That didn't happen to travel companies. Google added flights, but Booking Holdings (aka Priceline) continued to grow each year to 15B in revenue for 2019. (Huge drop for 2020 obviously.)

If I type "<city> weather" google will show me the weather, but which weather company has shutdown because of that?

Google news is in the search results, but there are a lot of news companies. Those info panels often come from wikipedia, but wikipedia is doing great.

This is something that sounds true, but I'm having trouble thinking of an example where it has actually happened. Examples appreciated.

But did advertising on Google become more expensive for competitors once Google entered the market (e.g. did Google Flights also bid on Google Ads) and were those additional costs passed along to customers?

So while your example shows a competitor survived, it over looks the many start ups that did not, it overlooks the increased advertising costs, it over looks the increased cost to consumers and the chilling effect on potential new startups that might have been able to enter the market.

We do not even need to question any of this because before Google acquired the startup which became Google Flights the acquisition was reviewed and only approved under very strict Chinese firewalls between Google flights and Google search…but those restrictions only sought to restrict Google flight’s complete takeover of the market and ignored how it is being used to increase ad costs to the remaining market competitors.

The same has been seen with Google shopping, where Google essentially acquired a startup, it flopped, then Google positioned itself ahead of organic results and began systematically burying competition in the Google results. The fact you can’t name any of the travel or shopping startups that had thriving businesses that fell once Google entered the market is more telling of how Google has dominated the market rather than evidence Google hasn’t actually put anyone out of business.

Google flights takes you straight to the airlines websites. No intermediaries. How's that increasing costs to consumers?

Do third party booking sites usually offer lower prices than the airlines themselves? I've seen it happen but very rarely.

For the specific flight I searched for, the 3rd parties were listed as having cheaper prices than the airline itself, but upon visiting the sites and going through the optionals etc those prices turned out to be misleading, and eventually it was cheaper to book directly through the airline.

Take Android for example. Did Google kill Blackberry with Android? Or was it other factors like the Blackberry CEO cannibalizing their R&D budget, and stubbornly refusing to give consumers what they wanted?

But that's also my point - Blackberry killed Blackberry, not iOS or Android. Should Blackberry have been protected from it's competition?

Android and iPhone initially ate into the unit sales of feature phones. RIM had pathetic consumer offerings. I replaced a Pearl (8100) with the first iPhone with iOS 1.0. For all the issues that combination had it was a far far better phone than my BlackBerry.

RIM didn't understand the consumer phone market at all, and frankly neither did other smartphone vendors outside Apple and Google. RIM assumed their Enterprise moat (Exchange integration, BES, etc) and a fucking hardware keyboard was enough to halt R&D and just sit on their hands. Meanwhile Apple and Google added Exchange support to their existing (ok but not great) POP/IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV support, good app stores for third party software, and maintained their vastly superior web browsing capabilities. Their software keyboards also improved significantly with just better keypress accuracy and better predictive type.

So Apple and Google killed feature phones and then got the features people wanted/needed for Enterprise sales. They were already good enough for a majority of "business" uses since a lot of SMB users of Palms, WinMo, and BlackBerries used zero "Enterprise" features. They needed e-mail and SMS which feature phones didn't support and iPhone and Android had from the outset.

So Apple and Google crossed RIM's moat and RIM had nothing to offer as competition. Everything about BlackBerries was firmly fixed in 2005. This was 2010/11 and iPhones and Androids were the state of the art. Instead of trying to meaningfully compete RIM doubled down on the 2005 phones.

No one should feel any pity for them. Their management seemed trapped in some sort of "we'll just MBA our way out of this" fantasy land.

That's true in the US, but not in the EU. And not operating in the EU is not really an option for any of the FAANG.

https://www.cartrawler.com/ct/digital-disruption/googles-ste...

I'd agree that providers are ceding too much control to Google for short-term wins, maybe without even realising the power they're handing over to Google.

Google is quietly inserting themselves between the customer and the business in all sorts of industries. They're not fully utilising that power which only makes them a benevolent (for now) dictator.

