Posts by Mod74

Everybody without Android Oreo vulnerable to overlay attack

Re: Sick of new

Google owned Motorola. Kept the patents, ditched the company off to Lenovo, and did nothing about fixing the OEM end, so I'm not sure why you think buying HTC would be any different.

Mozilla-Microsoft spat latest: Firefox yanks Cortana away from Bing

Re: Self Preservation?

Mozilla were majority funded by Google to pull users away from IE. Once Chrome had established itself and was on the way to becoming more popular than either IE or Firefox they cut Mozilla adrift.

Today the Firefox search default is Yahoo, so yes, Mozilla getting huffy about "respecting search choices" is in reality them protecting Yahoo's and their own financial interests. Even though ironically Yahoo search is merely a front end for Bing.

Google versus the EU: Sigh. You can't exploit a contestable monopoly

Re: Umm, what?

My first sentence isn't bollocks. Type a product into the Google search box and then click Shopping. You know, the one in between Images and News. Notice the lack Amazon results?

The shopping comparison engine is the one mentioned in the article, and the one the EU is looking at, not the search engine.

I don't take issue with the fact that Google charge for listings and Amazon choose not to pay them (cheaper prices for me), but the fact that the comparison engine is promoted to the top of the normal Google search page -and excludes anyone who doesn't pay to be there- I do think is a problem.

You're right. I have in fact chosen a very poor example here, At first glance I thought Google were promoting Google Drive, not the separate Cloud Storage. In fact Google Drive is on page 3. I could probably find other better examples, but hands up, my mistake here.

Google product search works well does it? I'm not sure how a comparison site that excludes one of the largest (and often cheapest) shopping retailers can be described as working well. Go do a product search, notice how there's no Amazon results? Amazon won't pay to be listed in Google's comparison (yes, they charge for listings) so you as a consumer are prevented from seeing what could be the cheapest option. The last thing I bought online was less than half the price on Amazon compared to the cheapest Google can offer.

Google use their search dominance to make 98% of their money through ads, which they're perfectly within their rights to do. For a lot of people artificially promoting less consumer friendly services (like shopping) is a step to far which I believe it's right that the EU investigate.

Do a search for Cloud Storage. Google is the number one result. Dropbox is on page 2, OneDive is on page 4. We can argue pros and cons but it's clear that the other two (and others) can offer better value or functionality depending on use cases. Yet they're thoroughly demoted in the search results.