How is it more honest or more useful? the google shopping and flights promoted results are already clearly marked as ads. All i see more of is more advertising, not more utility.
This is a lot more useful. I've never used Google's shopping reccomendations since they changed them a while ago from a price aggregator to a kind of store. The problem is that I don't trust them to give me a full overview of the market, and to find the best offers. Thus I always visited a couple of independent sites, and relied on the general search results not the shopping ones.
I expect from a search engine - at least a giant general-purpose search engine - that it is completely objective and honest. Only showing certain offers, or products from their affiliates, completely defeats the purpose. But if they are legally bound to fairly represent "competitors" (or products that are sold by sites that are not their affiliates), then I can use their product search without fearing that they are hiding something from me.
( In Germany: guenstiger.de and heise.de have price search engines, then I look at amazon and ebay simply because they are so large, and then at a few of the largest specific web sites, e.g. alternate.de for computers. I only trust the "regular" google search results for shopping.)
Not sure why this was up-voted as a productive comment, but I'll bite. Why is this ridiculous? I mean when you hold almost 99% of the search market (in Europe at least...in the US there's a bit more competition) you can't pull off these kinds of anti-competitive moves.
Google has a bunch of smart people, and they knew that they weren't going to win this case -- what they were doing was blatantly against antitrust laws.
Even in Europe where it's approaching 90%, 99% is quite a stretch. And "what they were doing was blatantly against antitrust laws" is just a ridiculous statement (and kind of puts the lie to your earlier more "measured" response. I mean seriously, was it "blatant" or was it "sketchy"?).
At the very least it would have been a very complicated antitrust case. I don't think anyone but Fairsearch would argue that anything was blatantly against antitrust law (and the settlement would certainly not have only involved including competitor's shopping results if it had been).
1) I concede the market share point (it is closer to 90% -- the point was more that the US is about 60-70%, a much smaller portion.)
2) If you read up a bit on antitrust law and/or were a smaller specialized/vertical search site competing with Google, I believe you would disagree. Take, for example, Nextag, or Mapquest back in the day. Nextag's traffic declined significantly simply because Google put its own results on top of the SERP ("search engine results page.") Same thing happened with Google Maps pushing out competitors by putting its own maps product on top of other products (though there is understandably some difficulty to prove whether or not that's due to the signal of the user or the preferential treatment of the Search provider. I think that's why you don't hear too much about this point, as it would require Google revealing details about their algorithm.)
Given the significant market positioning, by law you cannot use market dominance and scale in one market to push out competitors in another (i.e. definition of anticompetitive behavior.) For example, imagine Amazon was a lot younger and just starting out in the current search climate. If Google comes along and starts putting its own recommendations for shopping at the top of the SERP in a market where it has total search dominance, Amazon would be dust. Imagine also if Google decided "Hey, since Twitch.tv won't sell to us, let's start putting our own results for game streams at the top of the SERP, and relegate Twitch.tv a few inches down on the SERP," Twitch.tv would plummet (at least in the EU / international market.)
There is a lot to like about the EU, but its restrictions on speech (Google is NOT convicted of antitrust violations, this is not a structured settlement, this is extortion) and its censorious libel laws are not among them.
That seems like a stretch. It's very possible they wouldn't have been able to prove an antitrust case against Google, but isn't this a settlement to avoid them even starting? I guess you could argue any deal to settle is a form of extortion (and you see it in offers to settle on lawsuits all the time), but not spending years embroiled in a very public case seems like it could easily be worth it.
I don't know, having lived in Germany and the US, I feel I have more practical freedom of speach in Germany (or Europe).
Over here, kids don't get thrown into jail because they made a bad joke on Facebook.
I also find the gamut of acceptable political positions to be much wider here. Someone with a fairly regular middle-left point of view in Europe would be considered a socialist crackpot in parts of the US. There are restrictions on what you might call "hate speach" which I appreciate. Saying you want the Nazi party back, or want to kill the Jews, or wearing a Swastika is not covered by free speach.