So all these providers already lost this power years ago and are just providing a fancy UX over Google's backend travel search service. Now Google is merging the two search engines and cutting out the middleman.

As does the insurance industry ever wonder why the UK insurance industry went all in on cuddly mascots - one factor was googles clamp down on black hat techniques simples

I don't know the answer to your (rethorical?) question but what I know is that weather sites and apps were once nice and useful and now are basically a placeholder for advertisement, sometimes even scammy one.

Although it is a joint project between the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, it has forecasts available for the whole world in English, Norwegian, and Danish.

I have noticed recently that the Weather.com app has added huge advertisements at the top and has roughly doubled the number of ads within the page. It honestly feels like desperation to me and I’ve been wondering if something bad is happening to the company.

For hotels, Google started displaying results from other search engines like Agoda, so I just use Google for that too and clickthrough to whatever is the cheapest. They could also just stop displaying agoda from one day to the next.

https://skift.com/2019/11/07/googles-travel-gains-levy-pain-...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenmcbride1/2019/12/06/how-...

I remember reading a comparison on how the hotel search features impacted others vs booking.com and the conclusion was that booking.com has alright because it's more of a destination of its' own rather than driven by search traffic.

OTAs keep growing, because travel in general keeps growing. But Google takes more and more space there. Right now the "book now" button on Google hotel page takes you to selection of OTAs. But one day it can take you to Google's room selection page and eventually to Google's checkout page - the actual booking can still be done with some external party and they'll handle the customer service etc., but your money will go to Google first.

https://www.frommers.com/slideshows/848046-the-10-best-and-w...

This is interesting because I always thought Matrix from ITA Software, a company Google acquired in 2010, was quite useful.

Wonder if links to Skiplagged get subjugated in Google SERPs.

If Google thinks it can replace other websites by providing better alternatives, that's great. But then the company should get out of the way and let users have a neutral source for a comprehensive inverted index of the rest of the web. If there is nothing else better out there, then let web users determine that for themselves. The index should be a public resource not controlled by one company that can see what users are searching for and engage in "front-running". (Websites that allow crawls by Googlebot, sometimes exclusively, are of course enabling the Google monopoly.)

1. Google bought Frommers in 2012 and nearly killed it. Thankfully the founder reacquired the rights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frommers

Am I reading this wrong or does this indicate Frommer also prioritises avoiding long layovers.

(I dislike the inclusion of the long layover options too but I have always thought the reason the sites include them is that they actually sell. I once met someone who took these long layover flights on popular routes that always have many shorter options, so I know such people exist.)

The thing is, it’s the index they built with the technology they built. Google is not the only index. To build a public index, you’d need to have public crawlers, which would bring a whole boatload more questions / regulation / debate. Google’s search ranking is part of the secret sauce that they try very hard to obscure, while hinting at how to be good at it; basically: provide something valuable to visitors, and you’ll rank highly, at least in theory. Get caught cheating and get blacklisted.

Flight info is already public. Ticket prices are not, and vary tons based on all the deals and schemes out there. That’s not Google’s fault, but the fault (if one views it that way) of the airlines playing pricing games. Their business model relies on getting everyone to pay the highest price per seat they can get from a customer, so they benefit from not being open about pricing. Their goal is also to fill flights with paying customers or paying cargo, or the most profitable mix, depending on many factors. Again, not Google’s fault.

Google is in a position to front-run results and provide an experience that other companies cannot by virtue of users already being on their site using their search. It doesn’t seem reasonable to compare Google to a travel site, as it’s pretty clear that one wouldn’t expect e.g. Expedia to list Travelocity results alongside their own with equal priority.

I’m usually really against monopolistic behavior, as many companies use it to screw users and maximize profits (e.g. Comcast). Google isn’t in the same league IMO because they behave a lot more charitably — if it were Comcast running Google, I would wholly expect them to completely de-list every competing travel site and work on lobbying the government to get those competitors shut down, while channeling tax dollars paid to build infrastructure into their own pockets.

