Re:Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win...
by nend on Monday July 13, 2020 @03:43PM
(#23824792)
There's almost no search engine competition, so whether it's easy to switch is irrelevant because for the average user, there's no option to switch to.
Echo/Siri/Google assistant actually make it harder for people to switch, because the average user is not going to install google assistant on an echo device, which means they have to spend money and learn a new device in order to use a new assistant. So if in your future you're treating assistants as search engines, lock-in becomes worse.
>If Google starts to make decisions that are bad for users
Google has already made plenty of decisions that are bad for users, and they still have 90% market share because there's no meaningful competition.
You're basically envisioning a dystopian future where facts are controlled by a small set of mega corporations.
Think about Amazon's Echo, Apple's Siri, or the Google Assistant. You can ask any of them about weather or Dr. Fauci's age and get basic factual answers. I would expect digital assistants to be able to handle queries of much greater complexity in the future and I would expect google.com to keep up with that. If they make the user experience great, users will keep using Google and if that's where the users are, then that's where publishers will want to be as well.
The barrier to switching search engines is ridiculously low. If Google starts to make decisions that are bad for users (and I would consider forcing users to click through to a weather site a bad idea) then they will switch to a better search engine.