Google does this yet lies about their searches to maintain an illusion of competence.
For example, you can type in something like "purpose of life" and it will say it has 2 billion results, yet if you try to go to result 500, you can't, it will stop at 400, then change the number to 400 results only on the last page.
This happens for every query. Google lies about the astronomical number of search results, then only shows a few hundred at most.
Note that if you search [purpose of life], it does not say it has 2 billion results anywhere on the first page. My team removed the blue bar containing that text way back in 2010. You have to hit "Next" or otherwise visit page 2 to get it.
And I'd bet the reason why it's still there (I left Search in 2014) is because < 0.1% of users ever hit the next page. Everybody else just refines their query to a different search. It's a holdover from when search engines were bad (i.e. around 1998) and you had to go through 10 pages of results to get the one you were looking for. As a result, Google expends approximately zero engineering effort on pages 2-20 of the results - I know that in the 4 visual redesigns I worked on, we didn't touch them once. It wouldn't surprise me if the response to flack on this is to just get rid of all pages other than the first one - it avoids the issue entirely and wouldn't affect 99.9% of users.
The technical reason for this behavior, as others have remarked below, is pagination. Ranking across the full result set is a very complex calculation, and it can depend on some factors that are basically random (eg. timeouts and failures in backend servers). It'd make pagination basically useless if the same results you already went through show up on a later page because the ranking is different. This requires that the full result set be cached. You can cache 400-1000 results for each of the queries that the 0.1% of users who actually hit "Next" care about, but you'd have a big issue caching 2 billion results for each of those queries.
> Note that if you search [purpose of life], it does not say it has 2 billion results anywhere on the first page.
This is false for other search terms. Search for "meaning of life". At the top left of the first result page it says "About 10,620,000,000 results (0.56 seconds)".
Oops! Must have been one of those common "multiply by 26,772" errors.
At the bottom of the page, it says "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 22 already displayed." with an option to show all results.
With all results shown, the total result count goes to 59, so only off by 9,983x! But who's counting? Definitely not Google.
Oh boy do I feel special right now, since I hit 2nd page (or even 3rd etc) quite often since main search became quite a spam-infested over-seod crapfest few years ago for some types of search. Some first results are outright dodgy, often outranking ie official sites and I strongly suspect only malware awaits there.
Such a shame for basically one-trick pony who doesnt understand that staying relevant long term means that trick must be and remain a damn good proposition.
Its true I eventually give up and do ie duckduckgo and if that fails I try to refine searches even more (but this rarely works since I already start with it as default)
What does the search org look like internally? Is it connected with the ads or Chrome orgs at any interface? Do the rank and file ICs, EMs, and PMs have issues with how these products interact?
I have so many complaints about your product, it drives me wild.
How many people even look at organic results versus the paid-for ads that display at top?
It should be illegal for anyone to be able to purchase ads for another company's trademark. Apple, Google, and Amazon are all extorting companies by forcing them to buy ads to protect their own brand. (My own brand is being attacked by a competitor in this way, and it's ridiculous!)
The only reason anyone uses these systems at scale is that third parties were available in aggregate early on to provide content. You built your product off of our backs. And now that the power dynamic has shifted, we're cattle to soak for as much revenue as possible.
It also seems like the only reason Google is dominant is bad behavior. Paying for default search engine status. Being the default in all of their other unrelated platforms. Achieving browser monopoly.
I've recently started seeing Chrome ads and billboards everywhere. Google purchased a huge percentage of my city's billboard ad inventory for their "better on Chrome" campaign. It's as if Google knows this is the reason for everything. Where except for Apple devices is Chrome not dominant?
This whole cartel needs a muzzle.
Device companies should not be ad companies.
Ad companies should not be service companies.
Service companies should not be content and production companies, since they can favor their own and price pressure the rest.
We have a world where the top tech conglomerates are all of these and then some. They've cast a wide net and turned the whole world of consumer interaction into a supermarket, where we now have to pay for "shelf space" to interact with customers, pay to protect our brands from unfair sniping, pay to grow, obey asinine rules to build a product that fits their desired shape, integrate with their payments and login stack (so we're even less in a relationship with our customers).
It's a far cry from the open web of the 90's. Really bad for small companies, new startups, and even consumers. We can barely afford to build our products with all the margin that goes to Google, Apple, and the rest.
> It wouldn't surprise me if the response to flack on this is to just get rid of all pages other than the first one - it avoids the issue entirely and wouldn't affect 99.9% of users.
You are confusing users with queries. A lot more than 0.1% of users use the other result pages - double digit percent certainly. But if Google is doing a good job they don’t do it very often.
I am sorry but it doesn't change the fact that it is super disenginous to say (I just tried it myself): and then you only display a maximum of 149 results.
"Page 14 of about 184,000,000 results (0.83 seconds)"
"Page 15 of about 149 results (0.76 seconds)"
"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 149 already displayed."
Maybe it's time Google spent a bit more time on their search engine, including pages 2-20.
> It's a holdover from when search engines were bad (i.e. around 1998) and you had to go through 10 pages of results to get the one you were looking for.
Unlike today, right? Where actual search results... represent less than 10% of the page and the rest is irrelevant information and ads in Google search https://grumpy.website/post/0XCmMC-2O
> The technical reason for this behavior, as others have remarked below, is pagination.
> It'd make pagination basically useless if the same results you already went through show up on a later page because the ranking is different.
A bit off topic: I have always wondered why search result is the only feed on the web (apart from HN) that has not adopted infinite scrolling. This is a good explanation.
Searching "purpose of life" while logged in shows about 245 results, searching "purpose of life" while logged out shows "Page 10 of about 10.740.000.000 results"...
> It's a holdover from when search engines were bad (i.e. around 1998) and you had to go through 10 pages of results to get the one you were looking for.
Search engines are still bad.
Having to go through 10 pages of results to find something that matches what I was looking for is one of the reasons I stopped using Google. What I want is almost never on the first few pages of search results.
I work for Google Search. The counts we show for results are estimated. They get more refined when you go deeper into the results. But yes, there are still likely to be millions of results for many things you query -- and most people are not going to be able to go through all millions of those. So we show usually up to around 40 pages / 400 of these. We have a help page about this here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9603785
This is absolutely trash and essentially false advertising. Saying there are 1M+ results but then only having 400 viewable is straight up misrepresenting your product.