It’s a dumb lawsuit that will go nowhere. The lawsuit is disingenuous as they know it will fail. The true purpose is political lip service — accomplish nothing while claiming to be doing something against a perceived enemy.

If I am doing complicated international stuff I will check multiple locations for prices but for my simple domestic routes the ease and speed of google flights makes it the best option.

Edit: That said, I don't use google as my default search engine as I switched all my devices to DDG a long time ago.

I have never worked with a technology company that would in danger of being taken over in this way. The examples you list are all free information you can find on the internet, which is precisely google's business. To run afoul of monopoly laws they need to do things like build their own restaurants and route searches to them rather than the other local restaurants the user was looking for. I assume they are doing this in some cases. But the last thing I want is to do a search and find the result list giving a bunch of new pages of lists, with yet more ads of course, to sift through next.

Software engineers are enjoying a nice run, where one can make lots of money applying basic software skills anyone can learn, grabbing free info anyone can get, and utilizing libraries everyone gets with their computer/phone OS but has not been provided access to by their hardware vendor. Hopefully technology will keep changing so fast the run will last forever (as long as you keep hopping to the newest bleeding edge). But this seems like borrowed time to me, access to free info and your own computer's clock or whatever is a commodity anyone can provide, whether it's someone earlier in the chain selling the hardware, or just millions of hungry programmers in developing countries.

Yes, that's true, the info is free in a sense that someone published it on the internet. But taking the weather companies as an example, someone has to measure the weather, and then compute the predictions. That'a real cost someone needs to pay. And that I think is the reason some people don't like what Google is doing - they are displaying the temperature, while someone else paid for it to be measured.

That’s what has always made AccuWeather’s attempt to “privatize” (in reality stop having the government publicly publish forecasts, but continue the hard work of data collection) the weather service transparent rent seeking.

Although I disagree with other point, spokeo and fastpeoplesearch is the absolute worst example of digging through private info of millions and "only consolidating it". SWEs working on this type of stuff are either immature or have no soul in my opinion

Not to defend Google, but to be fair, 1) when searching for images, you're searching for images, not "image search sites." To search for image search sites, you'd search "all" (not photos) for "image search," which mostly returns Google image search and Google image search help pages as top results, burying other image search engines on subsequent pages. Google's search algorithm does seem biased against competitor image search sites, but maybe Google search is really finding only articles. Searching "all" for "image search sites" returns links to articles listing image search sites. Searching for Yahoo images returns Yahoo Image Search as the top result. 2) the images search results are actually thumbnails, and also links, so you see the thumbs precisely at the same time that you see links to the sites that host each image search result.

I want companies to be able to design products that best serve customers, not ones limited by narrowly scoped product definitions. Google's search page has advanced beyond query + results, offering interactivity and shortcuts. I'm not saying we shouldn't be vigilant if they start abusing their position and dominating too many markets, but let's take that case by case.

I also disagree that Google can simply take over other businesses so easily. They've failed so many times. You'd think Youtube Music would dominate, but Spotify is still more popular. YouTube TV? I cancelled that a while ago. What am I surprised about is that we don't have a really strong YouTube competitor. Twitch, TikTok, and Instagram have made some in-roads, but nothing I'd call a strong #2.

I think that's exactly what's going on though.

> and dominating too many markets

How many is too many? I could make the same argument for Walmart, Amazon, ...

> but let's take that case by case.

No. Let's not drown people in having too many lawsuits. It's time for a sea of change.

I don't see any problem with having arbitrary rules so long as they roughly capture the spirit of the outcome people want. The eight-hour workday is an arbitrary rule. The age of majority is an arbitrary rule. Zoning boundaries are arbitrary.

They all capture something we (most of us) fundamentally want, but the specific lines are approximate or convenient or customary.

Those rules are just as arbitrary as all the possibilities in between.

Actually, you can just leave it as tradeoffs between what is good for the consumer short term and what is good for the consumer long term.

Sometimes there are wider issues that affect democracy (e.g. social networks and information silos), but usually it's just an economic issue that people aren't looking at thoroughly enough.

