Apparently YouTube has 2,485,221 "websites" and Vimeo has 624,352. I have no idea what a website is in Datanyze parlance and can't find anything on their website that explains it. I'm also not sure what the pie chart is which seems to suggest they only have half the market between them while their market shares add up to 92.28%.
I've seen Vimeo start to have a bit of a niche where professional animators post there, musicians too. It's like where people put things they need online but not with the intent of being an influencer. I believe it still has to potential to grow.
It took less than 20 years for Google to go from "Don't Be Evil" to dominating the market in a similar way that Microsoft did. I think this speaks more to the fundamental problems of market pressure than anything else. Once Google became public they were beholden to shareholders to continue to grow and increase value. It's hard to do that without purchases, acquisitions, and defense of existing territory.
I do think Google, and other companies, need to be fundamentally broken up. However, there seems to be some underlying problems in the public market way of life in America that almost forces companies down this path.
I also think we need some broad new antitrust laws. Any market with fewer than 4 competitors is not a competitive market. Any market where a single competitor has more than 50% of the share is not a competitive market.
One of the main things that makes me think Google is a harmful monopoly is how they cancel products just for not going to the moon.
It's like search+ads is such a dang money printer that they just churn products over and over looking for something that goes to the moon and anything that doesn't, even if it would be a stable, competitive, profit-generating product if it were its own company, they just bin it because it doesn't even register on their enormous operating profit from search.
I think that definitely hurts consumers. And isn't that the main measure of if a monopoly is bad? Demonstrating harm to consumers?
On the other side of this, it can be beneficial for startups and competition if Google does shut down products. If Google keeps services running that lose them money, they are also basically closing off entire markets to start ups who have to compete against a service that doesn't need to be profitable with an endless money pit behind it.
> “even if it would be a stable, competitive, profit-generating product if it were its own company, they just bin it because it doesn't even register on their enormous operating profit”
There are plenty of successful YC companies that wouldn't register on Google's financials and would probably be shut down/ignored by Google if they owned them though. Obviously YC would like all their portfolio companies to be massive but I don't think they force companies to shut down if they don't become Google massive.
Not YC itself, but other investors that have an actual board seat and invested more than 125k likely have a vested interest in seeking a lucrative acquisition.
That seems a bit witch-hunty given that doing the opposite and putting out new products to flood the market place even if they aren't successful would also be called monopolistic subsidization.
Just because a business practice sucks for consumers and it is done by a big company doesn't make it monopolistic. Anti-trust shouldn't be a "free for all gripes welcome" fest.
They dominated back during the "don't be evil days" not because they were evil, but because they were better. I don't believe for a second google ever had to play a single dirty trick or underhand tactic to reach the position in search they currently have, other markets maybe, but not search.
Google made a good browser and defaulted the search to their own engine. Then Google bought a mobile OS, bundled all the Google apps and services by default, and defaulted everything to their own browser with their own search engine. Google also paid Mozilla and Apple to default to Google search.
Google made good products and good services and aggressively defended them through acquisitions and paid placement deals. It may be your opinion that these acquisitions and placement deals are not "dirty" or "underhanded" but I find them to be fairly anticompetitive.
The point by the parent is that Chrome was a moat (as was Android, that's why they bought it and pursued mobile in the manner they did; Android was a subsidy program to protect the search monopoly moneymaker), which Google used to ensure the position of search, to ensure that search was unassailable by competition. In the case of Android, Google was terrified of being leaped or replaced in the shift to mobile, inflection points in the landscape are when monopolies in tech are at their most vulnerable. The parent's point was not that search wasn't already dominant, it's that Chrome helps to protect that dominance.
Microsoft used the exact same tactic repeatedly. It's one of the cornerstones of any dominant corporation, to build and leverage moats to keep competition at bay.
Google had 61% of the search market in 2008. Google used their free browser, paid placement deals, and acquisitions to further enhance their position to the 90%+ that it is now.
Why do you think Google bought Android? Google panicked after seeing a private demo of iOS. Remember, back then Google execs were sitting on the Apple board.
Google Search was built on an "unlimited download" datacenter networking contract because the seller has no idea how astronomical Google intended to with its downloading.
> Once Google became public they were beholden to shareholders to continue to grow and increase value.
That's the extra special thing about Google's brand of evil. They were not beholden to the great masses of shareholders or big institutional money. They have less excuse than some other prominent companies, because Larry and Sergey (plus Schmidt) controlled the company courtesy of their stock class arrangement. They were not beholden, they chose to behave evil without the typical shareholder pressure.
I think Larry and Sergey fundamentally don't think Google is in the wrong in any way at all. The slow boil. I think Schmidt is just a cutthroat businessman.
And nobody else comes close to having a competitive search product. I've used DDG and Bing. Perhaps search is the utility lines/distribution and ads are the generation capacity, in a future disintermediation.
It's hard to have a nuanced discussion about antitrust in the search market when this case is coming up 2 weeks before the election, and is actually about politically pressuring Google to give the party in power favorable treatment.