> That’s hundreds of results and usually enough for deep research needs. You can enter a related query to refine your search and learn more.
is both patronizing and offensive. 400 result is 4 pages of 100 hits, the way literally anyone who does research on google is going to use it(I haven't used a 10 hit Google page in well over a decade). Not only that, I can browse through 4 pages in like 5 minutes, really really inadequate for "deep research needs", and really anything beyond cursory convenience linking. I've completely dismissed Google Search for in depth topics as a result because of the multiple occasions I tried in vain to find a page I'd visited previously with Google (that I ended up finding again with browser history) that just couldn't be found, even going back and trying to make a search that works.
> and most people are not going to be able to go through all millions of those.
this is totally fair but 400 is just way way too few, if you bumped it up to 4k that would be a step in the right direction. Additionally, by my thinking, Google is missing out on the people who are willing to wade through thousands of search results to find quality content, as it stands now those pages have very little way to break into the top 400, but a complex search term followed by a user wading deep into the results to find a specific page where they go and don't return would seem to show any extremely strong signal that that specific page should probably be ranked somewhat higher.
So when I google "cows" and it says "Page 2 of about 1,210,000,000 results" you know full well you aren't going to show anywhere near 1,201,000,000 results yet you program it to display that? And in fact it only shows "about 231 results" which is 0.000019234% of 1,210,000,000 results.
That doesn't sound like an estimate to me. To me, that is intentional misleading.
Spending 5 minutes performing google searches shows that isn't even close to the truth. The number displayed at the top of the screen is fabricated.
Searching for [google] states about 25 billion results, but it can only show me two pages of search results.
Searching for [meaning of life] states about 10 billion results, but it can only show me 212 results.
Searching for [meaning of life life] states about 7 billions results, but it can only show me 184 results.
It is impossible that these results are correct. They are clearly filtered, and the count of results is inflated for every single search.
Clicking on the text you recommended to expand all search results doesn't do that. It still limits the results, just to 300-400 instead of 200. In no case I tested could I get to more than 20 pages of results.
Thanks for posting here. Some questions: can you confirm that the estimates are unbiased in the statistical sense? Do you have an API for accessing the other ones, the help page for my locale doesn't mention anything? If not, how do you justify showing a very high number of results that users can't access?
If you're saying 2 billion when you know there are 'millions' your estimates are off by a factor of 2000. If you can really only show 400 results then the estimate is off by a factor of several million.
Maybe that's just how Google Search works, but the story points on your JIRA tickets must be a sight to see. :)
Well,but a consistent estimate of millions of results and then showing 400 is a rather bad estimate.
If the search results would be as bad as the estimates, you would have no business.
It seems like the high numbers are displayed to mislead about the speed and efficiency of the search, google knows no human will go through 10 thousands of result pages.
And ads are only sold for page 1.
The message is that you cannot verify what you are told, you just get what you're given. And what part you are given is an illusion that there are more results. Just trust Google.... what could go wrong?
Let's not forget, that Eric Schmidt said that more than 1 result is a bug.
This touches on the scope and hubris of Google and other companies that mediate reality for us. They think they have 'the truth', they know it and will give it to us, and if we refuse their truth, they will attempt to train us until we get it, in schools, the workplace, online, etc.
It's also why they will become irrelevant. If there is nothing organic about their results because the algo filters thoughtcrime ideas out, people will continue to move away. Thank god.
I personally use presearch and feel happier that the results are more natural. But nothing is perfect.
It's dishonest to show an estimate that is orders of magnitude off, and not even mention this with something like a +/- standard deviation. I can't imagine how something that has only hundreds of real hits could have an estimate of hundreds of thousands. Why not just drop this estimate altogether?
Ah ok, so this is why after a certain amount of clicks of the mouse I am at the end of the Internet.
I still remember the time when Internet was much bigger than 40 clicks.
Hopefully someone will disrupt you soon and give us back the real Internet.
How inaccurate does an estimation have to be before it becomes a lie?
What happens when a bank teller asks me during a credit application how many assets I have and I estimate about 10 billion bucks, when it later turns out I own the three dollars in my wallet and a strip of chewing gum? Am I (criminally) liable in that case?
The word "lie" is kinda hysterical, don't you think?
I joined Google in Nov. 2005, and "The Life of a Query" was one of the classes that everyone took. Even then, we were told that figures like "110,000 results" were an estimate, and if you kept hitting Next, you'd only get about 1,000. Maybe now it's 400, I don't know.
What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can?
> The word "lie" is kinda hysterical, don't you think?
No, I consider it accurate.
I still consider Google to be marginally useful these days, but the quality has slipped and the UX has yet to keep pace.
> What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can?
Yes, that is what people expect when someone says "I found a billion hits on what you're looking for, here is the pile." How does this being wholly inaccurate by orders of magnitude to what the user can retrieve benefit the user?
> figures like "110,000 results" were an estimate, and if you kept hitting Next, you'd only get about 1,000.
Sounds like they're using biased estimators for the number of search results. If the estimates weren't biased, the underestimated numbers would balance out the overestimated ones, so for every query where they fall short by 2 billion there would be one that has two billion more hits than shown by the UI (or two billion with one hit more).
> The word "lie" is kinda hysterical, don't you think?
If it's true that they show biased estimates, I'd say that's a pretty adequate description.
> What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can?
If Google determines that 99.999% of the people will never go beyond result 400, and 99.998% of the people find the result they were looking for in these 400 results, then what’s the use of showing those users there are “about 200,000,000 results”?
> What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can?
If it's inaccurate and misleading, it's a bug.
If they've noticed it and kept it, that bug has become a feature.
> What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can?
No, I'd expect that it would be able to generate subsequent pages on the fly.
Isn't this how all search engines have worked for most of the history of internet search?
I was an avid user of altavista, hotbot, yahoo, and early google. I recall that I was always able to 'page' through an absurd number of results. But I am old and have a bad memory, maybe I'm wrong
No, I think most of us though google was a more innovative company that could create a way to share that many results, feels more like an EA move where google stopped trying years ago and just went into search maintance mode.
Google limits number of search results to between 300 and 400[0] and yea as you know the reason is it is technically challenging, expensive and most probably unnecessary to show all results but devil is in the details or in this case information gem/s are on the 98th page or something like that :)
> The word "lie" is kinda hysterical, don't you think?
No, it’s 100% accurate. Your response is delusional and a poor attempt at manipulation.
> What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can?
If it isn’t possible for users to see those results then you should only display the number of results that can be accessed. That would be “not lying” in this case.
