European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing dominance

Re:European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing domin... by lkbm on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @10:29AM (#14645677)

Crawling the web is easy now. Your point makes sense if the behavioral data they acquire from users makes a huge difference. Maybe it does, but I feel like someone can build a better mousetrap and be better than Google, even without behavioral data. Google, right now, is thought to have the best mousetrap, not simply one well-tuned to a large mouse behavior dataset.

Maybe I'm wrong about that--I'm sure ML has become increasingly important in how Google ranks results, but I'm unconvinced that it's a severely anti-competitive factor.

(That said, I do still use Google over DDG largely because of the personalization and the integration with their other services.)

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Re:European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing domin... by frgtpsswrdlame on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @10:48AM (#14645867)

> I feel like someone can build a better mousetrap and be better than Google

Where are the someones then? Look through Show HN and you'll see all sorts of cool projects and upstart companies. How many of them are search? We've got a huge flood of companies trying to take down the taxi industry, where's the flood to take out Google? It doesn't exist because everyone knows they can't win.

Here's the Show HN for search: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=show%20search&sort=byPopularit...

Do you see any of these dethroning google? Almost none even bother to compete in general search, just in small specific areas.

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Re:European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing domin... by baq on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @10:49AM (#14645883)

crawling the web is only easy if all you ever do is following hrefs... we're in the world of single-page turing-complete web apps and you're underestimating the amount of pure compute, ingress and egress bandwidth necessary to keep the index up to date. there's a reason google has designed and built their data centers, their server chassis and even power supply.

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Re:European Commission fines Google €2.42B for abusing domin... by kinkrtyavimoodh on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @02:17PM (#14647814)

Mere difficulty of a problem does not make those who do solve it a natural monopoly. Of course these player may still be a practical (in effect) monopoly due to their being way better than the competition.

Making a kickass image editing application like Adobe Photoshop is difficult too (as anyone who has had to suffer GIMP would attest), but that doesn't mean Photoshop forms a natural monopoly.

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