One thing I also like is the strong protection of customers. Decieving your customers is also never covered as free speach. There are some laws that seem silly, governing the way products are advertized. E.g. you must use metric units, if you use imperial units (mainly for screens), the metric units must be displayed more prominently, you must have certain package sizes, you have to display the price for 100g / 1kg beneath goods in shops, etc.. I never appreciated these laws until I noticed how confusing and customer-deciving pricing is in the US. Like Mac & Cheese, 20 cents a package, but in the fine print it says only if you buy 10, otherwise its 80 cents. It's a silly example, but I feel more confident in Germany that I'm not going to get screwed over by a company then elsewhere.
I've been following this for a bit and I'm satisfied at the outcome. I don't "hate" Google by any means, but they get away with a lot of sketchy behavior simply because of their brand and with a cult hacker following.
Nevertheless as someone who has tried to run campaigns with Google before and had to go through the hassle, this is a step in the right direction towards allowing better competition.
I'm on the fence on this. Google does have a dangerously powerful position in the market, though I tend to support letting the market sort those kinds of things out (when there aren't artificial barriers preventing competition, as in the Internet last mile market, which needs a lot better and smarter regulation). But, I'm not sure if this helps the consumer or not.
On one hand, I use Duck Duck Go (for privacy reasons), and I've come to appreciate the seeming agnostic way in which DDG will pull results from all sorts of sources, with the goal being to provide the best experience. It isn't perfect, and sometimes it does confusing things. I just looked up "what's my IP" on DDG a few minutes ago, and it weirdly came back as a clickable thing that sent me to a map when I tried to copy paste the IP. I have no idea why I would want a freakin' map of my own IP address (I know where I am). Nonetheless, this looks a little like the DDG experience, where you get a variety of shopping options, or a variety of sources for information, and they're all first class citizens.
And, so, Google isn't exactly a walled garden, but it has become a lot less likely to refer me somewhere else if they can monetize what I'm looking for in some way.
On the final hand (I don't know how many hands I've laid out here, probably three or four, so far), these also kinda feel like ads. But, they're ads for companies that are arbitrarily chosen (by whom?). Google now has the power to select who to bless with the mighty Google hammer in these competitor spots. What will they do with that power? Will that actually make the consumer happier? I don't know how it'll play out.
I assume this isn't going to happen on the US results pages, so I guess we'll have some A/B data to compare.
The solution isn't perfect and I'm not a Google basher, but I'm glad about this. Even more important than the actual provisions of the settlement is the fact that Google - like any other big company - should know that they need to be careful how they use their dominant position in one market to try to capture a different market.
In the EU google owns search, lock, stock and barrel. If you aren't on google, if you aren't buying their traffic or aren't on top of their results, you almost aren't operating in the EU.
Google essentially now owns the high street in every town and city across the EU.
It's not that the consumers have no choice, it's that the companies have no choice.
And then Google were doing the equivalent of putting up their own stores IN FRONT OF existing stores. They'd just set their store up in front of competitors. And the competitors can't complain as google can, with a click of their fingers, make their store just disappear off into the Himalayas.
If there's ever a clear shut and closed case of exploitation of a monopoly and the need for government intervention, this was it. And I don't think it goes far enough.
Can any of us estimate how much damage MS did with IE and Embrace Extend Extinguish? Millions, Billions or Trillions? Would the internet technologies be 1, 2 or 5 years ahead? How much more would businesses have been productive if MS hadn't done so much damage to other software companies using their monopoly for a few billion profit? If it's even 1% more productive, we are talking trillions.
That's where we are right now with Google.
At least this time the reaction seems to have been much faster.