The reason we try to stop monopolies before they happen is not because they are hurting consumers at that point. Often they are underselling competitors to achieve their monopoly so consumers benefit and love them. We stop them because after they have that monopoly they no longer have good incentives to keep being beneficial for the consumer, so we avoid the problem before it is one.

Do companies exist to make things that are valuable for users, or do users exist to make money for companies?

I really don't know what a good customer-centric endgame looks like. Maybe a self hosted AI assistant that knows what I need, coupled with a micropayment infrastructure to apportion funds based on where I visit? No idea.

Several reasons:

1. You often can't judge the value of the information before purchase.

2. The downside of having to decide whether or not to purchase is often larger than the value of the information.

3. Microtransaction costs (time and otherwise) are higher than the value of the information.

4. That information is often available for free somewhere else (sometimes people just want attention or to inform others rather than money). The top results are just the ones that spent the most money on SEO (and hence have the most intrusive ads).

Incredibly annoying.

They're playing by rules they didn't invent. The belief is this content gets indexed better than just recipes (which, when well written, are terse) and it should be placed above the recipe so it has higher priority. They might be mistaken but with the limited amount of information Google gives, and the fact that most places I stumble across on Google are doing it, I'm ready to believe it works.

Any of those recipe sites? they'll read through several minutes of navigations, links, ads, and story before getting to the site. I feel badly for anyone who must listen to that, i.e. who doesn't have an option to read it visually, what a horrible experience.

It seems more and more common these days that people start companies specifically with the sole intention of being acquired by Google (or another large tech company).

Fortunately, the EU has the upcoming Digital Markets Act, ensuring fair competition in the digital space. You can read more about it here:

https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro...

In the last decade Google has no longer brought to the consumer anything major like Gmail, Google Maps or Chrome. I doubt it's because of inability to execute - they can and will hire large numbers of very smart people. It seems more like a conscious decision to err on the side of maintaining the ~2010 status quo.

In the olden days, if I went to AAA for travel advice, I'd get their partners and such recommended, not generic all-encompassing information. But I went to AAA for it. I don' see how this is any different. I can chose to go to not-google and Google then doesn't impact me.

Does Walmart have to put anybody's stuff where they want in the aisles?

That could be an incredible boon to the ecoconomy.

As a younger man I gave up on the idea of making simple consumer products on realizing that the large supermarket chains around here could dash my work on the rocks by just a middle manager arbitrarily saying 'no' to stocking what I had made.

So yes, I think those companies should be forced to work with local businesses.

This is a hyperbole because a private home is completely different from what we are discussing.

This should be obvious.

Google having to pay $10-$12B a year to Apple just for being default search engine. All while Apple is working on stopping cookies and now VPN that takes away all the information Google could use for Ads. And Siri Search being Apple's default recommendation results means most of the valuable ads search term revenue are now out of reach for Google. That is ~1.4B Apple Active Devices. ( Apple TV or other Appliance being counted or not is a rounding error ) and Growing.

If App Store spendings are any indication Apple user tends to spend twice as much than Google Play.

Basically Apple is squeezing Google left and right. ( Incidentally they are also what they are doing it to suppliers and developers )

If your company is defeated by Google turning it into some widget then you don’t have much of a business, you just have a feature you monetized and isn’t really a long term source of revenue. You need rigorous innovation and a clear advantage over your competitors.

Of course, one reason why I for one prefer to stay on Google Images (and have an addon to go directly to an image file instead of the site it's on) is that the sites themselves have so much cruft on them. And they kinda have to, because there's no money to be made on a minimalist image hosting site, while there's plenty of expenses - wouldn't be surprised if the brunt of expenses is abuse prevention.

Ohio is asking for a third option; common carrier status. Search and other monopoly infrastructure would be run at arms length from the rest of the business, and anyone could pay (the same as google) to integrate it into their own offerings.

I really just want to send out a query to various search caches, and get back results that are then merged into one dataset and shown in a native GUI. Forget this website shit.

Nah. That's what server-side cURL requests are for.