I expect that the estimate is more accurate than "we said 11000 but the actual result was 1000". Of course I understand it isn't going to be perfect, but that's two orders of magnitude off.
Could the number be valid from indexing standpoint but irrelevant search results are deemed unworthy of display to user? Unworthy + maybe costly on back-end side e.g. because infrequently accessed data is in cold storage?
That's exactly what it is. Each page is more expensive to serve than the last (it is basically joining a bunch of indexes for each term and then skipping the first N). At some number of pages they drew a line and decided that the value of these pages isn't worth the cost (and DoS vulnerability) to serve them.
I was thinking this too. Not to claim google is trustworthy, but pagination with large search result sets can be tricky when you go back really far if the queries to fetch them are expensive. The count is probably a different system from the actual results, and the count switching may just be how they handle the 0.000000001% of people who try going to page 400. So the lie may not be how high the number is, but the expectation of being able to see all the results.
You got a lot of responses telling you why Google can't or doesn't want to provide an accurate result count. I guess the logic is:
1. Google has to return a result count.
2. It can't/won't be accurate.
3. Therefore it's fine to provide a count 10 billion times to large.
The jump from 2 to 3 is dodgy and I see people questioning it. But I don't see anybody challenging point 1. Why does google have to give a number at all? If google can't/won't give an accurate result count, then they should give a result count at all. I don't care what technical limitations might complicate giving an accurate result count, that's no excuse for lying when silence is a perfectly valid choice.
Obviously they provide the count for marketing reasons. That's an explanation for the lying, but not an excuse.
The number of pages in a search index and the number of results found were major selling points for search engines. I'd say that the count got carried forward in the last 20 years.
This is mostly a technical limitation and has been placed since 1998. 99.99% of search queries won't go beyond result 100 then what's the point of showing the result 10000000 other than technological demonstration?
Eh, it's useful for a power user to know which way to refine.
Searching for [product 1234] has "about" 157 million results -> narrow the search -> [product 1234 bookshelf] has about 3.4 million results.
Searching for [product 1234defg] has "about" 280 results -> widen the search -> [product 1234 defg] has about 54000 results.
If you just show a number that's around 400 for essentially every query, you don't have any feedback on whether to widen or narrow the search if you don't see the result in the first couple of pages.
If I ran a store with a 10 digit inventory of tools and advertised that, but refused to offer more than a tiny fraction of them because it was too hard to offer more, what do you call that?
Sometimes I really want to see more than 10 results. I used to be able to set a flag that told Google "show me 100 results on the first page." But as of a couple of years ago, whenever I set that flag Google accuses me of being a bot and makes me solve a captcha. Thanks Google. I really enjoy solving puzzles just to get beyond your ad-sponsored search results.
Just one of many reasons why my default search engine is DDG now. DDG kind of sucks but these days it sucks less than Google.
Both Bing and DDG seem to have stop indexing porn since about 6 months ago.
Search for "couple having sex" then set the filter to "past month". Zero results on bing and ddg. It started around late January, early February. Other things that would lead to porn also fail like "woman f*cking dildo", "shemale", that's all I tried. They'll show result, but if you filter for 24hrs, past week, past month, they're blank
Unfortunately, I have similarly bad captcha results elsewhere. Millionshort normally rejects my queries from my Linux desktop, and often it will go 5+ rounds, which exceeds my patience.
GitHub does this too, if you click on the Issues page and change the search query it searches all of github, not just your own repos. But you can't go to the last page of the results (not sure about the max page number, but there is a limit and for good reasons).
Very interesting. Just tried it with "covid-19" and its true.
About 13,460,000,000 results (1.35 seconds)
..
Page 2 of about 163 results (1.15 seconds)
>"If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."<
..
About 12,620,000,000 results (1.26 seconds)
..
Page 4 of about 361 results (1.75 seconds)
In this thread are dozens of people complaining about something they would never use, ie going through a billion results. It’s really weird how hateful HN can be for no real reason.
I don't care that Google doesn't give me billions of results. I do care that Google is lying about giving me billions of results. Either give me a reasonably accurate result count, or no result count at all. The lie is an insult.
Bing is worse in that it makes it seem like you can go to e.g. page 100 and will say stuff like "1,000-1,006 of 659,000,000 results", but it's really showing you the results from page 5. Then, for example, in page 5, 6, 7, etc. you can see the same results between them, just shuffled around. You can't even tell how many results you're really getting.
> Google does this yet lies about their searches to maintain an illusion of competence.
I've seen this around a lot, but I have yet to see proof that it's a "lie" in any way. Perhaps provide some evidence if you have it?
More likely, there ARE 2 million results, but they're not going to show them all to you, because you are not economically able to pay them enough to do so. Now, if you want to pay Google a billion dollars, you can probably get all 2 million search results. They'll probably deliver them on gold-plated floppy disks if you want.
Anyway it ALSO it serves as an important hint that there are LOTS of results, and you should NARROW down your search. Wouldn't it be weirder if you searched for "meaning of life" and it said "200 results"?
Most of the replies under this comment are invalid because of the words "About" in front of those statements. I love the word "about" - it's even more slippery than "many," which implies non-zero.
I’m sure they could remove spam results if they wanted to, but what’s the incentive when alternative engines are mediocre and time wasting will mean you’re going to use their engine for longer.
... who cares? Functionally, I have never gone beyond the 3rd search page when looking for a useful website. I can see how the search engine does find the astronomical number of search results, but then just decides for technical reasons to not display them. This seems perfectly reasonable to me.
> The revenue-sharing deals that Google offers to browsers are essential to companies like Mozilla Corp., he said, because they offer their products to users for free.
> “The reason they partner with Google isn’t because they had to; it’s because they want to,” Schmidtlein said.
Mozilla would disappear overnight if Google stopped paying them.
Good riddance IMO (even though I love FF and it's the only browser I use). They haven't been able to build a sustainable business despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars per year from Google. A flower shop on a street corner can get a better ROI. Mozilla's management is incompetent and shady.
Yeah, the Red Cross can screw right off. And libraries. Things should not exist in this world if they can't pay their own way...
Sorry, my words above feel gross. I don't normally write sarcastic comments, and I don't like to, but I was a little put off by the "good riddance" comment.
I just mean... aren't some entities cost centres that pay dividends later, sometimes non-monetarily. Kinda like children. Not everything needs to compete is the market and be judged a failure if it doesn't succeed through the single metric markets care about, right?
If the Red Cross were run by a lawyer, who gutted the budget for doctors and nurses and focused the organization on PR initiatives, yeah, fuck the Red Cross.
