> Data from market research firm Datanyze suggest that YouTube is four times the size of the next-largest platform<p>I have a hard time believing their figures,<p>Youtube is only 4 times bigger than Vimeo?<p>Well Vimeo is making 100M visit per month [1], Youtube is making 30B [2]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.similarweb.com/website/vimeo.com/#overview" rel="nofollow">https://www.similarweb.com/website/vimeo.com/#overview</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.similarweb.com/website/youtube.com/#overview" rel="nofollow">https://www.similarweb.com/website/youtube.com/#overview</a>
It took less than 20 years for Google to go from "Don't Be Evil" to dominating the market in a similar way that Microsoft did. I think this speaks more to the fundamental problems of market pressure than anything else. Once Google became public they were beholden to shareholders to continue to grow and increase value. It's hard to do that without purchases, acquisitions, and defense of existing territory.<p>I do think Google, and other companies, need to be fundamentally broken up. However, there seems to be some underlying problems in the public market way of life in America that almost forces companies down this path.<p>I also think we need some broad new antitrust laws. Any market with fewer than 4 competitors is not a competitive market. Any market where a single competitor has more than 50% of the share is not a competitive market.
And nobody else comes close to having a competitive search product. I've used DDG and Bing. Perhaps search is the utility lines/distribution and ads are the generation capacity, in a future disintermediation.<p>It's hard to have a nuanced discussion about antitrust in the search market when this case is coming up 2 weeks before the election, and is actually about politically pressuring Google to give the party in power favorable treatment.
I have switched to DDG and about 20-30% of the time I have to switch to google. That said between DDG and firefox it's working! I am getting really vague generic ads sent to me instead of direct targeted ads. Ads in the wrong language, ads for products that have absolutely nothing to do with me. I love it.
I gave DDG many tries (as I really want to abandon literally everything Google), but no, the search results and speed are an order of magnitude inferior to Google's. I always find myself switching back to the evil, because that's the only viable option.
That just goes to show how effective "Googling" is compared to alternative Search tech.<p>It's been said that "to Google" has generically come to mean "to Search", but I think googling has become a synonym not for "searching" but for "actually finding what you are looking for".<p>When someone tells you to Google something, they are not telling you to do open ended research, they are telling you that you will definitely find the referenced information if you enter a specific term into the Google search bar.
I have relatively low expectation for this suit to lead to anything substantial. This line of argument surrounding Google being the default search for devices largely mirrors the situation with Microsoft and Internet Explorer. I envision Google being told to stop paying to be the default browser, but that will likely do less to change Google's dominant role in search than it did for IE. People have proven to be willing to change their search option to use google when it gets defaulted to Bing or Yahoo.<p>More broadly, I find that people's frustrations with large tech platforms aren't really related to monopoly at all. Concern is more about the growing reach and prevalence of tech companies. When I talk to people who are pretty heavily aligned with the "tech-lash" they're rarely talking about market share or leveraging dominance in one market for an advantage in another market. More often they're talking about capricious moderation and enforcement of content policies, and the general increase in the influence of tech companies on the products and media we consume.<p>Anti-trust has limited ability alter the issues that most people have with big tech companies. Serving a broad customer base invariably leads to appealing to the lowest common denominator: no one set of rules will appease everybody, instead you try to develop rules to maximize the set of happy users and minimize the set of unhappy users. The scale of these tech companies necessitate automated rules enforcement, and this inevitably leads to false positives. I find it hard to see why breaking up tech companies would change this. Sure, if a big social media site was broken up into 4 different sites then each one would have a smaller population to manage. But they'd have commensurately less resources to dedicate to that community management, so they'll probably lean on automation just as much.
Submitters: "<i>Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.</i>"<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a><p>Please don't cherry-pick the details from an article that you consider important, as the submitted title did ("Google Captures 95% of mobile search traffic and 92% of desktop traffic"). This is a form of editorializing because it frames that as the story for everybody. Titles are by far the most powerful influence on HN, so this is a big deal. We want the content/author to speak for themselves, not go through a layer of filtering by submitters.<p>If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's great, but do so in the comments. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...</a>
I'm kind of irritated the DOJ discussion is dominated by search. Google is full-on pervasive. They have your phone calls, your texts, your emails, your private conversations in your home, your body movements, your location history, your credit card history, and on and on.<p>So yes addressing their search domination is one toe of the giant, but it's just a start.
Google improves their search results by analyzing user behavior.
Users want relevant search results. A search engine cannot provide them without massive amounts of search queries. Locking them in a 90%+ search monopoly.<p>For competition to even be possible Google must open up it's data.
The chart inside says "Google captures over 92% of world-wide search traffic" - which I assume would include mobile or any other device (speaker etc).<p>If yes, then the headline is misleading.<p>(Mobile only headline is fine - 95%).
One thing Google has not solved is dublicate content. Often you search for something and all results are copies of the same article.<p>There are some low hanging fruits of problems and the market is dying for a competitor.
There is DDG and Bing. Google runs circles around them in terms of quality.<p>Both DDG and Bing are not crappy, they are good but Google is just better. This is a bit like going after Tesla for capturing EV market. One can have dozen other reasons to hate and complain about Google but it is a simple fact that Google search is just too damn good and useful.
I can't read the article because of the paywall, but is this counting China? Since Google isn't used in China I can't see how they are hitting those %s worldwide.