How Quickly We Forget: Google's Competitors Falsely Claim Google Dominates Because It Was 'First'
from the history-lesson dept
Well, the second part of the Senate's anti-Google hearings have wrapped up, and like the first part, they seemed pretty misguided. It was a lot of repeating things about how Google is big. There were some reasonable points that do bear more scrutiny, concerning some of Google's business dealings with partners, but, on the whole, people seemed to be making a big deal out of nothing.For example, one Senator continually quizzed WSGR lawyer Susan Creighton over whether or not Google "scraped" content. Creighton seemed to stumble over the question, but the proper answer is of course it does, because that's how search engines work. Yelp's CEO Jeremy Stoppelman complained about Google taking the same content it indexed for search, and then using it elsewhere. But no one mentioned the basic concept of fair use. If it's a problem for Google to scrape and use content -- as was implied repeatedly in the hearing -- doesn't that make any search engine illegal?
But, the most ridiculous testimony came from Thomas Barnett, a lawyer for Covington & Burling, who was representing a bunch of Google competitors who put together an operation called FairSearch. When asked about whether or not Google was a monopoly player, Barnett flat out lied, claiming that Google is dominant and can't be unseated "because it got there first."
Woah!
I know they say that the history books are written by the winners, but this seems like a case where the history books are being revised by the losers. Anyone who was actually paying attention when Google came on the scene thought Google was a joke. The search engine market was locked up and there was no room for competition. We had Altavista, Lycos, Inktomi, Excite and a few others as well. People thought Google was a crazy idea. Who would possibly enter the search market -- especially since Yahoo really seemed to have the market wrapped up (without its own search engine, but partnering with Altavista and Inktomi, before later partnering with Google)? It was a dead business.
Google wasn't first. It was seriously late to the party.
And that's really the point that's important here. Markets that look locked up in the tech/internet world very rarely stay locked up for long. Five years ago, MySpace absolutely dominated the social networking space. Where are they today? Ten years ago, Yahoo was the dominant destination site. Fifteen years ago AOL was how people got on the internet. Fifteen years ago, Netscape was how you surfed the web. All of these players were dominant with huge market share. How are they all doing today? Which one needed government regulation to break their hold on the market? Things change. Markets change. Rewriting history and bitching about Google because it's big misses the point. If Google does bad things, there are hundreds of entrepreneurs out there just waiting to take parts of the market away from the company.
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Filed Under: antitrust, competition, innovation, search
Companies: altavista, excite, fairsearch, google, inktomi, lycos, yahoo
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Don't forget
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Re: Don't forget
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How else are lawyers going to get paid? Will someone please think of the lawyer!!!!
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Baidu! Baidu! Baidu!
We all will need to learn mandarin is that not marvelous?
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Re: Don't forget
The reason is pretty simple: it takes significant resources and effort to bring something truly new to market. The second-comers don't have to expend much of that effort and can instead put the effort into making the thing better.
As Mike frequently says, and he's 100% correct in this, it's all about the execution, not the idea. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Good execution is rare and difficult.
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Yes But
There's no point in being upset--the shadow puppets are just reading their scripts, playing their roles.
Just ask yourself the standard crime investigation questions:
Who has the opportunity?
Who stands to benefit?
Who has the money?
These are generally easy to pull apart--you can start & end with "follow the money" as the other questions will be answered in answering only that one. Or, more succinctly: It was never about "justice" or fairness or any of the other ballyhoo they're going to trot out.
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Re: Yes But
With the crap that Facebook has pulled in the past two years, I have to say they are the prime suspect.
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god damnit...
This week on will it blend: lawyers. Result: yes.
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Re: god damnit...
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Why does everyone act as if there were no search engines before Google came along?
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Don't let facts get in the way of a good hearing.
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C-SPAN video of the Google hearing.
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Also, he states that Google is quickly becoming a monopoly in mobile operating systems. Where the heck is the O Rly owl on this one? I like Android, and it's market share is certainly increasing, but to say it's quickly becoming a monopoly in mobile operating systems, along with his other doozy about Google being first, it's obvious this guy either doesn't have a clue, or is willing to lie through his teeth. Neither option looks good. Maybe he's there as the court jester.
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�Is Android really free software?� by Richard Stallman, September 19, 2011:
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There's more issues to it as google has certain apps it requires on the phone to be associated with Google, and most wireless providers are requiring phone manufacturers be compliant with google's association because they want google's apps. But that's not google dictating on it's own.
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�Android as a whole� includes all of Android?
Yes or no?
�Android as a whole� is just a part of Android, but not all of it.
Yes or no?
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They pay Microsoft for the privilege
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Plus, isn't android 3 the tablet version and not the phone one?