I remember a comment from their CEO complaining that a 3 million USD comp was a "sacrifice" she was making because she believes on the mission. Totally insane.
When did we decide the only people who could be CEOs had to be blessed with magic CEO-dust or whatever, and must be showered with cash because there aren't enough people so-dusted and they're apparently impossible to train unless they've had just the right pedigree from birth? Is there really no-one at the company who could do the job and would be happy to take a promotion and a "mere" $1M salary? It's not fucking brain surgery, normal people can figure it out, and they used to. It's just a job.
In Mozilla's case especially, such a gamble ("gamble"—I really don't think it's that out-there) seems eminently worth it, since they've been treading water at best for over a decade. What's the worst that can happen? They fail? Already happening.
I suspect this entire trend (across the economy, not just at Mozilla) is due to some combo of our modern intense aversion for taking responsibility for anything whatsoever, and pervasive self-dealing in the management class. Board won't replace the "right" kind of person with the "wrong" kind because it's Simply Not Done—why, if anyone in the top half of the intelligence bell curve and an OK work ethic could do their jobs with just a little experience and training, they might no longer command such insane salaries! Can't have that.
But, I'm open to the possibility that it did in fact become unworkable, for some reason I don't know about, to just train people into these positions as-needed, and in fact we do have to pay stupid amounts of money to a tiny, incestuous c-suite class who are the only possible candidates for these roles, or else everything will fall apart.
Why is that insane? A CEO is just a job and how much you get paid depends on how much the industry is willing to pay you. So turning down 10mil to earn 3mil is indeed a sacrifice. Unless you have something against people making a lot of money or think once you hit some number you should not say anything bad about the pay. People don't get salaries because they earned or deserved them, they get them because that's what others are willing to pay for their work.
that is less a problem with mozilla and more a problem with CEO class that get massive pay yet often its difficult to distinguish who is a real proffeshional and who is full of hot air
Eh if a car company could only stay in business because they had giant Coke ads emblazoned on the sides of their cars I wouldn’t chalk it up as a win for the company.
Sadly, old Mozilla won't come back even if we get rid of the current one. Building web infrastructures is now a completely different story than 20 years ago. You're not going to build a new functional web browser from scratch without hundreds of millions of bucks every year.
Yes, and plenty of guys have been saying that since day 0 of the new management taking over, only to get ignored and hushed away. Yet, here we are 8(!) years later :).
New unpopular opinion: Mozilla needs to disappear. The faster it does the better, as it is already dead.
Isn’t receiving hundreds of millions a year a sustainable business?
I did not realize currency trade was constrained to your sensibilities; my bad. Private property, free markets! Until two parties enter into an arrangement then you demand they open themselves to business with others?
> Isn’t receiving hundreds of millions a year a sustainable business?
Right, but the argument goes that the only reason Google pays Mozilla so much is to prop up the competition. Google may have calculated that it would be preferable to pay the hundreds of millions, rather than have Firefox die just leaving Chrome/Safari.
Thus, it's not really a sustainable business, but rather being the lucky benefactor of some scheme. Their value is only in being 'the other guy', not in actually creating a valuable product for consumers. I wouldn't call that a sustainable business.
Imagine you pissoff Jeff Bezos, sould it be cool if he pays your employer to fire you, your landlord to get rid of you, hires a private detective to dig up dirt on you and offers every future employer money just to ruin your carreer?
I'm curious how much other major brands pay to stay in their places
Coke arguably pays megabucks to have giant displays in prime locations. Those locations have limited space so Coke taking up one is
Similarly, IIUC, companies pay to have their products put in conspicuous places in stores like Walmart, Target, etc. Only rich companies can afford to always get the spots that stick out the most.
I don't know if those are compariable. Google pays Apple to be the default search engine seems no different than Coke paying to be the first soda on the aisle or to be featured on the edge of the aisle. People are still free to pick a different search engine or go into the soda aisle.
Of course in retail another tactic is to make a bunch of products that appear to be different but are all basically the same. I think Crest or Colgate and 15 kinds of mouthwash all of which have the same "active ingredient" at the same concentration. The goal is to fill up the shelves with your products so there is no room left for the competition's products since shelf space is limited.
From an economic perspective they are quite comparable.
However, the complaint isn't asserting that such marketing practices are inherently illegal or harmful to a competitive marketplace.
The accusation is that google abused its market dominance to render any competition virtually impossible, or at least fiscally unfeasible. If the market for search engines that also control the end-to-end ad/marketing space like Google does were genuinely competitive, this practice wouldn't be illegal according to the DOJ. Even if a company as unethical, obtrusive, innovative, and effective as Google existed and wanted to compete in this field, thered be almost no way of breaking into the market. That also explains why the charges are happening now instead of when they began this practice in the early 2000's, to answer the defense's question asked regarding why this happening now after all this time.
IMO, the most telling and head-scratching detail is Google's claim that they face competition in the search engine marketplace with the likes of Amazon, GitHub, tik tok, meta and even Expedia? All because people don't have to use Google to access those products.
It's ridiculous to claim just because you have information and a search function, it's somehow a competitor to Google. Feels insulting they claim all of those entirely different products, which don't seek to index the web and provide general search capabilities, qualify as competitors.
> Google pays Apple to be the default search engine seems no different than Coke paying to be the first soda on the aisle or to be featured on the edge of the aisle. People are still free to pick a different search engine or go into the soda aisle.
It feels a little different to me because changing the default search engine requires more steps than simply walking down the aisle and it's obvious that the drink aisle has more drinks. Finding the search engine settings is rather difficult for the average user if they even know that there's settings for Safari, especially now that some of the settings are in Safari itself and others are tucked away in the Settings app.
In my mind, it seems it would be more comparable if iOS had you choose the default search engine at setup and listed Google first or every shopping cart in a grocery store already had Coke in it, depending on which direction you wanted to make them comparable.
Sounds like bullshit and at least one site agrees with my intuition:
> Legend: Because of the advertising value of having its products featured at Disney theme parks, Coca Cola provides Disneyland with all of its beverage products free of charge.
