The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/the-elephant-in-the-room-google-monoculture.html

by gavinballard • 15 years ago

130 85 15 years ago

bediger• 15 years ago

He makes a legit point, and he even raises the "Microsoft Monoculture" issue, asking why the folks alarmed about MSFT aren't alarmed by GOOG. I think they (and we) should be alarmed.

Nevertheless, where are all the people, pundits, piemen and PR flacks that arose back when Dan Geer et al raised that monoculture issue? Whenever someone seriously raises a software monoculture as an issue, The Big Guns come out to discredit that someone, and to dismiss the issue. Where are the pundits now?

redthrowaway2• 15 years ago

Can we get a [2009] in the title?

It would be interesting to see some updated numbers on this, especially from SO. While I don't imagine many programmers are using Bing, it would be interesting to see where DuckDuckGo ranks.

lambda• 15 years ago

Even if Bing isn't all that popular with programmers, I'm pretty sure it would come in higher than Yahoo did in that list. As far as I know, Bing has actually had moderate success in getting some marketshare from Google, though nothing outstanding, and while programmers are not representative of wider demographics, you will probably see at least some of them using Bing.

dredmorbius2• 15 years ago

My understanding of Bing's "success" is that much of it has been in contracted search -- setting up Bing as the default search service for specific sites and/or online services, or something like that. No, I don't know specifics, but it's similar to earlier games MSFT played with IIS numbers -- setting up IIS as the default "parking" domain for some large domain registrars.

jwesley• 15 years ago

If anything Google has gained some share since then. The biggest change has been that it continues to suck more and more traffic away with ads, YouTube listings, Google Places listings, shopping results, Google's in house affiliate ads, Google Books, and anything else that pays Google or keeps traffic on Google sites. It's gotten so bad that in many verticals it is impossible to find an organic result without scrolling. Like this for example:

http://www.seobook.com/images/ads-ads-ads.gif

icebraining2• 15 years ago

I wonder why I don't get any ads above the "Related searches..." at all when I use the same query. I do use https://encrypted.google.com/ instead of plain google.com, maybe that affects the ads?

In fact, I've just searched for a bunch of queries that I assume would have plenty of bidders (NFL, football, harry potter, ipad) and none of them had any ads box.

spolsky4• 15 years ago

OK-doke, here's the last month of Stack Overflow search engine referral traffic.

  Google 69,081,674 visits
  Bing 520,543 visits
  Baidu 319,294
  Search (CBS) 176,208
  Yahoo 133,833
  MSDN 109.875
  Yandex 80.399
  Naver 89,733
  Ask 30,026
  DuckDuckGo 25,492
  AOL 6,409
  Daum 4,462
  Blekko 659

jmdugan2• 15 years ago

Just keep in mind: People who end up at Stack Overflow are heavily biased compared to the general Internet population - because they are looking for something that lead them to search for and then click a link to Stack Overflow.

This same bias that selects the population will affect the choice of which search engine to use.

redthrowaway2• 15 years ago

Interesting, thanks. I'm actually surprised that Baidu ranks as low as it does, given its overwhelming market share in China and the fact that most code out there is in English. I just did a quick experiment and googled some common errors, then compared the SERPs to those of Baidu. SO was ranked similarly in both. Do Chinese programmers not goog...er, baidu errors?

Actually, that leads me to a more relevant question: looking through the queries that landed visitors at SO, have you done some scraping to determine what proportion were people googling errors verbatim, and what percentage were people asking questions or googling a particular topic, eg "scaling rails"?

jgeralnik• 15 years ago

This is what I love about HN. Ask a question about Stack Overflow, Joel Spolsky gives you an answer.

dhruvbird• 15 years ago

It's interesting to see that DuckDuckGo ranks higher than Blekko - One reason could be that it promotes SO articles via the 0-click info box.

craigday• 15 years ago

What I find interesting is that Stack Overflow has a really strong contingent of .Net/C# developers, so I assume these developers have a pretty reasonable investment in Microsoft technology, and not even they use Bing!

resnamen2• 15 years ago

Many Microsofties don't even use Bing.