I find it interesting to apply the same logic to other sites. Imagine for a minute if Amazon needed to feature product prices from Newegg on each Amazon search. It starts to sound a little bit ridiculous when you apply it that way. I know some will say "wait, Google is so big" but isn't Amazon too? I use Amazon in my examples but there are other good examples. Phooey..
Note: I'm not taking any position on whether the EU regulators were correct or not. I'm not familiar with either EU antitrust law or with how Google shopping actually works.
You go to Amazon because you want to see what Amazon is selling. When Amazon in response to that shows you products they are selling, it is hard to see how that could raise antitrust issues, no matter how big Amazon is.
You go to Google's search page because you want to search the web. Google responds by showing you the hits on the web, AND by showing you things they think you might want to buy through their shopping service. They are using one line of business to give a boost to a different line of business. That's the kind of thing that does draw antitrust scrutiny.
An analogous situation with Amazon would be, perhaps, if when you searched for books on Apache or MySQL or other server software, they also showed you deals on AWS hosting.
For one, Amazon is not that dominant in the first place (Google has 80% of the world's searches, Amazon has nowhere near 80% of e-commerce -- estimated to get to around 20% in 2016).
Second, they can't really use their (non)dominance in Shopping to sell kindle fires. At most, they can promote them to their users. Most of which haven't bought one, and wont buy one, according to number of Amazon users vs estimated Kindle Fire sales numbers.
An analogous situation with Amazon would be if they wrote and published their own books and started putting those at the top of all the search results.
Terrible example. Amazon is a store - not a product search engine. If amazon suddenly started selling Amazon made products and putting them at the top of their listings then we'd have an accurate comparison. Google is abusing their power in one market (search) to push their products in other markets (Youtube videos, shopping results etc.).
I'm of the opinion that so long as they clearly mark that it's 'Google' shopping or flight results there is nothing wrong with the practise, it makes clear business sense and most companies would try the same. In terms of Google shopping, its a damn aggregation of other stores, presumably they get a small cut of sales via some affiliate program, but really they're in the position to do this more efficiently by directly handling people who use Google, rather than shuffling them to a 3rd party site, which would deteriorate the user experience.
No one complains when they manipulate search results to drop companies (e.g. rapgenius.com) in search results. So where must the line be drawn for 'unbiased' search results?
>> "it makes clear business sense and most companies would try the same"
True, that's why there are regulators. If you're the clear market leader in one thing using that power to promote your other products to people at the expense of competitors is wrong. It's similar to MS with IE. They were the leading OS manufacturer and they used that power to promote their own browser.
>> No one complains when they manipulate search results to drop companies (e.g. rapgenius.com) in search results. So where must the line be drawn for 'unbiased' search results?
This was a punishment BECAUSE RG manipulated rankings. Perfectly justified in my opinion.
yep, this is particularly important since for so many people "to google" is a verb meaning to search the web, and thus if something is not found on google, it doesn't exist on the web\
(well, that's just another way to say "dominant position")
>It starts to sound a little bit ridiculous when you apply it that way.
That's because it wasn't meant to be applied that way. Not all ideas are meant to be carried out in their extreme. For example:
― "Your french fries will taste better with salt".
― "Well, I poored 20 pounds of salt on them, and they're not tasting nice anymore".
The difference between Google and Amazon, and the logic between the different treatmeant is simple. When you visit Amazon, you visit a STORE, and you go there specifically to shop from them. Whereas when you visit Google you visit a SEARCH ENGINE, and you go there to find results about sellers and products in general.
I was under the impression that the difficulty in switching providers was the crux of antitrust law. Surely if it's as easy as typing a different search provider (or shopping one like amazon) into an address bar, how can this be anticompetitive?
There are three parties here: Consumers, Google and competing services. Even if there are no immediate benefits to consumers, there may still be anti-trust considerations on the basis that consumers can be hurt long term if competitors to Google are shut out from a large part of the market today.
These competitors are extremely unlikely to be able to affect the search market.