>Behind the Legend: This is true, but highly misleading. For years, Coke has had an advantage over rival Pepsi because it provides its products free of charge to all of its customers. The company makes up the loss by requiring that beverages only be sold in official cups or containers -- and charging an enormous amount for those contains. The container charge is based on a sliding scale depending on the customer. Individual consumers, purchasing beverages at a grocery or convenience store, pay only a few cents for the can or bottle in which their beverage comes. At the other end of the scale, movie theaters and theme parks like Disneyland pay as much as $2.00 for a single drink cup, making the exorbitant prices charged for drinks at those locations completely understandable.
innovating is hard and haphazard, paying to defend your position is expensive but easy and incredibly predictable
i'd be very surprised if any large company with a commanding market share isn't spending a significant chunk of change on lobbying and other ways of locking newcomers out of their market
It's standard practice to offload truckloads of cash on marteking while you dominate the market. The purpose always is to stay on top. I personally think it should be illegal to spend $1 on marketing for companies above a certain size
Honestly ... Sometimes it feels like it. If you are out and are looking for a non-alcoholic beverage you are often limited to Coca Cola products. If you you then would prefer to have a non-sugary drink you are often left with water.
(Background: German bar and clubbing scene; exceptions apply; this has somewhat changed with 0.0% beverages)
Wouldn’t it be really good for google if the DOJ banned paying for default placement? I mean it seems like an untenable result to say that anyone but google can pay for default placement. So if paying for default is not okay, then that just saves google a lot of money (since google knows most people will pick them if presented a slate of options).
Most people would pick Google if there was no default option.
Most people don’t change the default option though. If Google didn’t (or couldn’t by law) pay such large sums, someone else (e.g. Bing) would pay a bit less and become the default. Even though most people prefer Google over Bing, there is still a significant incumbent advantage for being the default option.
There's a difference in exclusive dealing by a market leader and by a new entrant.
Of course, if and as a new entrant garners increased share, rules should change to reflect that.
The problem is that market dominance tends to be a positive feedback loop, for reasons not associated with actual product superiority. Ultimately it quashes choice, competition, new innovation, and the like.
Current US antitrust legal theory mostly ignores this based on the Bork / Posner / Director (all Chicago School) tradition. See Cory Doctorow's new book Chokepoint Capitalism for a revised take: <https://doctorow.medium.com/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism-b8...>
Either letting the user choose, or the developers setting a default (ideally with the interests of their users in mind). Of course, the latter is subject to interpretation, and a privacy-focused application might make a different choice than standard consumer products.
Chrome showed us that people will change the default when something is clearly a better experience for the user, even when the entrenched giant was Microsoft.
Just like with what happened with IE, as Google Search becomes worse and worse quality with advertising cruft, SEO spam etc. filling the first pages of results there will come a point where they’ve lowered the bar enough for a competitor to come in.
That said, I’d still prefer to be asked on first use “which search engine would you like to use?”.
The entrenched giant was Mozilla with Firefox. Chrome was distributed as malware included in various installers including Flash updates. And as scareware when using Google services.
I default to Bing on desktop, and DDG on mobile. For a specific search, I often give-up, and begrudgingly revert.
It's obvious that Google search has become the better product, but quality has wavered in the past 5 years, it's been on an uptrend. That on occasion the search task reports a 1.4s delay is actually reassuring.
Functioning operator search, Scholar, and Books seem to be the distinct advantage Google has for many of my use cases.
My biggest issue with all of the big players is the gaslighting and erosion. They need to dogfood everything. When my keyboard ime is suddenly under attack, and it gets stuck that way for months, it's time to look at how you're doing things.
That's the interesting thing about this. It's an open question of which monopolist is abusing their power here. Apple threatening to use their iPhone monopoly to bully their way into search or Google paying off Apple to forestall competition.
Google’s deal with Apple is specifically for iPhone’s built in web browser. Apple was working on a web search engine, but killed it off after Google renewed their deal the first time.
An Apple search engine would require that people who want to be listed submit to the Web Search Guidelines which would require things like "respecting DNT", "allowing users to log in with Apple if they offer social login", "supporting Apple Pay", "no spamming", "no rehosting scraped content", and collect a 30% commission on purchases made with their special "products" results. It would be privacy first, collect no information about a user's searches but generate a ranking on a generic index based on an on-device/in-browser ML model. Apple would spend comparably little effort making sense of the messy content on random websites and instead make websites provide a curated, easily digestible format to them. And sites would bend the knee to access iPhone users.
Never before would you see so many people on Reddit/HN pissed off at how successful it is.
I can’t find it for the life of me now. But someone did create a web interface to Apple’s “search engine”. It’s used in different parts of the interface.
On the other hand, Apple has been operating a podcast indexer for over 15 years that anyone can submit podcast RSS feeds and has had a fully documented API for searching its index the entire time. Any third party client can use it.
No, Apple never stores the audio on its servers unlike Spotify.
It's interesting that they haven't considering their stance on privacy and user data. Maybe Facebook can cough up some dough to become a default social media app.
Apple slaps down Facebook but allows Google to pay to be the default surveillance capitalist search provider?
Those things are all true, but if I search Google for: 510 555 1212
It shouldn't take massive AI and 25 phds to find a result for a company that lists 510-555-1212 as their phone number.
Ok maybe it does. But it's not like Google is a startup and they haven't had time to get around to it.
And add in the fact that if I do search 510 555-1212 I really wish they could atleast bring up (510) 555-1212.
I guess for now I'll give them a pass on 510.555.1212
Wow, you're smarter than I am, or at least more persistent. I ran into the same thing and I figured it was some sort of privacy issue or something and just switched to looking the numbers up on Bing. Pretty sure it used to work to google numbers without the dashes.
They definitely do. But I'm usually searching the number of real people I talked to that put in a lead. Eventually I can find something usually, I just have to try various forms of formatting usually.
Readit News
For example, you can type in something like "purpose of life" and it will say it has 2 billion results, yet if you try to go to result 500, you can't, it will stop at 400, then change the number to 400 results only on the last page.
This happens for every query. Google lies about the astronomical number of search results, then only shows a few hundred at most.
And I'd bet the reason why it's still there (I left Search in 2014) is because < 0.1% of users ever hit the next page. Everybody else just refines their query to a different search. It's a holdover from when search engines were bad (i.e. around 1998) and you had to go through 10 pages of results to get the one you were looking for. As a result, Google expends approximately zero engineering effort on pages 2-20 of the results - I know that in the 4 visual redesigns I worked on, we didn't touch them once. It wouldn't surprise me if the response to flack on this is to just get rid of all pages other than the first one - it avoids the issue entirely and wouldn't affect 99.9% of users.