BillSaysThis• 15 years ago

This blog post is from 2009!!! An in-page search for 2012 gets zero results.

drhayes92• 15 years ago

I think one reason people aren't sharpening pitchforks and lighting torches is because every other search engine is one click away. Switching search engines is pretty frictionless compared to switching OSes.

earl• 15 years ago

In theory. Do the nontechnical people in your life even know other search engines exist? I doubt those in mine do.

dhconnelly• 15 years ago

According to Alexa, Yahoo! is the #4 site on the internet, and Windows Live is the #7 site. So the millions of people who have Yahoo! and Windows Live for their homepages (and this is very common--remember that IE is still the dominant browser, and it defaults to Windows Live) are aware of those search engines.

The reason Google is the search leader is not because nontechnical people don't know of the alternatives. It's the leader because it's synonymous with search and people think it's the best.

drhayes92• 15 years ago

Heck, I'm not sure most people know what a search engine is. Wasn't "Google" one of the most-often heard answers to the question, "What is a browser?"

jonknee• 15 years ago

Chrome asks you to choose a default search engine when you install it. What more can they do?

jaredmck• 15 years ago

But switching paid search platforms is considerably hairier, especially if you have a large Adwords account with well built out campaigns. There's no way to drive anywhere near the volume of Adwords on Bing, especially once you're running at the margins. So unless you're willing to take a huge hit to business while moving some or all of your ad spending to another engine, there is no real choice to switch.

This is both the beauty and terror of Google's business model. Don't be evil?

mekoka• 15 years ago

I'm a little surprised all the people who were so up in arms about the Microsoft "monopoly" ten years ago aren't out in the streets today lighting torches and sharpening their pitchforks to go after Google.

Maybe people weren't so up in arms because of Microsoft's monopoly, but rather what they were doing with it. Apple didn't have a monopoly when I stopped being a fan.

epistasis2• 15 years ago

This is precisely it, Microsoft in the 90s did some really abusive and messed up things, for example luring away Borland's key compiler engineers with ridiculous salaries, and then paying them to sit on their thumbs and do nothing [+], in order to give Microsoft's development tools time to catch up.

I'm not a huge fan of Google, but if you're a startup you don't fear Google the way you would have feared Microsoft in the 90's. And if you're afraid of Google, it's because of legitimate competition in the marketplace, not nefarious anti-competitive practices.

[+] Edit: As pointed out below, the "sitting on their thumbs" may just be local lore, and not true.

eurleif• 15 years ago

>This is precisely it, Microsoft in the 90s did some really abusive and messed up things, for example luring away Borland's key compiler engineers with ridiculous salaries, and then paying them to sit on their thumbs and do nothing, in order to give Microsoft's development tools time to catch up.

Why not pay them to build better development tools rather than to sit on their thumbs?

spolsky4• 15 years ago

Do you have a source for this story about paying Borland's engineers to sit on their thumbs? I knew a few ex-Borland engineers that came to Microsoft and they were all doing awesome things on Microsoft's (many) compiler projects. Most of them moved because they wanted to work on awesome stuff.

Which is not to say that Microsoft didn't abuse their monopoly, but this particular story.... I've never heard it and it doesn't sound right.

jroseattle• 15 years ago

> Microsoft in the 90s did some really abusive and messed up things, for example luring away Borland's key compiler engineers with ridiculous salaries

Read the stories from last summer about bonuses being paid to employees coming and going from Google, Facebook, Twitter?

ww520• 15 years ago

Your meant Anders Hejlsberg from Borland who created C# in Microsoft? Those ridiculous salaries Microsoft paying him are peanuts compared to the huge value he created for Microsoft.

zak_mc_kracken• 15 years ago

> I'm a little surprised all the people who were so up in arms about the Microsoft "monopoly" ten years ago aren't out in the streets today lighting torches and sharpening their pitchforks to go after Google.

There is nothing wrong with monopolies, they are a natural part of a healthy economy and they are everywhere around us.

The problem is when companies abuse of that monopoly to gain unfair advantages in other markets. That's what Microsoft did. So far, Google hasn't shown any sign of doing such a thing.

Obviously, we should keep being vigilant.

mjwalshe3• 15 years ago

unfortunately Googles arrogance is leading it to do just that just like MS did - it will all end in tears.

Trust me as some one who worked for a regulated company you REALY REALY dont want to go there - develope a product and your not sure if the regulator will let you launch it

mjwalshe3• 15 years ago

Realy? Panda has sent some medium size companies to the wall and being made redundant is not fun even less so in The US

martian• 15 years ago

Noting that this article is from 2009, I think it makes some valid points. By owning people's entry to the internet, Google has a monopoly.

