>Google has maintained this monopoly, the government alleges, not by making a better product, but by locking down everywhere that consumers might be able to find a different search engine option, and making sure they only see Google.
Google improves search every year. Internally they have data to back this up. Google doesn't lock down everywhere consumers can learn about a new browser. The most notable being the default search engine on Windows is Bing. I have also seen ads for other search engines and discussion about search engines on social media.It isn't like you say the word Bing on the internet and you get contacted by Google's lawyers with a C&D.
>To understand why this case makes sense, look no further than the experience of Neeva, a search engine whose quality was as high or higher than that of Google, but died a few months ago because it just couldn’t get access to customers.
Better technology does not necessarily mean that you will have the better business. There are other reasons that you can fail. The link about Neeva having better quality actually states the opposite: "Neeva ended up building a search engine they were proud of, a search engine that came close to beating Google both by Neeva’s internal metrics and in user studies."
I don’t believe this based on my own search experience getting worse year over year. I believe they know how to improve it, but they choose to increase revenue instead.
Results seem to be less relevant to me and there are frequently more ad results than organic that display on the page.
I think they are able to do this because of lock in with users and vendors. If there was more competition, there wouldn’t be such bad results.
I think you don't understand how much worse the internet has gotten - there are a large amount of bad actors actively trying to make google worse (junk content, etc) - Even just providing the same level of quality results with decreasing quality source data is an improvement.
If it was easy to extract better results there would be competition with better results.
But I’m fairly certain that having 50-100% of the first page of search results be ads isn’t good for the internet. And it’s made worse by google search recommending chrome and chrome recommending google search.
And yet for me DuckDuckGo provides better results, consistently, for last few years. If “internet has gotten much worse” is true (I agree in many aspects it did) then DDG must be improving search at faster pace than Google.
there is some vp of the search in goodle, and he has bunch of metrics on his screen, some go down and some go up, and he obviously will chose those metrics which looks favorable to report to upper level, and then promote people who did "great" job of achieving those metrics, and fund and expand their projects.
Blows my mind that Google is penalized so often, while the clear monopoly is Apple. Heck Apple goes out of its way to break compatibility with Google through restrictions on RCS (iMessage), Pixel buds (or any other OEM), charging cable, no headphone jack and so on.
I can't take your RCS argument seriously. You do realize it's just a scheme from the carriers to bill you for every message again like they did with SMS? Good riddance. I don't need that on my iPhone, thank Jobs.
And for the headphone jacks, I'd rather take a water resistant phone without this legacy connector. Do you also want serial ports back?
> Better technology does not necessarily mean that you will have the better business.
Right, sometimes an existing company can spend you out of business even if your product is superior, even if consumers prefer your product, and even if your business is more efficient. That's what happens when there's a monopolist in your market: innovation is futile, consumers lose, the monopolist wins. The end.
Is there any research that actually confirms it? I mean it is the prevailing sentiment on HN, and my own gut feeling - but it might all be just a confirmation bias and/or good old nostalgia (somehow everything was better in the past).
Google improves search every year. Internally they have data to back this up. Google doesn't lock down everywhere consumers can learn about a new browser. The most notable being the default search engine on Windows is Bing. I have also seen ads for other search engines and discussion about search engines on social media.It isn't like you say the word Bing on the internet and you get contacted by Google's lawyers with a C&D.
>To understand why this case makes sense, look no further than the experience of Neeva, a search engine whose quality was as high or higher than that of Google, but died a few months ago because it just couldn’t get access to customers.
Better technology does not necessarily mean that you will have the better business. There are other reasons that you can fail. The link about Neeva having better quality actually states the opposite: "Neeva ended up building a search engine they were proud of, a search engine that came close to beating Google both by Neeva’s internal metrics and in user studies."