The technical reason for this behavior, as others have remarked below, is pagination. Ranking across the full result set is a very complex calculation, and it can depend on some factors that are basically random (eg. timeouts and failures in backend servers). It'd make pagination basically useless if the same results you already went through show up on a later page because the ranking is different. This requires that the full result set be cached. You can cache 400-1000 results for each of the queries that the 0.1% of users who actually hit "Next" care about, but you'd have a big issue caching 2 billion results for each of those queries.
This is false for other search terms. Search for "meaning of life". At the top left of the first result page it says "About 10,620,000,000 results (0.56 seconds)".
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/SQq7Snl
Logged into Google, Safari 15.6.1.
edit:
Here's a good one:
"starfish buttercup pickle mouse"
Page 1 of 2 says
> About 589,000 results (0.62 seconds)
Page 2 of 2 says
> Page 2 of about 22 results (0.36 seconds)
Oops! Must have been one of those common "multiply by 26,772" errors.
At the bottom of the page, it says "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 22 already displayed." with an option to show all results.
With all results shown, the total result count goes to 59, so only off by 9,983x! But who's counting? Definitely not Google.
Such a shame for basically one-trick pony who doesnt understand that staying relevant long term means that trick must be and remain a damn good proposition.
Its true I eventually give up and do ie duckduckgo and if that fails I try to refine searches even more (but this rarely works since I already start with it as default)
I have so many complaints about your product, it drives me wild.
How many people even look at organic results versus the paid-for ads that display at top?
It should be illegal for anyone to be able to purchase ads for another company's trademark. Apple, Google, and Amazon are all extorting companies by forcing them to buy ads to protect their own brand. (My own brand is being attacked by a competitor in this way, and it's ridiculous!)
The only reason anyone uses these systems at scale is that third parties were available in aggregate early on to provide content. You built your product off of our backs. And now that the power dynamic has shifted, we're cattle to soak for as much revenue as possible.
It also seems like the only reason Google is dominant is bad behavior. Paying for default search engine status. Being the default in all of their other unrelated platforms. Achieving browser monopoly.
I've recently started seeing Chrome ads and billboards everywhere. Google purchased a huge percentage of my city's billboard ad inventory for their "better on Chrome" campaign. It's as if Google knows this is the reason for everything. Where except for Apple devices is Chrome not dominant?
This whole cartel needs a muzzle.
Device companies should not be ad companies.
Ad companies should not be service companies.
Service companies should not be content and production companies, since they can favor their own and price pressure the rest.
We have a world where the top tech conglomerates are all of these and then some. They've cast a wide net and turned the whole world of consumer interaction into a supermarket, where we now have to pay for "shelf space" to interact with customers, pay to protect our brands from unfair sniping, pay to grow, obey asinine rules to build a product that fits their desired shape, integrate with their payments and login stack (so we're even less in a relationship with our customers).
It's a far cry from the open web of the 90's. Really bad for small companies, new startups, and even consumers. We can barely afford to build our products with all the margin that goes to Google, Apple, and the rest.
I wish the rank and file could feel this. :(
You are confusing users with queries. A lot more than 0.1% of users use the other result pages - double digit percent certainly. But if Google is doing a good job they don’t do it very often.
"Page 14 of about 184,000,000 results (0.83 seconds)" "Page 15 of about 149 results (0.76 seconds)"
"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 149 already displayed."
Maybe it's time Google spent a bit more time on their search engine, including pages 2-20.
Unlike today, right? Where actual search results... represent less than 10% of the page and the rest is irrelevant information and ads in Google search https://grumpy.website/post/0XCmMC-2O
> It'd make pagination basically useless if the same results you already went through show up on a later page because the ranking is different.
A bit off topic: I have always wondered why search result is the only feed on the web (apart from HN) that has not adopted infinite scrolling. This is a good explanation.
Extreme profiling Google? :-)
Search engines are still bad.
Having to go through 10 pages of results to find something that matches what I was looking for is one of the reasons I stopped using Google. What I want is almost never on the first few pages of search results.
Deleted Comment
> That’s hundreds of results and usually enough for deep research needs. You can enter a related query to refine your search and learn more.
is both patronizing and offensive. 400 result is 4 pages of 100 hits, the way literally anyone who does research on google is going to use it(I haven't used a 10 hit Google page in well over a decade). Not only that, I can browse through 4 pages in like 5 minutes, really really inadequate for "deep research needs", and really anything beyond cursory convenience linking. I've completely dismissed Google Search for in depth topics as a result because of the multiple occasions I tried in vain to find a page I'd visited previously with Google (that I ended up finding again with browser history) that just couldn't be found, even going back and trying to make a search that works.
> and most people are not going to be able to go through all millions of those.
this is totally fair but 400 is just way way too few, if you bumped it up to 4k that would be a step in the right direction. Additionally, by my thinking, Google is missing out on the people who are willing to wade through thousands of search results to find quality content, as it stands now those pages have very little way to break into the top 400, but a complex search term followed by a user wading deep into the results to find a specific page where they go and don't return would seem to show any extremely strong signal that that specific page should probably be ranked somewhat higher.
That doesn't sound like an estimate to me. To me, that is intentional misleading.
Searching for [google] states about 25 billion results, but it can only show me two pages of search results.
Searching for [meaning of life] states about 10 billion results, but it can only show me 212 results.
Searching for [meaning of life life] states about 7 billions results, but it can only show me 184 results.
It is impossible that these results are correct. They are clearly filtered, and the count of results is inflated for every single search.
Clicking on the text you recommended to expand all search results doesn't do that. It still limits the results, just to 300-400 instead of 200. In no case I tested could I get to more than 20 pages of results.
Maybe that's just how Google Search works, but the story points on your JIRA tickets must be a sight to see. :)
It seems like the high numbers are displayed to mislead about the speed and efficiency of the search, google knows no human will go through 10 thousands of result pages. And ads are only sold for page 1.
Let's not forget, that Eric Schmidt said that more than 1 result is a bug.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4
This touches on the scope and hubris of Google and other companies that mediate reality for us. They think they have 'the truth', they know it and will give it to us, and if we refuse their truth, they will attempt to train us until we get it, in schools, the workplace, online, etc.
It's also why they will become irrelevant. If there is nothing organic about their results because the algo filters thoughtcrime ideas out, people will continue to move away. Thank god.
I personally use presearch and feel happier that the results are more natural. But nothing is perfect.
Hopefully someone will disrupt you soon and give us back the real Internet.
Deleted Comment
What happens when a bank teller asks me during a credit application how many assets I have and I estimate about 10 billion bucks, when it later turns out I own the three dollars in my wallet and a strip of chewing gum? Am I (criminally) liable in that case?
