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Microsoft Behind Google Complaints To EC
justice4all writes to share that some of the recent complaints to the European Commission about Google have apparently been coming from Microsoft. "A lawyer for Microsoft confirmed that the software giant told the US Department of Justice and the European Commission how Google’s business practices may be harming publishers, advertisers and competition in search and online advertising. [...] 'Google’s algorithms learn less common search terms better than others because many more people are conducting searches on these terms on Google. These and other network effects make it hard for competing search engines to catch up. Microsoft’s well-received Bing search engine is addressing this challenge by offering innovations in areas that are less dependent on volume. But Bing needs to gain volume too, in order to increase the relevance of search results for less common search terms.'"
From the article:
in meeting with government agencies to discuss its recently approved search deal with Yahoo, Microsoft officials explained how Google has tilted the mechanics of the search advertising business in its favor. “As you might expect, the competition officials asked us a lot of questions about competition with Google—since that is the focus of the partnership,”
The title and summary seems to give the assumption that MS went and complained to DoJ and EC, but it really seems to be different case. They were discussing about the deal with Yahoo and why it doesn't hurt the market or Google. It really makes sense too - Google gets many magnitudes more search query data than their rivals. Long-tail keyword phrases are invaluable data and give a huge advantage for Google to taylor their search results.
maybe if bing didn`t suck...if microsoft was trustworthy....
antitrust concerns about search are not real because some of the complaints come from one of its last remaining search competitors.
Time to get the popcorn ...
"antitrust concerns are not real" and "last remaining competitors" in the same sentence, whoa.
What competition there really is besides Google? Bing, Baidu and yandex.ru. All the other ones are basically using services from either Google or Bing. Giving Google the monopoly now would be the worst thing to do.
Other OSs have a similar problem as Windows is such a huge market that many commercial app developers will restrict their products to only windows releases. And users choose (well.. in some cases atleast) the OS with the most apps, and on and on it goes.
Seems to be the same problem in search. Google has millions of data points of search terms co-related with the link that was clicked and all that data has trained their algorithm such that any competing algorithm would find it very hard to catch up.
Well, that's the same as saying that Lady GaGa is more successful than your local garage band (because she gets played on (inter)national radio and more people are exposed since she is popular)... Is that in itself a problem? Nope. It only becomes a problem if Google is using unfair business practices to maintain that level of success...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
I'm sure no one else sees irony here.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. --Aldous Huxley
"Google’s algorithms learn less common search terms better than others because many more people are conducting searches on these terms on Google. These and other network effects make it hard for competing search engines to catch up." So let me get this straight... When you make a product (in this case a search engine), you should not aim to make it the best product possible because it will be harder for other companies to catch up and steal your revenue/profit? Seriously? To me, it sounds like MS is saying, "No one uses our search engine because Google provides better search results and that is wrong."
Using your market share to make your product better?
It's not the same as what Microsoft has been doing, ie. using their market share on some products to force their other products onto their customers.
Giving Google the monopoly now would be the worst thing to do.
Google's results were not so much superior amounts of hardware, but better algorithms. They simply did it better.
Aside from the huge amount of servers, data centers and proprietary back-end Google has, algorithms are just one thing.
Google datamines everywhere on the Internet. They gather as much as detailed data as they can on their search engine. They datamine what links people click on the results (via background javascript http request). This gives huge advantage for Google with less common search queries, as they see what results people think are relevant to their search. Their competitors don't get even closely the same amount of data. Google is leveraging their marketshare to gain even more of it for their search, docs, youtube and other services, just like Microsoft used to leverage Windows marketshare to gain marketshare for IE.
Google also pays to be the default search engine. That's where Mozilla gets the bulk of their revenue.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I don't like the fact that Google is the overwhelmingly dominant search engine. The problem is I dislike Microsoft's dominance even more. From everything I have seen the only competitor for Google that meets my satisfaction criteria for a search engine is Bing. I am not about to move from Google to Microsoft. I am concerned that as Google's dominance grows the temptation to do bad things will grow until it becomes irresistable. However, while I have seen hints about Google abusing its dominant position, Microsoft has blatantly abused their dominant position in other areas. I am not about to contribute to the possibility of a Microsoft product becoming dominant.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Exactly. Google earned their spot through superior product when Yahoo, Microsoft and others bloated their pages with ads and crap no one cares about.
Now they get to reap the benefits. If they are found for anti-trust, all that does it set the precedent of "sure, you can do well in business. But if you do too well and upset the powers that be, we'll smack you around, so don't get any ideas."
So Google with their Over 70% market share is anti-competitive, said a representative at a company with >90% market share in desktops.
Not to mention, one has taken steps to suppress competitors, the other has not.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Is that why every time I search for something obscure I always get a NexTag search for the same term at the top the results, followed by pages of absolute gibberish? IMHO, the only thing that made searching easier was Wikipedia, because most of the rest of the searches I do Google isn't much better than anyone else, and I don't find that the overall search experience to be much improved over the last decade. I wish Google would stop making office software, mail programs, phones, toothbrushes, and whatever else and pour their resources into something that actually saves me time.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
And have no loyalty to Google.
But they do provide the best results, and until they don't, i'll keep using them.
Deleted
No, it's quite different actually. You have a choice to use Google. There are competitors for every single one of their apps, and you are free to pick and chose which ones you want to use and which not to (you don't have to use any). So they are not "capitalizing" on their dominance in one area to push another unrelated one on you. They are capitalizing on their dominance in one area to advertise the other products. When MS pushed IE, you had little choice (since there was --for all practical purposes-- no valid competitor to the OS) about using IE. They forced it down your throats (Considering you can't uninstall it)... And that's what was considered by many to be wrong. Google simply links to their other services... The analogy to IE, would be if MS included a shortcut to "Install IE" on every version of Windows they sold. Then, it would require a users action (and explicit opt-in) rather than being forced...