Honestly, I use search engines very little anymore.
SEO games make them almost useless to me. Certain well curated Reddit feeds, and sources where it looks like people give a toss is my preference. IRC, Slack, Discord communities are real time with a person, and probably “better” for discovery.
Let’s throw thousands of years of social evolution in the bin cause some billionaires can afford a lot of computers and exorbitant wages to have unscrupulous randos monopolize our exposure to the world. Ok
Same with FB, Twitter; I’m not finding a need to connect to everyone over their cat pic firehose, and the noise.
Edit: email works great for connecting to academics all over. Networking isn’t just through LinkedIn (which I also don’t use), and Upwork, or www at all. It’s just one of numerous conventions.
For general queries, I agree. But for any technical query, I find Google to be 10x better. I used bing for about 6 months, but considering most of my searches are technical, I found myself switching to Google > 40% of the time and just gave up.
Search and IR have incredibly strong network retrieval effects. Bing is great at "common knowledge" queries, in some cases better than Google. Bing is absolutely AWFUL at technical IR queries. Part of this is due to different index curation strategies, sure, but most of this is due to the learned behavior from the user base. With the current SOTA approaches, search network with more users fitting a profile is better able to return results for users that also fit that profile, so the most popular is the best nearly tautologically.
I use Bing almost exclusively, and find it to be very good. Maybe a few times a year I go to Google to try and find something that Bing isn't finding, and it's very rare that Google turns anything up either.
I have switched to DDG and about 20-30% of the time I have to switch to google. That said between DDG and firefox it's working! I am getting really vague generic ads sent to me instead of direct targeted ads. Ads in the wrong language, ads for products that have absolutely nothing to do with me. I love it.
I haven't used Google in years. Not sure how many but at least three. DDG is plenty good enough for me and of course Firefox, since Windows Phone got nixed. Being ex-Microsoft I was lucky enough to never have need of any non-search Google products (Gmail, sheets etc.).
Most of the time DDG is good enough for me. Occasionally I'll make a long tail query that only returns a handful of results on DDG and it's hit-or-miss that Google has anything better.
Also, for searches that "really matter" like when trying to get real work done, I end up trying them out in Google anyways to see if I missed anything. At which point, I wonder why I'm using DDG at all.
Maybe it depends upon the specifics, but for technical queries I've found DDG to be hands down better than Google for years at this point. Google used to be great, but with the dropping of both code search and specific matching even when using quotes, I've found it to be pretty terrible in recent years compared with a decade back.
Comes and goes for me. On an average technical search these days I'd say DDG is easily equal to Google and on the rare occasion I still have to switch to Google.
DDG had a period a few months ago where when I toggled on my country-specific search, the results were _spectacular_, language specific, relevant. Then it went away again. :/
It did make me hopeful that they're working on something to improve this.
I used DDG as my primary for a full year (2019) after using it on and off for several years, but I went back to Google and Bing this year. DDG has terrible results and about half the time I ended up using Google anyways. Image search is a travesty; current events often produce zero results.
I gave DDG many tries (as I really want to abandon literally everything Google), but no, the search results and speed are an order of magnitude inferior to Google's. I always find myself switching back to the evil, because that's the only viable option.
Let's not lie to ourselves. It's the option you prefer, not the only viable one.
It's also a lie to pretend that Google is any more evil than DDG. Both are capitalist corporations marketing a story to convince people to give them money (in this case, to convince you to make money for them). Neither of these organizations have morals, they have profit margins and consumer strategies. "Privacy" is just the tech equivalent of "Organic", a marketing tool to convince you to choose their brand. Eventually Google will get on the "privacy train" and people will completely forget they were "evil", just like with Microsoft. It's all so much Eurasia versus Eastasia.
That just goes to show how effective "Googling" is compared to alternative Search tech.
It's been said that "to Google" has generically come to mean "to Search", but I think googling has become a synonym not for "searching" but for "actually finding what you are looking for".
When someone tells you to Google something, they are not telling you to do open ended research, they are telling you that you will definitely find the referenced information if you enter a specific term into the Google search bar.
That just means it is an effective reference point index and accessible unlike say "Look at this $300 Introduction to Agronomy book ISB Number Y to tell you why what you said about modern agriculture not caring about soil erosion is completely wrong".
If someone tells you to Google something it essentially implies that it is already answered and accessible like when asked how to spell a word answering "use a dictionary" means to stop wasting their time essentially.
I have relatively low expectation for this suit to lead to anything substantial. This line of argument surrounding Google being the default search for devices largely mirrors the situation with Microsoft and Internet Explorer. I envision Google being told to stop paying to be the default browser, but that will likely do less to change Google's dominant role in search than it did for IE. People have proven to be willing to change their search option to use google when it gets defaulted to Bing or Yahoo.