But I don't think it's so much a monopoly on search that's interesting, as it is a monopoly on entry. Google is everyone's front door to the Internet. There are a few geeks like us who know about URLs and TLDs, but generally people just google what they're looking for.

And on that note, I think there are other monopolistic gates to the internet being opened. Like the portals of old, Facebook is setting itself up to be the other Front Door on the Internet. Part of that is wrapped in what people care about most: other people. So it makes sense that you go to Google for things, places, and ideas; and you go to Facebook for people.

Google realized it was missing that category of nouns and built Google+. Facebook knows it's missing a lot beyond people and is looking to expand into other nounish categories, but it's also looking to expand into verbs: listen, watch, read.

I don't think Google has a monopoly forever -- I think it's fighting tooth and nail to stay at the top. I think there is fierce competition going on at all levels here, Facebook being the obvious example. And let's not forget Apple, Comcast, and other media providers who are using their control of media experiences to leverage control over people's experience of the Internet.

The future is going to be interesting!

jmduke• 15 years ago

Okay, am I missing something?

Microsoft wasn't a monopoly because their software pervaded rampantly; Microsoft was a monopoly because their entire business model bastardized the notion of vertical integration by making alternate software (ie competition) impossible, furthered by the costs of developing IE being (allegedly) baked into Windows.

Is the "Google = Monopoly" argument that their bundling of GMail/Search/Plus/etc./etc. is discouraging competition?

jerf• 15 years ago

Yes, you're missing something, but it's a common thing to miss. What's illegal and immoral isn't the mere possession of a monopoly. What's illegal and immoral is the abuse of a monopoly position to shut out competition, corner the market, then raise prices above what a free market would bear.

Microsoft was a monopoly because they sold 95+% of the operating systems on computers. Microsoft was convicted not of being a monopoly, but of abusing the monopoly.

It is also interesting to observe that while Microsoft may have done some immoral things to obtain that monopoly (depending on how you look at it), that doesn't make the things they did before they had a monopoly illegal, or at least not for reasons of having a monopoly. Special scrutiny and rules are put in place for monopolists. Thus, it became illegal to bundle IE with Windows in some places, but that was a special ruling for MS only as a consequence of their monopoly status, it was not a general legal restriction against bundling.

The claim that Google is a monopoly on search is simply an observation that they are servicing the vast, vast majority of searches. It does not logically follow that they are doing anything wrong; that is something that must be established separately. I for one don't see much evidence for Google abusing their monopoly in illegal or immoral ways. (Most of my complaints would center more around resting on their laurels, such as with their notoriously bad customer service, but there's nothing particularly illegal or immoral about that....) It is also valid to be personally concerned about the presence of a monopoly, even if it is not doing anything particularly wrong.

The common category collapse of "monopoly" and "illegal monopoly" makes it hard to understand what's really going on.

mdasen• 15 years ago

Microsoft was a monopoly in the operating system market because they had near exclusive control of that market. Likewise, Google has near exclusive control of the search market. The term "monopoly" doesn't require abuse.

I think the point of the article is to say that Google isn't abusing their monopoly power (by many people's standards), but that Google is nonetheless a monopoly and if they delist your site or otherwise abuse their power, you no longer exist as a viable business.

We even have a recent example of this in the spat between Twitter and Google over Google+ results in search. Google is hiding behind the "you put 'nofollow' on them" line, but it seems a tad dishonest. Really, "nofollow" gets used to say "don't give them SEO points for this link". Even if one considers Google's position completely legitimate, it's also quite handy for Google. Now their Google+ service gets promoted over a competitor. Google's decision here is a use of their position to hurt a competitor.

In fact, it's a lot like the Netscape situation. There's legitimacy to not indexing the Twitter content labeled with "nofollow" or integrating your own competitor right into your product. This is the same argument that Microsoft used about Internet Explorer. When a company has 10% of the market, we don't need to scrutinize so much. They don't have a lot of power. When a company controls such a high proportion of an industry, that changes.

The author rightly identifies that if Google moves against you in their search index, it basically eliminates your business. There are always reasons. I'm glad about the moves Google has made against spammers in their index recently. However, when looking at the Twitter situation, I feel less positively. I personally don't use Twitter (or Google+), but I can recognize that Google's market dominance in search is going to hurt Twitter and promote their own competitor. Google+ may be better and there may be good technological reasons for the integration and the non-indexing of Twitter links, but when you're as dominant of search as Google is, I think a bit more scrutiny is warranted. Likewise, when Microsoft was so dominant of operating systems and started integrating their own browser into the OS, it was scrutinized. That doesn't mean there wasn't good technological reasons for the integration, just that Microsoft was of a size where it eliminates the viability of competitors.

