Re:European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing domin...
by makomk on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @10:08AM
(#14645478)
I personally reckon that making Google Search a significantly worse product is part of the reason why this happened. One of the companies pushing for this is Ciao, a comparison shopping service owned by Microsoft and used to provide the equivalent feature for Bing search results. Microsoft clearly know how useful these kinds of contextual results are, because before Google had them they were promoting them as Bing's big advantage over Google. Now they've managed to get the EU to restrict Google's ability to compete by offering them.
Re:European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing domin...
by Kurtz79 on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @11:22AM
(#14646197)
I think the line is drawn pretty clearly.
The point is not that their service was in prominent position, but it was done so that it appeared as natural result of the search.
It's somewhat like doing a search in a search engine and being shown paid results on top, without any indication that they are paid.
Re:European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing domin...
by Tritrin on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @05:16PM
(#14649528)
>The kind of results that as a user I want to see. Will that be disallowed to? If so, this will make Google Search a significantly worse product.
From the article the issue is not that Google services appear in the search results, rather it is that they artificially make their own results appear first without regards to normal search algorithms.
"Google has abused this market dominance by giving its own comparison shopping service an illegal advantage. It gave prominent placement in its search results only to its own comparison shopping service, whilst demoting rival services."
Re:European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing domin...
by yellow_postit on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @10:59AM
(#14645961)
The line was drawn at search results from the article. I get the slippery slope argument buy don't think it's pertinent here.
A "Shopping" link next to "Maps" and "Images" is probably OK, but it's also completely useless. I'd be surprised if more than a fraction of people doing comparison shopping actually clicked that link.
Intentionally pushing down results of competitors via algorithmic criteria is obviously bad, but say they stopped doing that. What about the inline shopping box at the top of search results? That's still putting their own service in a prominent position. Probably bad...
... but then this concern immediately applies to translations, song lyrics, unit conversions, maps, shopping hours, etc. The kind of results that as a user I want to see. Will that be disallowed to? If so, this will make Google Search a significantly worse product.