Google paying to be default search on phones is totally against antitrust law, judge rules Google's payments to make its search engine the default for smartphone browsers and elsewhere broke US antitrust law, a federal judge ruled Monday. The opinion memorandum [PDF] represents a major milestone for the US Justice Department in its campaign to tame Big Tech. "This victory against Google is an historic win for the …
"This is good. It will force google to make people *want* to use their search engine - which is currently at about the standard of yahoo, altavista and all the shite they replaced 25 years ago."
Yes it is shite but so is most of the content that they crawl and spider and that is getting even worse, thanks to *cough* AI.
The vast majority of searches I do relate to error messages in log files and the like or attempts to throw IT symptoms in and get diagnoses out.
Around five or so years ago, Linux related searches started to hit "blogs" that all look the same with a WordPress style piccy masthead with a rubbish title and strap line. Then ChatGPT n that turned the copied content into generated content.
Windows related searches largely end up on a site blog selling something or the horrendous MS Social sites, and obviously the same sort of auto blog bollocks that afflicts Linux (and *BSD, pfSense, VMware, Proxmox and so on)
Its not just search that is awful, it is the auto generated content bollocks that clogs up the arteries.
But who gives a shit about nominal product (search) when your real goal is flogging ads (your real product).
Google doesn't really sell search, they sell adverts.
I 100% agree Google has been worsening the search results deliberately so we see more ads - we actually have the evidence for this through internal documents revealed in court cases. They show Google engineered search to keep your eyes on Google properties as much as possible.
A key example is moving the relevant search result to page 2 - two pages twice the ads! By deliberately failing to get rid of blogspam you have to bounce Google - blog spam - Google and every time you come back to Google more add revenue!
It's legitimately terrible. In its early days Google kept the search engineers deliberately away from the money to reduce search engineering being captured by the ad revenue, but in the documents here it shows Google has broken that internal partition for money.
Got a new PC at work recently and it has Edge as the browser, and there is no choice in this. That wants to integrate my searches with my work account had Bing set up as the default search engine. I had a frustrating hour where whenever I did an online search it would bring up results from our work first and not online. So I decided to change it to Google and now that problem has evaporated* Bing is also a bit shit compared to Google and doesn’t seem to do things like site searches very well. *although one update seemed to reintroduce it, I think that might have been down to a work policy.
For example a couple of friends who were getting married had a particular picnic blanket from Harrods on their wedding list. So whilst on Bing I typed site:harrods.com "picnic blanket" which said it brought up 12 results, but only 6 were displayed from Harrods.com and none were what they were asking for. The other results were adverts from M&S, Wayfair, Alibaba, DeubaXXL etc. Google on the other hand with the same search request displayed way more results than that and had the correct blanket (Queen’s Green Canopy Picnic Blanket) which was out of stock and I ended up buying elsewhere once I found it wasn’t exclusively sold there.
My mileage differs from the OP's too and I've settled on Google search. As long as I run adblockers then Google is by better for me than Bing and DDG. I don't have a Google account, so maybe that changes the sort of results I see. I agree about site: searching and If I'm searching for things like PC or car problems then Google finds more relevant stuff than Bing or DDG. I don't really like Google and every so often I switch to DDG to see if it's got better. I've been researching a complicated DIY project recently and tried both DDG and Bing but ended up on Google. Google was also the only search that found a new element for my 1980s cooker.
What's your point?
The point here is that Google is _paying_ the likes of Apple, etc something to the tune of $70 ($18 bullion a year for around 250 million iPhones sold a year) a phone to put their search engine as default. And that is wrong.
If Google search is so good then they should let phone makers like Apple choose to include it by default rather than having to pay them. This stifles innovation as no matter what the competition (Bing, Yahoo, Duck Duck Go, etc) do, they cannot get their search engine in the door as they cannot match the $70 payment that Google is making, so they give up trying to innovate their product. As a result Google has no competition and they don't bother to improve their product focusing instead to make the search results lousy so you have to see more ads to find the result you are looking for.
That is what this antitrust case is about.
these politicians talk out BOTH sides of their mouths.
Gov Le Petomaine: "I didn't get a harumph out of you!"
Gov lacky: "Harumph!"
Gov Le Petomaine: "You watch your ass"
(From 'Blazing Saddles')
Google will continue MANIPULATING RESULTS (and people) with a STRANGLEHOLD on the 'search' market space (like Micros~1 does with software) and
NOT! A! SINGLE! THING! WILL! BE! DONE! ABOUT! IT!!!