I have a lot of respect for Google and none of this is meant to sound anti-Google. At the same time, I agree with the author's premise that Google is so dominant of search that they could eliminate the viability of your business via their search index. That doesn't mean that they would do that. However, I think it means that certain moves should be viewed as being made by the only company in the industry - not one made by a single company among many competitors. And before one says "there's lots of alternatives like Bing, DDG, etc.", Microsoft had Apple, Be, Linux, and others, but they still held the power.

The article isn't saying that Google is abusing their monopoly, just that they do have that power.

Samuel_Michon• 15 years ago

"Microsoft wasn't a monopoly because their software pervaded rampantly"

Sure it was, but it's not illegal to have a monopoly. However, using your monopoly in one market to break into another, that's frowned upon. Google might have already been doing that with the promotion of Chrome on their site.

Also, Google's integration of Google+ in their search results pages sure is giving their own social network a leg up over sites like Facebook and Twitter [1]. Whether that legally means they're abusing their monopoly, I don't know.

[1] http://searchengineland.com/examples-google-search-plus-driv...

Natsu• 15 years ago

I don't get it either. If Google turns evil, everyone can switch search engines immediately. There's no lock-in. We're free. Gmail? You can download everything. Using Windows was never like that. There was always something making it hard to switch.

If the "Google monoculture" becomes a problem for average web users, they'll change. Right now, almost nobody wants to.

rorrr• 15 years ago

Here are the numbers for one of my sites, not related to IT in any way:

    Google   94.3%
    Yahoo     2.6%
    Bing      1.8%
    Yandex    0.63%
    Ask       0.37%
    AOL       0.23%

EDIT:

Here's another non-IT site with 13 million monthly visits:

    Google   89.9%
    Yahoo     6.4%
    Bing      2.96%
    Ask       0.37%
    AOL       0.21%
    Yandex    0.12%

whatusername2• 15 years ago

So my 2011 figures (for a site for English Speaking SF/Fantasy fans) are about GOOG: 95% / Bing: 3% / Yahoo 2%

eslaught• 15 years ago

> But where's the healthy competition? Where's the incentive for Google to improve?

People here might not like this answer, but honestly, Facebook. Look at Google+. You can like it or not, but it's clear that it's the biggest change to Google's product in a while.

ok_craig2• 15 years ago

I'm really interested in hearing how people think this problem should be fixed, since Google having such a large market share is necessarily a bad thing. I see a lot of criticism, but no solution offering. But it's implied in all the anti-Google comments that either Google needs to stop making its product better, or it needs to be forcefully hampered by the government. Is this a correct assessment? If not, what are the alternatives?

sdrinf• 15 years ago

One alternative might be celebrating startups, and entrepreneurs, who publicly declare (pro- or retroactively) refusing acquisitions -from Google, or otherwise.

One of the non-obvious consequences of this monopoly is all the other ways by which you could've navigated the Internet, that has been bought, paid for, then rapidly shut down by Google.

Note there are many other ways you can acquire information that is relevant, and timely for you -social&topical communities, Q&A sites&channels, decision trees are but a few- it just happens that search got an early start on the R&D economies of scale.

ok_craig2• 15 years ago

I can get behind your first suggestion. Social influence can be huge, and it doesn't require a legal club to beat a company down with.

Do you think it's necessarily a bad thing when smaller companies get bought by Google? What you don't mention in the case that all startups refuse a buyout is that the #1 search product improves at a much slower rate. Their technology may be interesting and useful, but in itself not enough to draw consumers, while if it were integrated into a larger product, it could bring that new technology to many more people much more quickly. Do we gain more by using technologies as individual products than we do by using them as parts of a larger, integrated whole? Probably sometimes we do. But always?

I can't say I'm familiar with all the things you mention in your last point. But if I knew about all of them, understood their purpose and what value they served, do you think I would use them all? I feel like I would probably just type a Google search, which could potentially search all of those for me. I know social, I know Q&A - it doesn't really seem to me that with just those services, I would have a set of tools as powerful as Google itself. I use them on occasion, but for specific things. Search engines are general purpose question answerers - it seems like this is why they're more popular. I think if all of those services were out first, and then Google came along, it'd still be the most powerful and grow to be huger, because in general, it's more useful.

chrischen2• 15 years ago

Google doesn't lock people into its search. People have a choice and they obviously choose Google.

waterlesscloud• 15 years ago

People had a choice regarding Windows in the 90s.