Please watch this, it is about not well known company called Luxottica that holds majority of world market for eyewear. There is a good posibilty that if you have sun glasses, they made them. It is not something technical, just simple merchandise, simple to understand:

https://youtu.be/yvTWjWVY9Vo

Since the video came out, they have also bought (actually "merged") one of the largest companies creating perscription lenses.

Now, do you like what you see? Is it "so easy" and "good" for the customers? Do you love it? How is their status impacting you wanting to buy eyewear?

Same is with google, amazon, microsoft, just name it. But yes, until they get a vast majority of market, they will not start to milk the users. As they want majority of market first.

While a monopoly is bad this is a very poor source to use to prove a point, even though they do admittedly have a point (like the broken clock being correct twice a day). The problem has absolutely nothing to do with it being an Italian company but that is of course a big point in any 60 Minutes video (US good, others bad) and I highly doubt it would have been made had it been Walmart instead of Luxottica.

But to comment on-topic: I believe Google and/or search engines should be put under the same rules and laws as the EU did with Microsoft. Search engine is searchengine, not search/travelplanner/hotel finder/translator/whatever. It strangles competition and innovation. Google should include those other things from other services if another service will sell the service to Google or keep clear.

Edit: In short, as the EU is already working on, Google and the likes that are gatekeepers, needs to be stopped or broken up.

If Google was 100% responsible for developing everything they offer to consumers, then perhaps there is an argument that Google is good for consumers. However the truth is that Google Search is what they developed, it became the only search engine that most people use, and being a gateway tot he web and having the ability to spy on the world's web use is an unfair advantage that virtually no one else has.

Anything that becomes popular Google can gobble it up. Consumers cannot get superior direct benefits from non-Google companies for long. Google will acquire any such companies sooner than later.

First it assumes Google can execute on said idea better than me and that I can't innovate. Here's the thing though; the bigger a company is the slower it gets. Sure, they can implement processes but big always gets more complex. Being small gives you an edge. What you do with that edge will determine whether FAANG apes your idea or not.

Secondly, big tech isn't immune to market forces. The more features they add, trying to please every last potential user leads to bloat. At some point their search experience is bound to get degraded from adding way too many features in pursuit of every last user. This adds more bureaucracy. More tech debt. More uncontrollable variables.

Search in 2021, especially on mobile, is vastly different from even 5 years ago. There are more ads, more tracking, more fraud, more shady back dealing, more user hostile anti-patterns. Yes, users currently enjoy their product but at some point surveillance capitalism will get its reckoning (see Apple, Europe, regulation in general) and for all the various products they have, search is the only relevant one. Without Search, how 'threatening' is Google really?

Same goes for Facebook and that hot mess of an app. News feed, groups, pages, dating, marketplace, messaging, watch, etc. All this reeks of a co. that's lost focus in pursuit of not ceding users to competitors. This just means when they fail (which they will!), they will fail spectacularly.

My advice to you and myself is focus on a niche. Try to do things that will be hard for FAANG to reproduce by making your users love your product more.

Competing head on with these behemoths is foolish, but a moat is possible nonetheless given proper execution.

However, you as a creator are not free to find another universe in which the leading search provider does not use their position of influence to squash any competing products by ranking their own products higher.

(I haven’t heard privacy brought up as a legal measure of harm to consumers, which would be an interesting angle, but I’m not sure how that plays with current law…)

Well, that is the (Borkian) dominant understanding of antitrust right now, but it hasn't always been, and I think that view is under pressure again.

It has never been clear to me why we must limit our view to consumers when looking at antitrust - there is always much more going on than how much things cost. It effects competitors (actual and would-be), the environment, related industries, available jobs, sometimes national security - monopolies can have huge impacts on lots of things. Why exactly is this super-reductive, artificially crabbed view the only measure of a monopoly's harm?

Medium-term, I think the pendulum is swinging back.

Is it? There's an increasing antipathy towards the amount of data Google collect, many people on this forum, if not so much in the world at large, would consider that harm. If Google's hiding from me a better service that's also free, or even has an acceptable cost, I'd consider that harm.