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(Anyone remember that move of Boise(?) from the Microsoft Monopoly trial? it was brilliant)
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and who could forget askjeeves?
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I think this should explain it perfectly...
Because they have bigger balls than Google. And you know what happens when you get "bigness". Everyone's looking to take you down a peg.
It doesn't matter that it's non profit. It doesn't matter if they happen to be a great browser that I use after SRWare Iron.
No, they're evil because everyone knows it's popular. Suck on that, Netscape!
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But as for evil otherwise? I'm not sure why anyone would say so. So they partner with Google - I'm not sure if that's evil, but if it is, you can always switch search engines.
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2 hours later and it's now up to a staggering 300 mb. Admittedly, the fact that I now have 4+2 tabs open might have something to do with it.
You do use the latest (stable) version right? 'Cause I remember there being a major bug a couple of versions ago.
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It's funny to see this hearing now that Google is about to lose it's search edge. Maybe they'll "tweak" the engine again...
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WE are tweaking the engine.
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StackOverflow
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(Seriously, back in the dialup days I had this phone book-sized book of websites. I used AltaVista later, but eventually I got sick of how cluttered their main page was, same as everyone else that used them. Then one day I heard about a new search engine called "Google"...)
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Re: Ah the internet phone book I had one of those!
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Google too big? What about the banks?
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30 years ago, Microsoft was the big bad, now look...
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Re: 30 years ago, Microsoft was the big bad, now look...
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He's still right either way.
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Not the same thing at all.
Have you used an alternative to Windows or Office today?
I can do that in 2 seconds with Google.
It's simply not the same thing. Google offers a commodity product using open standards and platform agnostic interfaces. You can defect to another search engine right now before I am done with this post and then defect to yet another before I am done with it.
Google doesn't have the same kind of vendorlock.
Microsoft is Hotel California.
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Re: 30 years ago, Microsoft was the big bad, now look...
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It's dangerous thinking to fall into the trap of believing that anarchy would necessarily be preferable to even a dysfunctional central government.
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http://www.c-span.org/Events/Google-Exec-Testifies-Before-Congress/10737424248-1/
One thing that really upset me is the fact that they threw all this data at Google without giving Google the opportunity to pre study the data. How can you expect Google to respond to data, statistics, and studies it has not even had the chance to read?
That's not how court hearings work. Both parties are allowed the opportunity to study the evidence. Why is this senate meeting so different?
and I seem to somewhat understand Google's responses, but they seem to have flue over the senators head.
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Vote this person out of office. Any politician who's primary focus is not to fix IP law in the right direction needs to be put on a voter black list and voted out of office ASAP!!! Unbelievable.
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The hearing talks about a loss in ranking as "costing" a business money. Their ranking went down, it just cost them x dollars. The underlying assumption is that the business is entitled to such a high ranking to begin with.
No one is even entitled a spot on Google's search engine. It's Google's search engine, they can promote or ignore whoever they want. If Google wants to promote their own brands, I see nothing wrong with that. For years, other companies like Disney have done cross promotion on television, theme parks, radio, etc... and the government never did much (is it that these other companies provide/have provided politicians with more in campaign contributions?). Google doesn't even have access to creating its own television programs and broadcasting them on cable channels, radio, and broadcasted television stations, so they can hardly be even considered cross promoting. Yet we have big media companies that control a huge promotion of all of these information delivery platforms, it costs the consumer a lot (the U.S. offers inferior Internet access at higher prices than most other countries thanks to the government establishment of monopoly power) yet the government does absolutely nothing about that.
Why is it when Google suddenly promotes its own brand, it's a big deal?
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many other countries (not most, sorry).
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That bothered me, too. But for a different reason.
A few senators hearing at that hearing, Klobuchar, in particular, seemed rather upset that Google wasn't providing �certainty� to businesses. The underlying presupposition is that Google is supposed to work for businesses.
And I was thinking �But what about users?� Apparently not important to Klobuchar.
That is, a few senators seemed all upset that Google wasn't screwing the voters over hard enough.
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Google who?
Then Alta Vista came along...
Who is this Google of which you speak??!
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Who says Google has it locked up? They are living in a dark box.
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Of course Google changes the search results
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Yelp
Google licensed Yelp reviews (which were blocked by the public). After the license expired, Google used them anyway and told Yelp, that was the only choice, or to get kicked out of the index. That is the active of a monopolist.
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Google was the first to actually cache a page in a manner that the cached page could be accessed. Google was the first to scrape images, to scrape and sort news stories, and so on.
The differences in the way Google obtained, stored, and manipulated both data (page content) and images was unique. They were literally first.