I joined Google in Nov. 2005, and "The Life of a Query" was one of the classes that everyone took. Even then, we were told that figures like "110,000 results" were an estimate, and if you kept hitting Next, you'd only get about 1,000. Maybe now it's 400, I don't know.
What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can?
No, I consider it accurate.
I still consider Google to be marginally useful these days, but the quality has slipped and the UX has yet to keep pace.
> What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can?
Yes, that is what people expect when someone says "I found a billion hits on what you're looking for, here is the pile." How does this being wholly inaccurate by orders of magnitude to what the user can retrieve benefit the user?
Sounds like they're using biased estimators for the number of search results. If the estimates weren't biased, the underestimated numbers would balance out the overestimated ones, so for every query where they fall short by 2 billion there would be one that has two billion more hits than shown by the UI (or two billion with one hit more).
> The word "lie" is kinda hysterical, don't you think?
If it's true that they show biased estimates, I'd say that's a pretty adequate description.
Yes.
If it's inaccurate and misleading, it's a bug.
If they've noticed it and kept it, that bug has become a feature.
No, I'd expect that it would be able to generate subsequent pages on the fly.
I was an avid user of altavista, hotbot, yahoo, and early google. I recall that I was always able to 'page' through an absurd number of results. But I am old and have a bad memory, maybe I'm wrong
[0] https://the-digital-reader.com/2019/03/27/did-you-know-googl...
No, it’s 100% accurate. Your response is delusional and a poor attempt at manipulation.
> What do you expect -- the engine collects all 2 billion and puts them in a queue somewhere, just so that the one person in 500,000 who actually tries to see them all can?
If it isn’t possible for users to see those results then you should only display the number of results that can be accessed. That would be “not lying” in this case.
Dead Comment
1. Google has to return a result count.
2. It can't/won't be accurate.
3. Therefore it's fine to provide a count 10 billion times to large.
The jump from 2 to 3 is dodgy and I see people questioning it. But I don't see anybody challenging point 1. Why does google have to give a number at all? If google can't/won't give an accurate result count, then they should give a result count at all. I don't care what technical limitations might complicate giving an accurate result count, that's no excuse for lying when silence is a perfectly valid choice.
Obviously they provide the count for marketing reasons. That's an explanation for the lying, but not an excuse.
>3. Therefore it's fine to provide a count 10 billion times to (sic) large.
LOL, what? No way!
Searching for [product 1234] has "about" 157 million results -> narrow the search -> [product 1234 bookshelf] has about 3.4 million results.
Searching for [product 1234defg] has "about" 280 results -> widen the search -> [product 1234 defg] has about 54000 results.
If you just show a number that's around 400 for essentially every query, you don't have any feedback on whether to widen or narrow the search if you don't see the result in the first couple of pages.
Ya know, that whole thing indexes are for by definition.
Oh, but if they did that they wouldn't have a convenient way to implement dropping something from public view either, so there's that.
Just one of many reasons why my default search engine is DDG now. DDG kind of sucks but these days it sucks less than Google.
Search for "couple having sex" then set the filter to "past month". Zero results on bing and ddg. It started around late January, early February. Other things that would lead to porn also fail like "woman f*cking dildo", "shemale", that's all I tried. They'll show result, but if you filter for 24hrs, past week, past month, they're blank
GitHub does this too, if you click on the Issues page and change the search query it searches all of github, not just your own repos. But you can't go to the last page of the results (not sure about the max page number, but there is a limit and for good reasons).
Somewhere a product manager is beaming with pride
Check these videos out.
TruthStream's production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zyJB45ewvU
Jimmy from BrightInsight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWbytHBp0zI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O_NvPpbsbw
Deleted Comment
I've seen this around a lot, but I have yet to see proof that it's a "lie" in any way. Perhaps provide some evidence if you have it?
More likely, there ARE 2 million results, but they're not going to show them all to you, because you are not economically able to pay them enough to do so. Now, if you want to pay Google a billion dollars, you can probably get all 2 million search results. They'll probably deliver them on gold-plated floppy disks if you want.
Anyway it ALSO it serves as an important hint that there are LOTS of results, and you should NARROW down your search. Wouldn't it be weirder if you searched for "meaning of life" and it said "200 results"?
(This exaggeration is about 1 million times less severe than Google's.)
Never noticed this !
Dead Comment
> “The reason they partner with Google isn’t because they had to; it’s because they want to,” Schmidtlein said.
Mozilla would disappear overnight if Google stopped paying them.
Good riddance IMO (even though I love FF and it's the only browser I use). They haven't been able to build a sustainable business despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars per year from Google. A flower shop on a street corner can get a better ROI. Mozilla's management is incompetent and shady.
Sorry, my words above feel gross. I don't normally write sarcastic comments, and I don't like to, but I was a little put off by the "good riddance" comment.
I just mean... aren't some entities cost centres that pay dividends later, sometimes non-monetarily. Kinda like children. Not everything needs to compete is the market and be judged a failure if it doesn't succeed through the single metric markets care about, right?
Anyhow, respect (despite my sarcastic start :) )
That's where Mozilla is.
In Mozilla's case especially, such a gamble ("gamble"—I really don't think it's that out-there) seems eminently worth it, since they've been treading water at best for over a decade. What's the worst that can happen? They fail? Already happening.
I suspect this entire trend (across the economy, not just at Mozilla) is due to some combo of our modern intense aversion for taking responsibility for anything whatsoever, and pervasive self-dealing in the management class. Board won't replace the "right" kind of person with the "wrong" kind because it's Simply Not Done—why, if anyone in the top half of the intelligence bell curve and an OK work ethic could do their jobs with just a little experience and training, they might no longer command such insane salaries! Can't have that.
But, I'm open to the possibility that it did in fact become unworkable, for some reason I don't know about, to just train people into these positions as-needed, and in fact we do have to pay stupid amounts of money to a tiny, incestuous c-suite class who are the only possible candidates for these roles, or else everything will fall apart.
Yes, and plenty of guys have been saying that since day 0 of the new management taking over, only to get ignored and hushed away. Yet, here we are 8(!) years later :).
New unpopular opinion: Mozilla needs to disappear. The faster it does the better, as it is already dead.
I did not realize currency trade was constrained to your sensibilities; my bad. Private property, free markets! Until two parties enter into an arrangement then you demand they open themselves to business with others?
