In this particular case, it seems easier said than done?

OP did put eggs in different basquet ( social medias ) but Google will be Google right? What would be the alternative.

Trust busting or restricting Googles ability to conduct their business as they see fit.

Not something needed in a functioning market but if a company decides and manages to dominate a certain market, the rules change one way or another.

PS: I'm deliberately avoiding the word "monopoly". It's not required in most jurisdictions.

> What would be the alternative

That's the point, there is not alternative at the moment. Breaking up monopolies allows competition and an alternative provider when something like this happens.

Gotcha, yes. Or a least regulate the said monopoly so they provide clear and open guidelines in regard to their policies.

Anti-Trust Legislation.

I’m surprised to see that sentiment echoed several times on HN. I’m all about it.

If it wasn't for Google, millions of businesses would never have had a chance to exist, because they didn't have anywhere near the initial budget or right political connections to reach their customers through traditional media. It is a terrible power they have in their hands, but it is leagues better than what was before.

But I think it is outrageous how they mistreat important customers like OP and let some petty employee who probably has never done anything useful in their life destroy the livelihood of other people just out of spite.

If it wasn't for Google, it would be someone else delivering ads online. Gratitude for their near-complete takeover of that market is severely misplaced.

What is hindering someone else from competing with Google on search? Google is awful when it comes to things such as censorship and free speech, but it is a boon to business competition, compared to how things where before.

Search is not new, nor is directory advertising. Google didn’t bring anything to the table in the digital ad world until post-YouTube and Doubleclick acquisition. Overture, aka Yahoo search ads created the ecosystem that Google ultimately cloned for their business model. The only thing that Google really brought value was simple UX and better-than-average search results thanks to PageRank and such. Every B2C service they provide outside of search and gmail came from acquisitions. Google was and always will be fundamentally predisposed to anticompetitive behavior. Their acquisition and slaughter of world-changing technology and holding captive the attention of a generation or more of top talent has cost the world Trillions in opportunity costs IMHO.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/04/google-in...

Ya that’s good for competition right? Regulatory capture?

Google has done nothing particularly special to create opportunities for very small businesses online and their deliberate, persistent efforts to maintain a faceless veneer, through which meaning for customer support, for those businesses is impossible.

I had a rather business that was an AdWords certified partner and I know very deeply how many customers they have had OP’s experience. At this point, it is more important for them to maintain an operation that can ostensibly thrive without humans in the loop than to make money selling ads. That is their strategy, a choice that could have been reversed any time in the past 20 years. See how even their own employees are completely unable to help customers. I think it’s dogshit stance and they should be punished throughly in the marketplace for it. That’s just impossible now due to their size.

> Google has done nothing particularly special to create opportunities for very small businesses online

I couldn't disagree more with you. For anybody selling online, Google brings most if not all paying customers and other search engines bring so few as to be irrelevant. If Google isn't bringing anything to the table, how come they are so dominant and raking in so much money? Why couldn't Yahoo compete? And don't say that they suffocate competitors because of their size, because they can't bully Apple, Facebook or Microsoft by size.

I don't like Google as a company, they censor, they are corrupt and they mistreat their customers such as OP. There are also search engines that are far better.

But Google has been one of the biggest blessings ever for small businesses and individual founders trying to make a living. Don't let your hatred blind you. There are fully legitimate businesses that shouldn't be brick-and-mortar and rely on a fair way to get their information out to lots of people. Google makes that possible - for free!

Because they kinda caught the opportunity? If Google didn't, someone else would.

> If Google isn't bringing anything to the table, how come they are so dominant and raking in so much money? Why couldn't Yahoo compete?

> But Google has been one of the biggest blessings ever for small businesses and individual founders trying to make a living.

Please note that competition in search market is different from providing small businesses with advertising opportunities. The "blessings" came from their position being the dominant search provider, not from their being Google.