> Google's lawyers defended the company by saying that users are attracted to their search engine because they find it useful
- From https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0k44x6mge3o
Why does Google need to pay to be a default?, If users are so attracted to Google's search engine as claimed by the lawyers surely users will find\select it themselves without having it "forced" on them as a default
"This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available," said Kent Walker, president of global affairs at Google, [...]
Seems Goggles...er Google were cribbing the response Micros~1 had when they were found to have illegally bundled Insecure Exposer with Windows. Le plus ça change...
There is still a significant share of people who just leave the default. In the United States, Bing has 18% market share on desktops and 1.86% on mobile:
https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/desktop/united-states-of-america
And Edge has a 15% market share on desktops, just above Safari, and 0.47% on mobile. On mobile, Safari has a higher market share than Chrome, and even "Samsung Internet" has a 3.5% market share:
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/united-states-of-america
In passing we can note that Windows has 64% desktop market share in the US vs 25% for OSX, so we can estimate that 60% of Mac users stay with Safari rather than change to Chrome, and 25% of Windows users stay with Edge rather change to Chrome.
Google pays because of the power of “the default”.
Internet explorer was the default and everyone used it. Google paid the bigger companies to avoid Apple or similarly sized companies from striking a deal with Bing instead.
It’s more likely the platform understands the value and bargained for it - that’s a lot of cash Apple managed to gain and one less product they had to compete in.
I’m glad someone is finally admitting this is not great - but you can change it - permanently and it’s done (at least on iOS). Windows seems to not get the picture and keeps insisting I change back to edge / installing. O365/…
The devil you know vs the one you don’t - sure Google isn’t great, change it to duck duck go and move on. I recon we are likely to see Bing become the default in a lot more places unless the ruling will curb that at the same time - which I doubt they will,,: so hardly fixes the problem then.
I’m not really sure which side of what fence I’m on here - I’m sure the consumer will lose one way or another.
Yes, but any time they use any Google service on a different browser, they have both Chrome and Google Search thrust hard down their throats like they're Linda Lovelace. I'm sure many people just click on those things because they mistake them for actual "advice" rather than the blatant advertising they actually are.
This conviction was long due, and still will be long due thanks to Google appealing over and over again.
The painful side effect is that Mozilla became very depending on Google paying for it to set Google search default. Without that, Mozilla's funding crumbles. Is Mozilla Google's insurance? Will this measure to increase competition have the unintended side effect of wiping away any and all browser engine choice on anything but Apple products?
Imperfect solution :
If the MS browser was based on Firefox technology the browser market would be better balanced and Ff would be a little safer away from the clutches of the Goo co.
As I said, imperfect, but better.
I am reminded of this classic cartoon by Riana Duncan...
This decision concerns me about what will happen with Mozilla now. I'm glad Google are getting a hammering however Mozilla get a lot of their income from being paid to have Google as their default search engine.
Unfortunately this could ultimately prove to be yet another blow for the major non-Chromium browser left on the market, which in it's own way would be anti-competitive.
It's about Google as far as I'm aware, and that includes them paying Apple to set the default search engine on Mac desktops and laptops as well as on iPhone and iPad, Mozilla for their Firefox browser, probably other browsers as well like Brave or Safari or whatever (clearly not Edge tho), etc etc.
There's no reason to limit it to just phones since Google spends their cash in all sorts of places to get defaults.
I don't know how you will resolve this other than like the EU have brought in a browser choice screen on new devices, having a search engine choice come up the first time you open the browser.
But then that would have to be enforced across all browsers on all devices to make it fair. Something im sure Microsoft wouldn't be happy with if they were forced to offer Google search as an option when people first open Edge on a new Windows PC.
Three reasons:
1. Because you're just wrong. Using Bing, the first result for "change search engine on Amazon Fire tablet" tells you how to do exactly that.
2. You can also install other browsers on that tablet. So even if you couldn't change the search engine, and you can, you could install a different browser and set it there.
3. Because Bing is not a near monopoly in search and Amazon is not a near monopoly in tablets. Not that many people buy Fire tablets. This ruling didn't say that paying to have your search engine used was illegal for everybody, but that doing it from such a dominant position to crowd out competition was anticompetitive.
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