Right, but the argument goes that the only reason Google pays Mozilla so much is to prop up the competition. Google may have calculated that it would be preferable to pay the hundreds of millions, rather than have Firefox die just leaving Chrome/Safari.
Thus, it's not really a sustainable business, but rather being the lucky benefactor of some scheme. Their value is only in being 'the other guy', not in actually creating a valuable product for consumers. I wouldn't call that a sustainable business.
Thats what free market allows.
> despite
"In spite of paying my 30 year old live-at-home son a $100,000 per year allowance, he has been unable to find and hold a full-time job"
Coke arguably pays megabucks to have giant displays in prime locations. Those locations have limited space so Coke taking up one is
Similarly, IIUC, companies pay to have their products put in conspicuous places in stores like Walmart, Target, etc. Only rich companies can afford to always get the spots that stick out the most.
I don't know if those are compariable. Google pays Apple to be the default search engine seems no different than Coke paying to be the first soda on the aisle or to be featured on the edge of the aisle. People are still free to pick a different search engine or go into the soda aisle.
Of course in retail another tactic is to make a bunch of products that appear to be different but are all basically the same. I think Crest or Colgate and 15 kinds of mouthwash all of which have the same "active ingredient" at the same concentration. The goal is to fill up the shelves with your products so there is no room left for the competition's products since shelf space is limited.
However, the complaint isn't asserting that such marketing practices are inherently illegal or harmful to a competitive marketplace.
The accusation is that google abused its market dominance to render any competition virtually impossible, or at least fiscally unfeasible. If the market for search engines that also control the end-to-end ad/marketing space like Google does were genuinely competitive, this practice wouldn't be illegal according to the DOJ. Even if a company as unethical, obtrusive, innovative, and effective as Google existed and wanted to compete in this field, thered be almost no way of breaking into the market. That also explains why the charges are happening now instead of when they began this practice in the early 2000's, to answer the defense's question asked regarding why this happening now after all this time.
IMO, the most telling and head-scratching detail is Google's claim that they face competition in the search engine marketplace with the likes of Amazon, GitHub, tik tok, meta and even Expedia? All because people don't have to use Google to access those products.
It's ridiculous to claim just because you have information and a search function, it's somehow a competitor to Google. Feels insulting they claim all of those entirely different products, which don't seek to index the web and provide general search capabilities, qualify as competitors.
"no the users aren't our customers, they're the product, and the market for their attention is very competitive srsly!"
It feels a little different to me because changing the default search engine requires more steps than simply walking down the aisle and it's obvious that the drink aisle has more drinks. Finding the search engine settings is rather difficult for the average user if they even know that there's settings for Safari, especially now that some of the settings are in Safari itself and others are tucked away in the Settings app.
In my mind, it seems it would be more comparable if iOS had you choose the default search engine at setup and listed Google first or every shopping cart in a grocery store already had Coke in it, depending on which direction you wanted to make them comparable.
> Legend: Because of the advertising value of having its products featured at Disney theme parks, Coca Cola provides Disneyland with all of its beverage products free of charge.
>Behind the Legend: This is true, but highly misleading. For years, Coke has had an advantage over rival Pepsi because it provides its products free of charge to all of its customers. The company makes up the loss by requiring that beverages only be sold in official cups or containers -- and charging an enormous amount for those contains. The container charge is based on a sliding scale depending on the customer. Individual consumers, purchasing beverages at a grocery or convenience store, pay only a few cents for the can or bottle in which their beverage comes. At the other end of the scale, movie theaters and theme parks like Disneyland pay as much as $2.00 for a single drink cup, making the exorbitant prices charged for drinks at those locations completely understandable.
i'd be very surprised if any large company with a commanding market share isn't spending a significant chunk of change on lobbying and other ways of locking newcomers out of their market
(Background: German bar and clubbing scene; exceptions apply; this has somewhat changed with 0.0% beverages)
They are paying them to not compete. Isn't that the definition of antitrust?
Most people don’t change the default option though. If Google didn’t (or couldn’t by law) pay such large sums, someone else (e.g. Bing) would pay a bit less and become the default. Even though most people prefer Google over Bing, there is still a significant incumbent advantage for being the default option.
Of course, if and as a new entrant garners increased share, rules should change to reflect that.
The problem is that market dominance tends to be a positive feedback loop, for reasons not associated with actual product superiority. Ultimately it quashes choice, competition, new innovation, and the like.
Current US antitrust legal theory mostly ignores this based on the Bork / Posner / Director (all Chicago School) tradition. See Cory Doctorow's new book Chokepoint Capitalism for a revised take: <https://doctorow.medium.com/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism-b8...>
Just like with what happened with IE, as Google Search becomes worse and worse quality with advertising cruft, SEO spam etc. filling the first pages of results there will come a point where they’ve lowered the bar enough for a competitor to come in.
That said, I’d still prefer to be asked on first use “which search engine would you like to use?”.
It's obvious that Google search has become the better product, but quality has wavered in the past 5 years, it's been on an uptrend. That on occasion the search task reports a 1.4s delay is actually reassuring.
Functioning operator search, Scholar, and Books seem to be the distinct advantage Google has for many of my use cases.
My biggest issue with all of the big players is the gaslighting and erosion. They need to dogfood everything. When my keyboard ime is suddenly under attack, and it gets stuck that way for months, it's time to look at how you're doing things.
"To list your site on Apple please submit your DUNS number and pay the $100 annual fee?"
Never before would you see so many people on Reddit/HN pissed off at how successful it is.
https://cmitsolutions.com/hartford/apples-web-crawler-appleb...
On the other hand, Apple has been operating a podcast indexer for over 15 years that anyone can submit podcast RSS feeds and has had a fully documented API for searching its index the entire time. Any third party client can use it.
No, Apple never stores the audio on its servers unlike Spotify.
Apple slaps down Facebook but allows Google to pay to be the default surveillance capitalist search provider?
A number calls me.
I type in the number with spaces to Google to try and find it. No results. Nothing.
I add dashes. Results come up.
I put the area code in parentheses, different results come up.
If google can't figure out how to search 9 digit numbers against phone numbers correctly, I'm not sure I can trust them for anything.
Ok maybe it does. But it's not like Google is a startup and they haven't had time to get around to it.
And add in the fact that if I do search 510 555-1212 I really wish they could atleast bring up (510) 555-1212.
I guess for now I'll give them a pass on 510.555.1212
I wonder whether google has nerfed their own search results for phone numbers and email addresses.