At the moment yes you are right, but if we want it to stay that way we need to do something about it now. I agree that people mainly use Google because it's the default, but if we aren't careful there won't be an alternative left that can stand up against them. The only hope we'll have then is that Facebook, Apple, Amazon or Microsoft decide to tackle Google head on, but in most cases where that has happened in the past Google has won.

I'd already say that in terms of publishing online that Google is the only search engine publishers/marketers care about.

With search, we already approaching that point.

No other search engine comes close to the quality of Google, at least for certain topics.

Outside of Russia, China, Japan and some other countries Google is the dominant search with a big lead.

And that is troubling indeed! Competition is good. And necessary for a healthy market.

It also means that Google has a huge amount of control over what information can be discovered.

What if MS decides Bing isn't worth their while anymore in 5 years? Yahoo will have dwindled away by then, leaving only Google. In Europe, Google has +90% everywhere (except Russia).

And that's the point: quality. Altavista was a good search engine at it's time and now it's just memories. Because a "better" search engine appeared, giving results that were more useful.

If we continue down that road as you worry, at some point regulatory action might be appropriate. Google already seems to be breaking itself up via Alphabet, maybe they should just be cleaved entirely to avoid collusion and encourage competitors. On the other hand, the gov't avoided breaking up Microsoft back in the day, and this seems to have worked out OK as competitors sprung up into the gap the gov't wedged open anyway.

Bing is still using Google as its backend.

www.yandex.com is a really good alternative, I found it even offers better search results for most topic I look at.

Bing doesn't use Google as its back end ... I don't believe it ever did.

Yahoo did switch to using Bing as its back end, some years ago.

Not that I agree with your parent comment that bing still uses google results on the backend, they did at least used to: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses...

Between Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, who do you want to be the overlords of the web? Each one of them is trying to win total dominance and eventually one will. Google seem like they would be the least evil of the five.

The things is, this is exactly whagt their marketing department has been pushing us to believe since their inception.

The motto, the glibly pedantic color schema, the focus on simplicity on their home site, and cleanly (yet viciously) integrated ad revenue, even the language of the letter in the original link, all of these things point to a naivete that ignores how corrupt the ethos of what Google's central argument is: meritocracy above all else, in other words: down with the dumb, down with the lesser, all hail the perfectly manufactured data stream that contains what seems like childlike wonder, but is instead an amalgam of people's minds. They are sucking the intelligence out of us and selling it back at a markup so high it begs disbelief.

The fact that there is Bing is good, adn Bing's search isn't all that far below Google's in terms of getting good data from the web, but the point is: aren't we forgetting that there was a loooong time when we derived a lot of good data without their services? I find the aggressiveness of Google's ignorance to be quite frightening. I find that they are so far removed from the effects of their casual relationship with owning what happens to the data they are "curating" that it seems anathema to good governance, and governance it is because we are subject to the whims of their algorithm's ability to provide us with data that goes beyond what the mind can handle and handle sanely.

There is a monumental schism between what the web is comprised of and the first page of Google's query results, and that is what I think is at issue. What about all of the rest of the data that we never see? How do we know it's not interesting? How could we ever spend the time to sift through it to make certain we aren't missing data that is far easier to comprehend?

Long post, but a quick example: I program a fair amount. I like C++ for various reasons, but the C++ reference page is dry as the Red Sea after Moses played the downbeat of the 40 year cadence the slaves danced to after raising one too many pyramids.

I would wager that there might be a great C++ reference page out there somewhere that has easy on the eyes detail, a fairly conversational tone and nice examples that aren't at the very end of the page. But, because Google's algorithm (and Bing's, Yahoo's, Duck Duck Go, etc) all get tons of traffic from the cppreference.com page, it or some Stack response is the go to answer for essentially every question for which I need an answer. How is that well crafted page ever going to get the right recognition if everyone is being diverted to the cppreference page? It's like the old trope, we do it that way because that's the way we've always done it. Sometimes this means we drive the speed limit because that's the safest way to drive according the engineers who calculated the road conditions when they were built, but it's a little different in this instance because it's the _quality_ of the road that matters, not merely the velocity we drive that dictates the "goodness" of the experience.

Google (and the other big bots out there) are ignoring the quality in their algorithm(s) and merely settling for popularity as the guiding rubric, and I think we are all too aware of how that mentality can lead to unsalient choices.

They've already made it hard enough to make sure legit email ends up in the inbox of a gmail-recipient, rather than being silently flagged as spam -- that anyone hosting their own mail needs to consider if they need to special-case delivery for gmail recipients (I've considered routing gmail-destinations through authenticated smtp to gmail via a gmail-account - then realized that that was just silly and I feel better when gmail doesn't work -- but I don't depend on delivering my (private) email for revenue). Add to that the fact that google is one of few big email providers that are hard to grey-list (or rather automatically white-list once delivery has started) -- and they've already made a great effort of siloing off one of their arguably most open services.

If you think the megacorp that doesn't do customer support is going to be any easier to dislodge at other levels in the stack, once they manage to squeeze themselves in by undercutting the market, I'm afraid you're hopelessly naive.

Once they start to feel confident in their domination, there's nothing preventing them from going the Microsoft way, i.e.:

1. Introducing incompatibilities, forcing closed standards etc. which block any potential competition.

2. Stop spending as much on product development.

I want to Android as an example to prove otherwise.

While yes, you can install CyanogenMod (without Google Play Services), or others along those lines that remove the "Google" out of Android, it's true value (for most common users) is Google Play Services.

While you can say that you can get apps from apkmirror or F Droid, most apps still won't work without Play Services (case & point - Snapchat)

my entire point being - yes, it's very easy to have alternatives (and their importance can't be ignored), Google services (be it Play, or Gmail or others) are what people are looking for.

And people can just buy an iPhone instead. Windows phone is still chugging along.

Define chugging along. I was under the impression it was broken down at the side of the road and moment away from being abandoned.

Yes, alternatives inside the Android ecosystem are more technically doable than easily doable.

I was more thinking of other operating systems: we are fare from lacking functioning alternatives both on mobile and on desktop.

> You know the cool thing about this integration ? Any part can be replaced.

How do you replace search ? How do you get competitive against mail, youtube without the amount of data google uses to sell ad on them ?

All I hear is a challenge. I'm not a big data engineer, but I would be interested in seeing others take it as a challenge to develop a unique, effective, and open platform that rivals the Google monopoly.

AT & T and Standard Oil were also "challenges" and they weren't toppled by "unique, effective, and open platforms" :)

Yandex is pretty good, they have search and a better mail than gmail, just try it out, you will be surprised. I was.

There was NO ads! You can actually read your email - and NO ads! That is amazing!

The problem is that Google is also very good in lots of areas. This makes the challenge even more difficult.

There are existing alternatives, today, that are profitable. What makes you think it's not possible to use something else ?

There's a part that already can't be replaced while keeping all the others. Google Fi only works with Nexus devices. It could be a lack of OEM interest, but who knows what Google does that might keep it that way.

Google Fi is an MVNO, one that entered into an area with arguably insufficient competition. Regardless of how you might rate the level of competition before Google Fi entered the market, it has definitely added ambitious customer-oriented features.

Its device-dependence exists because it's a unique dual-provider MVNO (Sprint and T-Mobile). This allows them to broker the best deal for the end consumer. But the bar is high -- devices must support dual-SIM, which is rare. Devices without explicit support aren't barred from Google Fi but may not get the full features and you can't get help with those devices if you run into issues.

It actually is now Sprint, T-Mobile, and US Cellular.

or any device that accepts a nano-sim. I know several people who use a google-fi sim in iphones

Absolutely not.