More broadly, I find that people's frustrations with large tech platforms aren't really related to monopoly at all. Concern is more about the growing reach and prevalence of tech companies. When I talk to people who are pretty heavily aligned with the "tech-lash" they're rarely talking about market share or leveraging dominance in one market for an advantage in another market. More often they're talking about capricious moderation and enforcement of content policies, and the general increase in the influence of tech companies on the products and media we consume.
Anti-trust has limited ability alter the issues that most people have with big tech companies. Serving a broad customer base invariably leads to appealing to the lowest common denominator: no one set of rules will appease everybody, instead you try to develop rules to maximize the set of happy users and minimize the set of unhappy users. The scale of these tech companies necessitate automated rules enforcement, and this inevitably leads to false positives. I find it hard to see why breaking up tech companies would change this. Sure, if a big social media site was broken up into 4 different sites then each one would have a smaller population to manage. But they'd have commensurately less resources to dedicate to that community management, so they'll probably lean on automation just as much.
Please don't cherry-pick the details from an article that you consider important, as the submitted title did ("Google Captures 95% of mobile search traffic and 92% of desktop traffic"). This is a form of editorializing because it frames that as the story for everybody. Titles are by far the most powerful influence on HN, so this is a big deal. We want the content/author to speak for themselves, not go through a layer of filtering by submitters.
This is common knowledge for long time readers of HN. However, it would be nice if the submission UX encouraged this.
Prefilling the title with the <title> tag after the URL has been entered and making the title read-only with an explicit action to make it modifiable would go a long way towards achieving what you’re asking for.
As it is, going to submission page does not make this guideline very clear. People see two input fields and simply fill them in as they feel best.
I'm kind of irritated the DOJ discussion is dominated by search. Google is full-on pervasive. They have your phone calls, your texts, your emails, your private conversations in your home, your body movements, your location history, your credit card history, and on and on.
So yes addressing their search domination is one toe of the giant, but it's just a start.
Google improves their search results by analyzing user behavior.
Users want relevant search results. A search engine cannot provide them without massive amounts of search queries. Locking them in a 90%+ search monopoly.
For competition to even be possible Google must open up it's data.
If Google provided relevant search results, I might give it the benefit of the doubt; but it doesn't.
For my searches, Google's results are such a dumpster fire of spam and cross-promotion that I've gone back to how I used to find information before search engines existed. And when I break down and use a search engine, it's the Duck.
Google doesn't make money from people finding information. It makes money by keeping people on the treadmill of searching for information.
They aren't low hanging fruit. They are problems google has put thousands of people to work on for two decades. Your startup that manages to improve one detail is useless unless it handles the other details also.
Lack of competition dis-incentivize development so I think you highly overestimate the effort and resources they put into the search itself.
Not saying "duplicate content" is an easy problem though. Contrary if you solve that problem you can apply it elsewhere for example in spam prevention.
There is DDG and Bing. Google runs circles around them in terms of quality.
Both DDG and Bing are not crappy, they are good but Google is just better. This is a bit like going after Tesla for capturing EV market. One can have dozen other reasons to hate and complain about Google but it is a simple fact that Google search is just too damn good and useful.
It’s debatable whether Google is better. I get different results for DDG that somehow Google just doesn’t care about or the results are just SEO gamed. For coding and mathematics I prefer DDG’s results.
Is there a particular reason you just have to use the "best" product even if it is highly unethical? Why is it not okay to use a product which is better than Google2010, which we were amazingly happy about back then.
In other words, how does ethics feature in your decision calculus?
"Elm list" (my classic example) in Google gives me the documentation page for the List datastructure, "<language> <concept>" being my most common query when trying to get work done, like "javascript array" leading me to the MDN docs.
I will say that DDG has finally improved to at least providing a random tutorial for the List as its first result, but it still doesn't provide official docs and also suspects I might be asking about trees.
Google consistently understands what's being asked here and knows to rank canonical documentations highly.
That’s interesting. “C# list”, “java list”, “js list”, “lua list”, “nim list”, “php list”, “python list”, “rust list”, “scheme list”, “visual basic list”, “zig list”, all show canonical-looking docs at the top on DDG — some in convenient sidebars, which are one feature I prefer DDG’s implementation of.
I do not have to convince anyone that Google is better. It is my personal experience, others can have a different experience. But my point was that I am not using google search because Google has somehow forced me to use them, the way IRS forces me to pay them or the way US government forces me to pay social security "contribution" to them or how most bay area cities force me to use PGnE for energy and force me to put ethanol my in car. Latter are all examples of coercion where as former is all about Google doing something better than others.
I can't read the article because of the paywall, but is this counting China? Since Google isn't used in China I can't see how they are hitting those %s worldwide.
I have a hard time believing their figures,
Youtube is only 4 times bigger than Vimeo?
Well Vimeo is making 100M visit per month [1], Youtube is making 30B [2]
[1] https://www.similarweb.com/website/vimeo.com/#overview
[2] https://www.similarweb.com/website/youtube.com/#overview