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Google was NOT the first to cache (or actually index) pages, Google was definitely not the first to index images and create thumbnails from them, and google was definitely not the first to index, sort (which is part of indexing) or so called 'scrape' news items.
The only main thing Google did first was the process of Ranking pages based on how many other pages linked back to them, they looked at the many to many relationships that each unique page had compared to the whole. That was the unique, and using database relational theory and models the most efficient normalisation, point that Google brought to the market.
They might be the first in the way they manipulated data, but that's like saying Toyota was the first to come up with the slogan "Oh what a feeling", it doesn't mean anything in the context of what the question was.
They are stating that Google was the first Search Engine, and I suspect so are you.
Gopher, Archie, Wandex, and the major precursor to Google et.al and what we equate indexing/crawling to today, 'Webcrawler' disagree.
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The scraping of news items, the scraping of image content was new and unique in that it wasn't the original intention of a search engine, but rather an outcrop of the unique way the Google collected and cached content.
A fed B that fed C and so on.
Gopher, Archie, and so many others were mostly "human made indexes" (think early Yahoo, example). You submitted your pages to them, and then they "indexed" them. Recursive botting of websites was considered very unwelcome at the time, a quick way to get a call placed to your university's IT department to shut down your "project".
The earlier search engine bots (Hotbot, Alta Vista, Excite, etc) we all very superficial, and often did not do recursive searches, and required user submission of pages for inclusion. As I mentioned before, Yahoo was a "human made index" based on user submissions.
Google changed that with massive and endless recursive botting, which is why they could scrape so much content. Basically, before Google, search engines were fairly superficial, easily gamed, and rarely "self supporting", failing to have very much depth in their indexes (mostly pointing to index pages, and not taking inside pages unless "invited".
Back in the day, search engine submission (actually visiting individual submit pages for each SE) was a major job for website owners. Google changed all of that, effectively making submissions meaningless, replaced instead with a social voting of ranked linking (which has it's own issues).
So yeah, Google was first.
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Though you forgot, not sure whether on purpose or not, Wandex by Matthew Gray (around 93 I recall) and the most important search index crawler of them all (as I stated before) Webcrawler by Brian Pinkerton in 1994.
You might like to read at that link either his original paper or the eventual dissertation on webcrawler which is where google got most of their underlying ideas from.
So yep, Google was First.. after those two of course. guess that makes it 3rd. Maybe it was the first Third one.. ;)
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Getting there first means getting there first, not doing better than the competition.
Although I agree Mike might have been unfair to suggest Barnett was "lying." That assumes Barnett knew he was saying something really dumb.
Hanlon's razor: Don't attribute to malice something that can be adequately explained by stupidity.
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It doesn't matter...
I'm going to make a few predictions (and you will find that I'm probably right here). Google search will be ruled a monopoly in federal court. It will eventually be regulated as a utility. The court will appoint a special master who will oversee Google's search algorithms. Page rankings will be required to be impartial and policy-free. Google will not be permitted to prevent Android adopters from using alternative search engines by default. Google will not be allowed to link directly to its own products from the search engine. Google will be required to disclose any proprietary web services linked to its search engine and used by its properties. Google will not be permitted to enter into exclusionary contracts relating to search (e.g. Google Books). Google will be required to give desktop users an obvious and visible choice (like EU's Browser Choice) of which search engine to use. Etc, etc.
This is going to happen. It doesn't matter how much money Google spreads around. It's gotten too big, and the world knows it.
I don't hate Google. I just want a level playing field. And this nonsense that Google is "afraid that users will switch" is a pathetic canard.
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I don't think you know what that word means.
I'm going to make a few predictions (and you will find that I'm probably right here). Google search will be ruled a monopoly in federal court. It will eventually be regulated as a utility. The court will appoint a special master who will oversee Google's search algorithms. Page rankings will be required to be impartial and policy-free. Google will not be permitted to prevent Android adopters from using alternative search engines by default. Google will not be allowed to link directly to its own products from the search engine. Google will be required to disclose any proprietary web services linked to its search engine and used by its properties. Google will not be permitted to enter into exclusionary contracts relating to search (e.g. Google Books). Google will be required to give desktop users an obvious and visible choice (like EU's Browser Choice) of which search engine to use. Etc, etc.
That sounds awful from a user standpoint, frankly. I don't want a bureaucrat determining if Google can improve its search results. I want Google to be able to react quickly. I don't want things like Google maps to not be available via Google. I rely on that kind of integration all the time to get stuff done.
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Re: Re: It doesn't matter...
Android? An entire operating system designed get Google in the middle of more transactions.
Google Plus? An entire social media platform designed to get Google in the middle of more transactions, and to put more of Google on every site (+1 button).
Chrome Browser? An entire free browser intended to get Google in the middle of more transactions (and to let them track you too!).
