US Department of Justice claims Google bought its way to web search dominance Google is facing charges from the US Department of Justice that it maintains a dominant position in internet search through payments to device makers and browser developers that keep it as the default search option. The trial began on September 12 with a court hearing in which the US government outlined its case against the …
Google's arguments were absolutely true... back in the early 2000s. It did indeed get to be the #1 search engine because where other search engines at the time prided themselves on the number of hits they could pump out, Google came up with a way to put more relevant hits at the top of the list. So, much like Microsoft in the 1980s, their success was earned. However, like Microsoft in the 1990s, Google eventually started trying to protect its market position in any way possible. With Microsoft you probably can't point to any single event precipitating the change from legitimately the best offering for the widest number of people at a given point in time to being a monopolistic asshole of a company, with Google you can point to the acquisition of DoubleClick. DoubleClick is not only the inventor of the tracking cookie, but before Google bought them, they hadn't yet found a line they weren't willing to cross in the name of the bottom line. After being subsumed by Google, the rot started to spread at Google and the monopolistic practices started getting more and more brazen.
The Google of today is a completely different company from the Google of the early 2000s. The Google of today absolutely needs to be smacked around by regulators.
You may get some disagreement about Microsoft earning their success in the 1980s, but the rest of your post was spot on.
In particular, I used to work for DoubleClick when the first privacy-protecting laws were being passed to place at least some minimal limitations on what DoubleClick was doing at the time. Kevin Ryan, the CEO, was overtly bullish about the company's ability to either fight that legislation or subvert it, with no thought given to the legitimate privacy desires of the users.
I hope you managed to retain at least most of your soul after that tour of duty at DoubleClick.
And as I stated, in the 80s Microsoft had the best solution for the widest assortment of users. Sure, they got their foot in the door as a result of a combination of family connections and wealth, but this was also sort of the golden age of the PC with Apple, Amiga, and dozens of others having their own offerings. DOS, and later Windows, won the day. Not all of that can be attributed to the IBM deal and then later also selling to Compaq. Though I do respect and appreciate the respectful way you disagreed.
It never fails. Even after I say for the broadest number of people twice someone always ignores it and says how their personal favorite <whatever> was better. Maybe it was for you, but I was talking about everyone. In this case, CP/M being significantly more expensive meant that it was not the best overall solution. It may have been a better technical solution, but that is only one aspect of why any given product may be successful.
Yep I remember when Google was a huge improvement over Altavista. But over the years SEOs ate away, and Google played a game of whack a mole with them that made things progressively worse. And then Google tried to capture more and more direct revenue from their results by tilting them in ways that were profitable, by ignoring search terms even when you put them in quotes, so they could steer you to keywords they make money on.
I started using DDG almost a decade ago and while it was kind of painful at first it soon reached a point where it is probably 95% as good as Google, through a combination of fewer SEOs trying to game them and not having a reason to steer you to results you explicitly don't want. I occasionally use the '!g' option to get Google's results, but only rarely find what I was looking for that way if I couldn't find it with the initial DDG search.
Much as I dislike them, Google has a point. Most people use Edge to download chrome, and get really pissed off when it keeps coming back. Microsoft need to keep ramming it down our throats because people don't want to use it by choice.
The same goes for bing. I know one person who uses bing as their default search engine. One. The rest use Google.
Google came to be the most popular search engine because, at the time, they were the most useful. If a better search engine came along, people would use it. But it hasn't.
Sure, it isn't what it used to be, and the cartload of ads on the first page don't do it any favours. But I can always find what I'm looking for without too much hassle, and that is really all most people care about.
Google has plenty of problems, not least being a sneaky, devious, self serving data slurping monster, but it gets the job done. Nobody is forced to use it, and they wouldn't if a better alternative presents itself - look at how quickly people leapt onto chatGPT, and how quickly they've leapt off again. Create something as god as or better than Google, and Google will go the way of yahoo and Alta vista.
No we don't. i.e. we don't directly use Google or Bing. That is so 1990's. The more clued up of us use an anonomizser like Startpage.com.
Since Google and from memory Bing started putting the top ad payers at the top of your results or other shit like it, I don't trust them as far as I can throw them with both hands tied behind my back.
There is no sense in sending info to the likes of google that helps them send as back in your direction. AD's are the devils work.
I see the Google bots/employees are active again downvoting a perfectly reasonable post and not bothering to explain why they disagreed with it.
I only use google for searching via a VM and a VPN. It just makes sense.
Don't get sucked into that vat of molten chocolate... :)
The most irritating thing about using Edge is the way Google (gmail and search) keeps trying to ram Chrome down my throat.
I use Bing search in Edge unless I actually need to find something. Then I switch to Google (which pops up dialog suggesting I switch to Chrome).