> If Google didn't, someone else would. And where are they? The opportunity is always there and always has been for any tech company willing to rise to the challenge.

> Please note that competition in search market is different from providing small businesses with advertising opportunities.

Search and advertising has the same function: Reaching out to your public. If we look at the humane side instead of the business side, Google helps individuals with a message get a voice and reach out to the world in a way that would be impossible before. Only social media can compete in this, but they are much more heavily censored and suffer much worse discoverability.

I mean, your argument could be applied to any business or anybody who does anything. But the ground truth is that Google did it and kept doing it right for many years. Another dominant actor might have decided to do things other ways, such as maybe letting local business boards decide who gets to appear in online search.

"What is hindering someone else from competing with Google on search? "

Mergers and Acquisitions

https://qz.com/1920334/the-acquisitions-that-built-googles-m...

That's not hindering anybody. It especially is not hindering their competitors Apple, Facebook and Microsoft from competing. Google Search has grown into its size and popularity due to its own merits, and can as easily be replaced.

From the lawyers in that case: “There are no reasonable substitutes for general search services, and a general search service monopolist would be able to maintain quality below the level that would prevail in a competitive market”

I've been using a much better search engine than Google for months now. The free market of the internet and human ingenuity has delivered.

I think you are mistaking Google for "The Internet", believe me, someone else would be thrilled to show us ads.

What's hindering someone else? I'm not talking about ads only, but also search. Google brings customers without the business having to pay anything to anybody or suck up to industry cartels.

There's a meme that ads must be based on covert tracking, and google analytics being everywhere is the most powerful covert tracker, also built into Chrome.

I think ads using tracking are close to worthless and that the whole Analytics/ad industry is just busywork that makes people think they're doing something important. Especially Facebook are good at luring small businesses in and convincing them to "keep trying" with different demographics and parameters to spend more in ads.

I never understood why more businesses don't use discount codes to know where their marketing is having an effect. That's ground truth.

I too remember the vast wasteland that was America before Google: local newspapers, shops, and malls pulling in sustainable revenue in their own markets. It was horrible. Ghastly, really. I much prefer getting everything in my life from one of five west coast billionaires.

But it isn't really Google you are all praising. It's the company that bought them. They just go around using their name because it would have failed if they'd done otherwise.

Companies today are just like life. They don't care about the individual. Just like Life has no problem killing a young innocent child with cancer, Google has no problem killing a thriving business with policy.

For every one person who got a chance, a thousand more were taken away. Such is life, and everyone plays a role not any one place or person. If you want answers on why you got the short end of the stick, you might want to re-evaluate whether you should be spending time worrying about it in the first place.

Unless you are endeavoring in the same business path again, I'd invest my time in retraining and rebuilding rather than getting answers you feel you are owed.

I often ask myself why things are this way, but they are and no amount of getting frustrated will ever help. Even though I might be fully entitled from my point of view, even if I had the worst possible life ever, even if I deserved justice more than anyone else on the planet--it wouldn't matter. Never happens, take it from someone who has been at the absolute lowest and highest and online since the beginning.

Oh right, and the millennials I hate to say it are going to end this world anyway. Everyone knows history will repeat, even if it takes a bit longer to do so this time around. Oh my, I am getting so off topic it hurts, sorry 'bout that!

I struggle to understand your point, but I can only speak for myself coming from a place where there is immense hatred towards young people coming from the old generation. Before Google and social media you couldn't get a business started unless you had old family members "blessing" your endeavour, or had connections with the right political crowd. That would include long years of sucking up and eating abuse to get the chance to "prove your worth" to people who know less than you - if you ever get that chance. Google and - to a lesser extent - social media allows the "millenials" to bypass the gatekeepers and mount successful businesses on their own merits and skills. That is revolutionary! That's the difference between having dignity in your life or staying in the dirt.

> For every one person who got a chance, a thousand more were taken away.

In my view for every one person who lost his chance, a thousand got theirs from Google.