It's only hard to argue there's no harm if their product is identical to its competitors, which is basically never true.

It kills competition since most of them are financed by an unrelated service (Googles ad network) and without competition we get such nice things like randomized automated life time bans, non existent customer service, products that are randomly killed, overly anti competitive licensing agreements (Android apparently cannot survive on its own merits) etc. . Privacy is just one of many many issues.

Google is stealing ideas and products, that they know are viable through the metrics they gather from the search data.

Then they implement those products and embed them ABOVE the search results.

Effectively killing off the competitors, who invented and build the original products.

HOW are developers free to avoid Google killing off their businesses like that?

Doesnt Walmart and Amazon do that as well, looking at the data and then making their own in house products?

The patent system is for protecting ideas which the law allows to be protected.

On the other hand, Google owns ITA and I think the airline websites are typically frontends for it anyway.

Much like if you make a good product and sell it on Amazon, Amazon can simply use their might to dupe your product and sell it as AmazonBasics.

So innovation is stifled because the second it becomes profitable a giant can pluck it from your hands and use their power to squash you whilst making money from it.

I am not sure what mechanisms within Capitalism are supposed to protect people from the simple power asymmetry of companies having far more resources money and lawyers doing what the fuck they like.

There should be antitrust lawsuits against all of the giants abusing their power but, because of said power asymmetry, they of course have a huge amount of lobbying power in comparison to anyone else.

Using Bing, DuckDuckGo, or other Google alternatives are incomparably easier than not using utilities like electricity and plumbing. I struggle to see how one can honestly make this comparison.

You can do everything with water with rain-barrels and buckets. As others have said, you can do power with candles, bike generators, and wood fire.

Is that a realistic solution in a modern society? Hell no.

I struggle to see how anyone honestly can lie to themselves that it is somehow absurd to label something a "utility" just because the technology has advanced beyond cave-man level.

Google deserves their status as a utility - monopolies, effective or otherwise, we have consistently found to be actively harmful.

Furthermore, if a company wants to be a "be-all-everything technological solution", it is actively attempting to usurp the role of government. And when that govt is un-elected, that's a despotic oligarchy, at best. We may well be forced to storm Google HQ and put every Google CEO's head on the chopping block if we want to preserve our liberty.

Or, y'know, maybe just support getting them regulated instead, bit more of a humane solution, dontcha think?

[0] https://electrek.co/2020/11/10/tesla-model-3-82-kwh-battery-...

[1] https://www.smartsolarenergyco.com/tesla-powerwall-review/

In many urban areas you may not even be allowed to opt out of utilities meanwhile. I once delayed paying for the water bill in a new house for a month till I moved in and needed, got a big late bill finally because the fees are mandatory for the house.

And, just as naturally, the government actually owns a lot of the distribution network. The producers provide into the distribution network, the customers receive from the distribution network, and the government regulates fair (by some definition thereof) access.

So how come there are countries without a natural monopoly and with competing utility providers?

Also running your own generator with oil isn't a few orders of magnitude (i.e. at least 100x) more expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not even one order of magnitude more expensive, but maybe just twice as expensive.

I also don't think GP's simile is good, but some of your arguments against it are just blatantly false.

Local governments own most U.S. utility lines and pipes, so a competing for-profit utility would have to go against the not-for-profit public service, leaving low to no room for profit and no reason to even compete.

Fiber/cable/dsl lines are one of the few U.S. utilities with competition because the performance/reliability/features of the service can vary greatly and because almost no local governments ran their own ISP before private companies came in and ran their lines. I can bet that any area with a municipal ISP has a very low chance of seeing xfinity/att run their own fiber if they're not already servicing the area.

The scope (of showing nice timer by google on 'timer' search) is much broader spanning many verticals

What's next, should they also show Bing and DuckDuckGo search results when you search for an arbitrary query too?

The goal of Google isn't to link you to websites, it's to get you to your information as quickly as possible. Said information could be a website, just as it can be an image, a flight or a single sentence pulled into an Answer Box.