44 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 93.0 ms ] threadI expect from a search engine - at least a giant general-purpose search engine - that it is completely objective and honest. Only showing certain offers, or products from their affiliates, completely defeats the purpose. But if they are legally bound to fairly represent "competitors" (or products that are sold by sites that are not their affiliates), then I can use their product search without fearing that they are hiding something from me.
( In Germany: guenstiger.de and heise.de have price search engines, then I look at amazon and ebay simply because they are so large, and then at a few of the largest specific web sites, e.g. alternate.de for computers. I only trust the "regular" google search results for shopping.)
Google has a bunch of smart people, and they knew that they weren't going to win this case -- what they were doing was blatantly against antitrust laws.
At the very least it would have been a very complicated antitrust case. I don't think anyone but Fairsearch would argue that anything was blatantly against antitrust law (and the settlement would certainly not have only involved including competitor's shopping results if it had been).
2) If you read up a bit on antitrust law and/or were a smaller specialized/vertical search site competing with Google, I believe you would disagree. Take, for example, Nextag, or Mapquest back in the day. Nextag's traffic declined significantly simply because Google put its own results on top of the SERP ("search engine results page.") Same thing happened with Google Maps pushing out competitors by putting its own maps product on top of other products (though there is understandably some difficulty to prove whether or not that's due to the signal of the user or the preferential treatment of the Search provider. I think that's why you don't hear too much about this point, as it would require Google revealing details about their algorithm.)
Given the significant market positioning, by law you cannot use market dominance and scale in one market to push out competitors in another (i.e. definition of anticompetitive behavior.) For example, imagine Amazon was a lot younger and just starting out in the current search climate. If Google comes along and starts putting its own recommendations for shopping at the top of the SERP in a market where it has total search dominance, Amazon would be dust. Imagine also if Google decided "Hey, since Twitch.tv won't sell to us, let's start putting our own results for game streams at the top of the SERP, and relegate Twitch.tv a few inches down on the SERP," Twitch.tv would plummet (at least in the EU / international market.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7243851
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7246436
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7246429
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7246429
Over here, kids don't get thrown into jail because they made a bad joke on Facebook.
I also find the gamut of acceptable political positions to be much wider here. Someone with a fairly regular middle-left point of view in Europe would be considered a socialist crackpot in parts of the US. There are restrictions on what you might call "hate speach" which I appreciate. Saying you want the Nazi party back, or want to kill the Jews, or wearing a Swastika is not covered by free speach.
One thing I also like is the strong protection of customers. Decieving your customers is also never covered as free speach. There are some laws that seem silly, governing the way products are advertized. E.g. you must use metric units, if you use imperial units (mainly for screens), the metric units must be displayed more prominently, you must have certain package sizes, you have to display the price for 100g / 1kg beneath goods in shops, etc.. I never appreciated these laws until I noticed how confusing and customer-deciving pricing is in the US. Like Mac & Cheese, 20 cents a package, but in the fine print it says only if you buy 10, otherwise its 80 cents. It's a silly example, but I feel more confident in Germany that I'm not going to get screwed over by a company then elsewhere.
Nevertheless as someone who has tried to run campaigns with Google before and had to go through the hassle, this is a step in the right direction towards allowing better competition.
if I'm an advertiser, how do your they decide which third party ad results must show on Google?
http://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/google_commitments...
(in Annex 1 - Selection And Ranking Of Rival Link)
On one hand, I use Duck Duck Go (for privacy reasons), and I've come to appreciate the seeming agnostic way in which DDG will pull results from all sorts of sources, with the goal being to provide the best experience. It isn't perfect, and sometimes it does confusing things. I just looked up "what's my IP" on DDG a few minutes ago, and it weirdly came back as a clickable thing that sent me to a map when I tried to copy paste the IP. I have no idea why I would want a freakin' map of my own IP address (I know where I am). Nonetheless, this looks a little like the DDG experience, where you get a variety of shopping options, or a variety of sources for information, and they're all first class citizens.
