I think your comment should have a disclaimer that you work for Google. But, to address what you said, the point being made is that if someone say made a clone of Google, that had better search results than Google, that Google would penalize the website, as Google penalizes websites that resemble itself. This seems inherently anti-competitive, no? Consumers would be overjoyed to find that a new website existed out there that gave better results than Google for anything they might be looking for, yet they would never find out about the existence of such a website, as Google would suppress it in its results. This may be purely innocent intention—based in an understanding that users want results immediately instead of entering another engine or aggregator, but it's not completely apparent that is indeed the case.

I was completely neutral (or as neutral as one can be, foremost concerned with ascertaining truth) at the end of the last sentence, so I decided to investigate a little myself. The results seem to me like Google isn't doing anything obviously of egregiously wrong from a first pass, though obviously I don't have the benefit of the 1.7b queries the EU had in their investigation.

I searched, "price comparison website" and was presented first with this link: https://www.shopify.com/blog/7068398-10-best-comparison-shop...

I then searched for the name of each of the companies I didn't recognize. As I actually searched for Pronto first, I thought this verified Foundem's claims, but I think that Pronto didn't come up as it's a Brazilian site, as then when I searched for all the other sites they came up as the first result, except Become, which was on the first page but further down (presumably because it's such a common word).

Nextag (dead) [1]

PriceGrabber (first link on SERP)

Shopzilla (first link on SERP)

Become (bottom of first page)

Pronto (not on the first ten pages)

Bizrate (first result on SERP)

So, you can clearly find these websites if you're looking for them. For Google to not directly link aggregate pages instead of direct results could very well be in the best interest of users... but the point at the end of the article stands that the sterility created in the overall tech ecosystem by such dominance may be harming consumers overall in the long term. It's unclear to what degree that's the case, though, if it is ultimately true.

[1] WSJ piece from Nextag CEO 2012 https://outline.com/n8rW7a They shutdown last year.

Even if the issue were valid, the analogy itself is absurd. He could have said that Google Search surfaces links from Maps, YouTube, Groups, etc and doesn't penalize them using identical criteria (I don't know if it does or not). But saying Search doesn't penalize Google Search leads to infinite regress, or contradiction: If SERP generates a Link to a Next 10 results page, it must then derank the next page and filter it, but then since it wouldn't generate an internal link, it should rank in the results and be granted pagination. It's like Godelian Incompleteness Statement for Search.

More then that, the entire argument relies on a technicality: Links as UI buttons. Pagination uses links for UI interaction, but after Web 2.0 arrived, it doesn't have to. Infinite scrollers, pure JS pagination + XHR that doesn't generate links could be used.

(yes, I am a Googler, I am most definitely not trying to hide it, it's in my HN profile, I just got tired of constantly typing it, but if you search back far enough before 2010 when I joined, you'll find my opinion on these matters has not changed. I'm a copyright minimalist, I favor decentralized, mostly unregulated web, where everyone can scrape everything, remix, reuse, and repurpose data for permissionless innovation, and I do not favor the government getting involved so it can artificially create categories like 'vertical search' or decide what search algorithms should do)

I'd say in general that there is no need to list your employer in your comments or to have it in you profile, but if a comment branch specifically is about that employer then there should be a disclosure in your highest comment on that branch.

> yes, I am a Googler, I am most definitely not trying to hide it, it's in my HN profile, I just got tired of constantly typing it

While I don't personally care too much, I suppose it could be problematic if you remove this information from your profile at a later date, and from that point on people reading your comments wouldn't (easily) be able to know that you work at Google.

Google is a big company, and most of us working for them are mainly in it for the paycheck.

Knowing that I work for Google doesn't, by itself, tell you very much about my opinions. It indicates I'm not strongly anti-Google, I guess.

> It indicates I'm not strongly anti-Google, I guess.

Or maybe you’re so strongly anti-Google that you realize the only way to take them down is from the inside.

And now you know too much.

Out of curiosity, how do you square your belief in a decentralized web with working for a company that has plagued us with "innovations" like amp?

> But, to address what you said, the point being made is that if someone say made a clone of Google, that had better search results than Google, that Google would penalize the website, as Google penalizes websites that resemble itself. This seems inherently anti-competitive, no?

> So, you can clearly find these websites if you're looking for them. For Google to not directly link aggregate pages instead of direct results could very well be in the best interest of users... but the point at the end of the article stands that the sterility created in the overall tech ecosystem by such dominance may be harming consumers overall in the long term.

I remember when google searches would often return results that are searches in other websites, and hated this. It was so annoying. It hasn't happened in a long time, I hadn't noticed until thinking about this in hindsight. I guess this is why?

Regardless of the validity of the point, it was an obvious direct improvement in the quality of google. It was blindingly obvious that every example I saw of this (including the one at the center of the EU case) were bullshit SEO games, not actual google competitors that deserved to appear in search results.

It shouldn't be held against any company to improve their product. It is in direct opposition of what my understanding is the basis of US antitrust law (that there is some consumer harm being done).

The pages for the search results are dynamic, based on external data.

Is the idea here that, for each point in time, a static concrete, crawlable permalink is generated, with a version of the page at that point in time for a particular query?

Seems like it’d be this huge spool of link rot. The common standard for dynamic content is to flag a URI path in robots.txt as non-static content, based on live data. This is near-universal behavior for anything generated on the fly, without the intent of external linking.

Since search results are sometimes related to availability of external content, like whether the server providing the content at the search result is down or not, the quality of snapshots for concrete results would become a curiousity over time.

It would be interesting to see such an experiment, but the resources needed to host such a curiosity, catering to spell check searches, spammy requests, bot requests and so on would be suicidally prohibitive.

I think you’d need a dyson sphere to power a server attempting to host a combinatorial explosion like that. All anyone needs to do is start querying the digits of pi, to produce a spacefilling spider trap.

> But, to address what you said, the point being made is that if someone say made a clone of Google, that had better search results than Google, that Google would penalize the website, as Google penalizes websites that resemble itself. This seems inherently anti-competitive, no?

If you search for a particular model of digital camera, you're looking for the product page for that camera or reviews of it etc., not a list of search results pages in a hundred other search engines that each contain largely the same results. Especially if they were all to do the same thing so that the only response to any search query is links to that query in dozens of other search engines that all only produce links to the same query in all the other search engines.

The thing that should produce results for other search engines or reviews/lists of them isn't a search for a product, it's a search for "search engine" or "product search engine" etc. -- but that is what you get when you do a Google search for that.

A search should never link to another search engine's SERP, because if you actually wanted that the obvious way to do it is to search Google for other search engines and then type your query into the other search engine.

Searching for "<thing> search engine" produces results for "<thing> search engine" and searching for "<thing>" produces results for "<thing>". Because if searching for "<thing>" produced results for "<thing> search engine" then how do you just search for "<thing>"? And if the user wants the "<thing> search engine" results, why can't they just search for "<thing> search engine"?