Firefox? Seemingly independant company paid a ton of money by Google for searches made from the browser toolbar
Google is the "get in the middle" company. What they are doing certainly does line up with what Microsoft was doing in the past, using their size and their power to take over markets, and to "force" (without force) users onto using their platforms.
At 60% of search, and 33% of the smart phone market (and growth between 2009 and 2010 of 600+%), and more than 10% of the direct browser market (and 32% if you consider the Firefox tie up), Google dominates the market and is well on it's way to getting as close as you can get to a monopoly without being one.
We won't even discuss how their ranking system in the end favors their own products, and how those products have been created to scavenge market from other successful companies by basically giving it all away for free.
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No... No, they do not. They don't stop anyone else from entering the marketplace, they just so happen to be the largest competitor.
"What they are doing certainly does line up with what Microsoft was doing in the past, using their size and their power to take over markets, and to "force" (without force) users onto using their platforms."
No... No it does not. Microsoft actively prevented competitors from coming into the marketplace. Google puts out products and says "here you go people, use it if you want" for the most part.
"Google dominates the market and is well on it's way to getting as close as you can get to a monopoly without being one."
But Google's domination doesn't mean that someone new can't enter. It's like saying Yahoo can't improve their own search engine and offerings because Google has the most penetration. It's a nonsensical argument.
"We won't even discuss how their ranking system in the end favors their own products, and how those products have been created to scavenge market from other successful companies by basically giving it all away for free."
Which companies have been harmed because Google's biased searches (lead by what customers, not businesses want) has harmed a competitor? I find good stuff from Google, but I find even better things through forums and Facebook. So what crimes are being committed by Google being people's go-to but not only resource?
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Re: It doesn't matter...
"Google has a monopoly on search"
No it doesn't. Anybody can switch at any time simply by entering an address into their browser, and they're spoilt for choice.
"There is no credible competition to Google in online search and advertising"
There *is* competition. How "credible" you find it is a matter of opinion, but there are clear competitors to virtually everything it does.
"It will eventually be regulated as a utility."
That would be a weird choice, but wouldn't that mean that every other company that does the same thing would need to be regulated as such?
"Page rankings will be required to be impartial and policy-free."
How would this be achieved, given that page rankings are usually determined by factors outside of Google's control, even if you believe some of the conspiracy theories? This would also backfire in some pretty spectacular ways eventually.
"Google will not be permitted to prevent Android adopters from using alternative search engines by default"
The government having a direct say in how a company builds its own software? Yeah, that will be a positive move... Should they also be stopping Apple from building iOS with its restrictions, or are you only interested in attacking Google?
"Google will be required to give desktop users an obvious and visible choice (like EU's Browser Choice) of which search engine to use"
A horrible idea, and this is both unworkable (how does Google enforce this on anything other than Chrome and Android?) and unnecessary (Chrome already gives you a choice when you first run it).
"I don't hate Google. I just want a level playing field."
Yet, everything you suggested is to cripple Google in favour of its competitors, most of whom have failed to overtake them for very good reasons (looking at you, Bing). At best, you're looking to kill some of the usefulness of Google so that inferior services can catch up. At worst, it's a horrible precedent, where any company that becomes successful in its field stands to be punished.
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Also, we know why Schmidt went and not Sergy and Larry. I suspect the other two would have stood up, given "the best legislators money can buy" the middle finger, and said something of the ilk "see you in court."
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Re: It doesn't matter...
When you install Chrome it already asks you what search engine you would like to use by default. Google, Bing, Yahoo, ect.
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forget?
google, certainly, has nothing even compared to monopoly. is the leader, simply because is the best. if it was crappy, a new site would pop up and everyone'd use that particular site over night. if it has competitors with the money to hire a layer it's not a monopoly.
"FairSearch" for me is exclusively google. fair to say, that it produces the best results in most of the cases. there still are some issues, but from what i've seen in the past few months, they are working on it.
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... oh. Damn.
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Google claims that their search results are organic, solely based on what it believes to be the best results based solely on what consumers want. It claims that its search results are not bias towards or against any particular website or business.
While I believe them, I think the point that the senate is somewhat trying to make is that, if Google is claiming that the search results are unbiased and organic and in fact they are not, then that borderlines fraudulence. It's somewhat deceptive. I have absolutely no problem with Google providing for biased results, but for them to claim that their results aren't bias when they in fact are is something that might require governmental intervention (though I do not believe that Google is doing anything deceptive, I do think they are being honest).
However, if we want to investigate Google for fraud, then we shouldn't be trying to use anti-trust laws against it when we already have more relevant anti-fraud laws that we can better use against them. The anti-trust laws seem irrelevant here.
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