Bing is OK if I see something in the top 5 results. I does tend to return pages and pages of hits from the same source, which is never what I want to see.
I use Edge in preference to Chrome because Edge at least controls the CPU usage of Javascript tasks in background tabs, and yes, the constant insinuation from Google that not using Chrome is dangerous gets really old. Edge Chromium is objectively a better browser than Chrome, with the exact same HTML support and protections against malicious sits as Chrome, but Google keeps telling users of Edge that they’re unsafe if they continue using it. If it walks like a FUD and quacks like a FUD...
As for Bing... I’m disappointed: for a little while there, it was actually getting pretty good. Its big advantage over Google was that the SEO dirtbags pretty much ignore Bing’s algorithms when they try to game search rankings, which means that for general queries it tended to produce better results than Google. I gave up on Google when I realised that with the single exception of API documentation searches, most other queries produced a half-page of paid insertions and junk links, with the useful ones at the bottom of the first page.
But, we can always rely on Microsoft to hamstring anything half-way decent that it produces, and so they put that fucking AI bot into it. Now, Bing results are polluted with autogenerated nonsense, so I am once again trying DuckDuckGo and hoping it has improved its indexing...
I am old enough to remember the days when Google didn't exist on the web.
You either looked through lists of websites on Yahoo, or got them from a friend, or stumbled on them through "link sharing" banner ads.
Once you could look up exactly what you wanted, and get reasonable results, there was no reason to use AskJeeves or Lycos or Altavista.
There was no reason to look anywhere but Google.
Yes I remember back then if I found a site I liked I would bookmark it. Then I'd go back a few months later and it was 50/50 whether that link would still work, even if the site itself still existed.
When Altavista came out and made the web searchable it was a revelation, and I quit needing to bookmark what I knew I could easily find again via search. Google was a big improvement over them, but unfortunately while PageRank was brilliant and would be the best possible solution in an ideal world, it was terrible in a world inhabited by SEOs.
Back in 1996, whilst working in the IT Department of a company with around 100+ users, I was tasked with setting up the internet access on all the computers.
As we were still running Windows 3.1 at the time, this not only meant installing a TCP/IP stack and a web browser, but I also had to spend several minutes explaining what the internet was to each user after I had upgraded their PC. At that time this mostly consisted of showing them a few sites relevant to the business as well as introducing them to AltaVista. I would ask if they had any hobbies so that we could search on a topic in which they were interested. Most people would respond with topics such as gardening, knitting, tropical fish and so on, and I'd type that into AltaVista so that they understood how to get at the data they wanted.
After upgrading the PC of a user I will call Barry (mainly because that was his name) I asked about his hobbies and, with a large grin on his face, he replied, "Necrophilia." I shrugged and typed it into AltaVista. Now, given that this was only 1996, it was still amazing how many results were returned! It was a good job Barry had his own office so that no one else could see what we were looking at!
Folks, I remember in the early internet multiple site would have a component (maybe and iframe? probably a table) which contained "you are on this site" and offered links to the "previous" and "next" one in the list and a link to the list itself. It was based on interest AFAIK and had nothing to do with search engines at the time.
What was it called‽ Driving me crazy.
The majority of desktops run Windows, where Edge is the default browser, and Bing the default search engine. And Edge has 5% of market share, and Bing has 3% of market share. Apple is more successful with Safari, a respectable share of their users keep the default browser. Not sure whether the difference comes from quality or brand loyalty, but the numbers don't lie.
I wonder how much Google's still doing to install Chrome on computers without users understanding it. For years, every piece of Windows software had a Chrome installation option which had to be unchecked. I haven't installed too much Windows software recently, so I don't know if that's still the case. However, I have worked on computers of a few people who were using Chrome but, when I asked why, didn't know how it had been installed and just used whatever opened. I wonder if they're more successful at covertly installing it on Windows than on Mac OS. Of course, Safari use on IOS is more due to Apple's lack of browser choice.
Probably much less of an issue than it used to be, in the days of every PC having at least one of Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader or Java on it drive-by downloads of Chrome and/or various browser toolbars were everywhere. AV programs are also much better now at picking up bundled PUA.
Covert download, sure. But not respecting Windows file system standards and running from the users folder, instead of Program Files.
Of course, users were not administrators, so could not official install. There was an actual reason that users are not administrators ... one of which was SO THEY DONT LOAD SOFTWARE. But, profit before morals. take a leaf from every virus writer and put it in AppData. That alone burnt my trust in Google.
Like a lot of people, I’ve tried alternatives and although bing would be useful as it can search stuff in our Microsoft tenant, the rubbish it shows alongside it puts me off.
All I want is a simple search, not news stories from a bunch of uninteresting publications.
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