And the huge amount of servers and data centers is an expansion problem, not a start up problem. You could launch a search engine on a single machine (IIRC, when google first went live, it was off a single box)... This kind of relation doesn't hold for nearly any other business (To build a car, you need a factory... Even if that factory is in a garage, there's still a significant capital investment before you're able to produce vehicles)...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
Google: BAD
Microsoft: WORSE
I wonder how their heads didn't explode writing it. Roughly, Google's searches are better because more people use it. We've got algorithms that don't depend on how many people are looking for data. But we need more people using Bing so we can give better search results.
Does MS have such a strong Reality Distortion Field that they can say ANY random, contradictory stuff and people will take them seriously?
If opportunity came disguised as temptation, one knock would be enough.
3^2 * 67^1 * 977^1
So you are saying that the emergence of Google to the top spot was a combination of the right product at the right time, using the correct levers to get people hooked?
Remind you of any other companies? Like... all of the big ones, especially Microsoft?
Fact remains that to dominate the search market you would need vast sums of cash, but it was Google that created a search market so centrally valuable and profitable because they took advantage of market trends with a superior product and monetized it through effective advertising.
Bing is not a superior product attempting to create a new market or centralize an existing market. It is an average product attempting to eat into the market share of an existing product. To do that they need a better product that people notice to be better, but they simply don't have that product. A good example is how people switched to FireFox from IE because it works a lot better... people want good stuff for free. Google gives people what they want, where Bing gives people what they already have somewhere else with no incentive to change.
Earning a monopoly through a good product doesn't make it any less of a monopoly. The problem with a monopoly is that it means a lack of competition, and capitalism requires competition.
If Google holds a monopoly position that creates a barrier to entry for competitors— including those who might do it better than Google, then, according to capitalist economics, there no longer exists a reason to keep their product good, or continue to introduce more good products.
Monopolies are bad. Period. I don't care how they came about.
Its one thing to blatantly abuse a monopoly like Microsoft has been documented doing time and time again. Having a monopoly because you have a good popular product have never been illegal.
That said im not so sure Google even fit into the monopoly description. A monopoly have barriers making it hard to switch to a competitor.
Only reason i have not using Bing is that i wouldnt trust Microsoft with filtering my information. When dead people write letters i stay the hell away.
HTTP/1.1 400
Therefore the cost of hardware is not a barrier. Neither is the cost of advertising. Neither is the data itself (since the firms already in place still need to mine it). So the only barrier to entry is the willingness of someone to do it. Is it easy? No way, but there are few (if any) barriers to entry...
The reason Google is in top spot today, is that in the past decade it was the best (or at worst #2) search engine around. If you can figure out a way to return better search results, you could absolutely overthrow them. The issue you're alluding to is that the if in that sentence is a lot harder to achieve today than it was in 1998. But should Google be blamed for finding a better way? I thought that was the spirit of a free market...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
If you can't beat em.... sue OR complain real loudly about how unfair a better product is.
That's a terrible analogy because the reason GaGa is played on all over the radio is precisely because of the corrupt oligopoly in the market of radio stations.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
It's interesting how far people go to defend Google, just an another company, on slashdot. Their PR sure has worked good on geeks.
Boo-fuckin'-hoo.
Their complaint boils down to "It's not fair that Google is successful."
Again, boo-fuckin'-hoo. Make something useful and maybe people will use it.
Lets put that quote to another context.
Boo-fuckin'-hoo.
Linux users complains boils down to "It's not fair that Windows is successful."
Again, boo-fuckin'-hoo. Make something useful and maybe people will use it.
See how the image changes right away when you just switch places with something that /. users envy?
when i read this, all i hear is the tautology king saying:
google is better because they're better.
therefore, we need laws against them.
Last time I checked, Google was promoting open standards. Chrome scores rather nicely on the Acid3 test as an example. Chrome on Linux: 100. Even on Windows Chrome scores 93. IE on Windows: 12.
That's the biggest difference between the two to me.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
Yes someone needs to mod you up.
Why, is Google looked upon as being so good? There is nothing nice about Google, they are just like any large company attempting to keep their dominance.
Lets see, Google is giving people access to use their "Free" DNS service, I ask why? there is not charitable reason for this. It's simple you get enough market control over peoples DNS and you can start calling your own shots, Microsoft even tried this one on once upon a time.
Google, is notorious for sneaking in IP grabs on peoples data when using their Cloud services, granted they get caught out then play the "oh how did that get in the fine print? must be some sort of mistake" but the fact remains they still try it on.
Google grabs your personal data and sells it to advertising companies? Not evil?
If you use, Google desktop, Google toolbar, Google web history, or Google analytics (or a combination of any of these apps) and blamo you cant move on the web without Google knowing exactly every move you make. Yet, us geeks will weed out every other privacy concern on the internet and point the finger to the culprit and call them evil but Google? again seems to get another free ride.
Don't take all these bad points I raise and flag me a Google hate, no no no. Personally i think having the EC on your ass over the fact your to successful, I would consider as a badge of honor in the IT market. Microsoft was there, now its Google's turn.
If its Google's turn to be more accountable for their actions so much the better, it might help tone down their "evilness" and put them in a more pleasant light in my own POV.
Personally, I preferred the Google we had 5 years ago, the Google we have now is a very different creature indeed.