Kliment• 15 years ago

Website authors don't have a choice though. It's be on google or don't exist.

chrischen2• 15 years ago

That's not Google's fault. Google made a better product and consumers freely chose this. If Google arrives at a monopoly because of building a better product there is nothing wrong with this, but if Google arrives at a monopoly through manipulation and anti-competitive practices and then further using that monopoly position to sustain the monopoly then that's wrong.

cpeterso• 15 years ago

Any suggestions from people who have switched from Google to another search engine?

I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo, but I gave up after a few days. DuckDuckGo's results were very good for popular/mainstream terms, but Google is much better at deep "needle in haystack" searches.

I later switched from Google to Bing, but I gave up after one day. Bing's results were very random and stale. And Bing is ugly. :)

guard-of-terra• 15 years ago

Give Yandex a try. The results would be stale too but at least it looks nice.

BCM43• 15 years ago

I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo, but I gave up after a few days. DuckDuckGo's results were very good for popular/mainstream terms, but Google is much better at deep "needle in haystack" searches.

When was this? It's gotten a lot better for me.

white_devil• 15 years ago

You could always just use DDG by default, and then resort to Google only when you really need it. That's what I've been doing for 1 - 2 years now.

bad_user4• 15 years ago

The other Elephant in the room - with rich Javascript interfaces, crawlers are only feasible to build if you have enough resources - i.e. only companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are able to do it. Web pages are becoming increasingly less accessible and Google has a lot to gain by this trend.

The writing on the wall is pretty clear - Google has a monopoly in search and the only way they can be disrupted is through alternative means of finding content (like social networks).

Which is why, as much as I like them and their products, I find the integration with Google+ downright scary and dangerous for the health of our ecosystem.

nostrademons• 15 years ago

That's not really true - John Resig hooked Rhino up to a good-enough DOM model in a weekend:

http://ejohn.org/blog/bringing-the-browser-to-the-server/

No, you're not going to match Google's crawling infrastructure or data extraction libraries. But if you just want to grab pages off the web, parse them, and handle JavaScript from those pages correctly, you can easily rig something up between Mechanize/html5lib/V8 or Nutch/Tika/Rhino.

bad_user4• 15 years ago

Crawling a couple of pages is different from crawling the entire web on a recurring basis. It was hard enough without the emergence of Javascript-enabled pages.

west13• 15 years ago

I haven't looked at every comment to see if anyone has stated the obvious: search is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more data you have, the better your results. The better your results, the more data you get.

No one will make up ground on Google until a radical new algorithm is invented, and Google doesn't buy it :)

resnamen2• 15 years ago

I don't think it's a matter of data access. I would argue that Bing has parity with Google in most respects (they have the same Internet to crawl, partnerships with some data providers for things like flight search, etc.), and they even have decisive advantages in other areas, like access to huge piles of social data. So why aren't they as good or better?

bishnu• 15 years ago

I mean the difference is that a search engine is a search engine - it's not a platform a whole bunch of people need to be using to be more effective. Ditching Microsoft in the 90s meant ditching Office, the best selection of games, etc. Whereas every other search engine works just as well (potentially) as Google search.

mbesto• 15 years ago

Let's be clear first on what Google's product is and what it's selling.

Google's product is pageviews (or eyes). It sources these pageviews effectively for free (from you and I) and sells them to companies. The end-user who does the search is a marginal piece of the product that Google is selling.

Therefore you can't say Google has a monopoly on search, because there is no market for search, since no one is paying for a product called search.

edit:spelling

phear• 15 years ago

http://mashable.com/2012/01/12/bing-overtakes-yahoo/...The latest from mashable. Google still waaay ahead in 1st place. Notable is that when Bing first came out many blogs were talking about what was wrong with it and why it would die. They've slowly come a logn way(helped in part by Yahoo's problems). Do they have what it takes to be the thorn in google's flesh that xbox is in Sony's?

tzury• 15 years ago

That is a must I would say in our era.

See, given one of the fundamentals in the Unix philosophical idiom is Make each program do one thing well.

In an era of Software as a Service, it is Make each service do one thing well.

The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture

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