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I'm not sure if you're being deliberately contrarian or if you're legitimately dense.

Saying they "paid for lower QOS for Google" is misleading; they would actually have paid for higher QOS for themselves, which is perfectly reasonable.

It wouldn't have been of any benefit to Yahoo to increase their QOS with Google's remaining unchanged. I'm saying that they could have partnered with companies that owned large portions of the network to slow down Google's access. If Google couldn't crawl it, it couldn't index it. If they couldn't index it, their search results wouldn't have been as good.

Google won because they were better, and they were better because they won?

Pretty much, yeah.

That's rather circular reasoning.

Perhaps but it's not wrong.

In actual fact, Google's search engine business would never have been a viable business on its own; it simply didn't make enough revenue. Google's search engine only survived because it was cross-subsidized by Google's advertising revenue.

It's extraordinarily difficult to make a profit on a "Free" service without advertising.

Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't support the argument that it was "better".

No, more people choosing Google over Yahoo, Bing and AOL means that it is/was better.

Net neutrality, in the end, is an arrangement where companies like Google can push ads on you and monetize free content and have you pay for the privilege through your ISP fees.

Except that with Net Neutrality in place, you are free to choose one of their competitors without the network penalizing you.

A few big companies have come to completely dominate the market because of that particular arrangement.

In a market where all are given the same access, a few companies dominating it are just proof that the market chose them.

Even if the completely unrealistic worst-case scenario of ISPs all replacing Google and Facebook with their own private offerings

That's a strawman. I never argues that.

They wouldn't be able to directly replace them, they would be able to give preferential treatment to the traffic of their own competitor. They can't replace them but they can make them near unusable to their customers.

LK

To claim that it is not google specific is at best naive. In the US there are really only 2 players, Google and Microsoft.

There are tons of breakdowns of search size, I kinda picked this one at random. http://www.seoconsultants.com/search-engines/

Aha! Then by your own citation, it isn't 28% Google specific! It's only ~71-72% Google specific.

Microsoft is used to swamping the little guy. Historically since the dawn of personal computing, Microsoft's standard operating proceedure is find a new product they don't sell that someone else does, copy it shamelessly, creating a vastly inferior product in the same space, and flood the market with their inferior product, usually at a loss, in order to drown the little guy out of business, creating their own near monopoly when they can then recoup their investment and make profit. Trouble is... Google is not some tiny startup without the capital needed to defend against Microsoft's anti-competitve pactices. Google likely saw it coming the day Bing was announced.

To claim that it is not google specific is at best naive. In the US there are really only 2 players, Google and Microsoft.

There are tons of breakdowns of search size, I kinda picked this one at random.
http://www.seoconsultants.com/search-engines/

Google also provides the means for any web author to have results displayed, but to keep their work from being cache-fetchable.

If the Belgian newspapers had designed their site correctly by including the meta tags from the very beginning; there would have been no lawsuit. Since they didn't; Google is right to make them suffer by de-listing them entirely.

Stupid design is always a capital crime.

There are a few decent shortkuts that use the Windowsw key (although Win-L is my fav). Here is a list.

Windows-E opens up explorer. Links to other useful Windows Key Shortcuts.

No, it's not hard to press CTRL+ESC to open the start menu. Also, that key gets in the way sometimes when I'm playing games; I accidentally press it, minimize the game and curse at the 'convenience' of the Windows key.
Still, some of the Windows key + other keys (like WK+E to open an explorer window) are nice. Here are some more. How to disable.

Well, heck! If your keyboard has all those keys on it, why not use 'em for something?

For all you other card-carrying keyboard shortcut phanatics out there, here are some more things to do with that logo key. Microsoft actually has an entire KB article on, well, KB shortcuts. Also, here is a list for Mozilla users.

Er, what do you mean the Window key is useless? There are several shortcuts associated with it (a Short List), and its useful to map to other apps as well. For example, Win+Z|X|C|V|B is set up on my MS Windows machine to control winamp, regardless of whatever app is focused at the time.

Its possible to use the windows key in a similiar fashion under XFree86, hotkeying combos to certain actions.