, the paper asserts, the practice has the effect of harming
consumers. "

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Grue3
Great, now there's scientific basis behind what I've been observing for the
last 5 years or so. Google search results are actually really, really bad.
There are ads everywhere and everything is designed to make you click them.
I'm not at all surprised by the findings. And it doesn't matter that Yelp paid
them, after all it's Google who is unfairly competing against Yelp here and
hurting their business.