And, so, Google isn't exactly a walled garden, but it has become a lot less likely to refer me somewhere else if they can monetize what I'm looking for in some way.
On the final hand (I don't know how many hands I've laid out here, probably three or four, so far), these also kinda feel like ads. But, they're ads for companies that are arbitrarily chosen (by whom?). Google now has the power to select who to bless with the mighty Google hammer in these competitor spots. What will they do with that power? Will that actually make the consumer happier? I don't know how it'll play out.
I assume this isn't going to happen on the US results pages, so I guess we'll have some A/B data to compare.
The solution isn't perfect and I'm not a Google basher, but I'm glad about this. Even more important than the actual provisions of the settlement is the fact that Google - like any other big company - should know that they need to be careful how they use their dominant position in one market to try to capture a different market.
Google essentially now owns the high street in every town and city across the EU.
It's not that the consumers have no choice, it's that the companies have no choice.
And then Google were doing the equivalent of putting up their own stores IN FRONT OF existing stores. They'd just set their store up in front of competitors. And the competitors can't complain as google can, with a click of their fingers, make their store just disappear off into the Himalayas.
If there's ever a clear shut and closed case of exploitation of a monopoly and the need for government intervention, this was it. And I don't think it goes far enough.
Can any of us estimate how much damage MS did with IE and Embrace Extend Extinguish? Millions, Billions or Trillions? Would the internet technologies be 1, 2 or 5 years ahead? How much more would businesses have been productive if MS hadn't done so much damage to other software companies using their monopoly for a few billion profit? If it's even 1% more productive, we are talking trillions.
That's where we are right now with Google.
At least this time the reaction seems to have been much faster.
You go to Amazon because you want to see what Amazon is selling. When Amazon in response to that shows you products they are selling, it is hard to see how that could raise antitrust issues, no matter how big Amazon is.
You go to Google's search page because you want to search the web. Google responds by showing you the hits on the web, AND by showing you things they think you might want to buy through their shopping service. They are using one line of business to give a boost to a different line of business. That's the kind of thing that does draw antitrust scrutiny.
An analogous situation with Amazon would be, perhaps, if when you searched for books on Apache or MySQL or other server software, they also showed you deals on AWS hosting.
*edit for clarity
For one, Amazon is not that dominant in the first place (Google has 80% of the world's searches, Amazon has nowhere near 80% of e-commerce -- estimated to get to around 20% in 2016).
Second, they can't really use their (non)dominance in Shopping to sell kindle fires. At most, they can promote them to their users. Most of which haven't bought one, and wont buy one, according to number of Amazon users vs estimated Kindle Fire sales numbers.
No one complains when they manipulate search results to drop companies (e.g. rapgenius.com) in search results. So where must the line be drawn for 'unbiased' search results?
True, that's why there are regulators. If you're the clear market leader in one thing using that power to promote your other products to people at the expense of competitors is wrong. It's similar to MS with IE. They were the leading OS manufacturer and they used that power to promote their own browser.
>> No one complains when they manipulate search results to drop companies (e.g. rapgenius.com) in search results. So where must the line be drawn for 'unbiased' search results?
This was a punishment BECAUSE RG manipulated rankings. Perfectly justified in my opinion.
That's because it wasn't meant to be applied that way. Not all ideas are meant to be carried out in their extreme. For example:
― "Your french fries will taste better with salt".
― "Well, I poored 20 pounds of salt on them, and they're not tasting nice anymore".
The difference between Google and Amazon, and the logic between the different treatmeant is simple. When you visit Amazon, you visit a STORE, and you go there specifically to shop from them. Whereas when you visit Google you visit a SEARCH ENGINE, and you go there to find results about sellers and products in general.
These competitors are extremely unlikely to be able to affect the search market.
If people aren't happy with Google then they can another search engine.
"This item is not available in your country".