soxpopuli

Android gets raked over the coals for years for bad customer experience.

Google attempts to reign in fragmentation and divergent and inconsistent UI experience, and move more of firmware to Play store so it can issue security updates to customers without carriers and OEMs blocking.

Google raked over the coals for anti-competition.

Meanwhile, Apple ships iTunes and App Store, which can only be used with their own cloud stores. They ship iMessage which only works with their Cloud. Apple Maps. A fitness app. A wallet. A payment system. etc All in a proprietary, single vendor system, closed source.

If every Android phone's out of box experience was a random collection of OEM apps that had no common standard, the consumer experience would be terrible. Switch from a Samsung to an LG device and you might be hit by the fact that the device has none of the apps you were using on your previous phone, you have to delete all of the current apps, and reinstall all of your previous ones, enter all the settings again, all of the login credentials, etc. The switching cost would be huge and it would cause OEM lock in.

The setup process is a factor in consumer choice. If you are faced with an onerous gauntlet of selection dialogs for 10+ apps when you start (it's not just app store, browser, maps, but email, music, video, camera, photos, etc), consumers are going to be very annoyed. I don't want to spend 30 minutes to an hour unboxing my phone and "installing", that's what used to happen on PCs.

And what happens when things go wrong. If the user installs a third party app store, and gets malware, do you think they're going to be blamed, or Google's Android brand will be blamed? Most consumers aren't aware enough to narrow down who to blame.

So in the end, you'd be asking Google to assume all the brand risk, all of the complaints over fragmentation and failure to patch older phones, and making consumer experience worse.

Apple has none of these problems. Say what you will about their locked down platform, the one thing you don't have to worry about is inconsistent getting starting experience or malware from the App Store.

The 'choice' being presented here is the kind of choice hackers and engineers love, but it's not the kind of choice one's parents and relatives may love. It's just hobbling attempts to improve the Android experience.

By entities, you mean the Microsoft funded astroturf organization FairSearch and the hydra connected to it.

But the linked page is there. Google is indexing Amazon, extracting the photo, description, and price of the product, displaying it in a box, and making it a link back to Amazon where it got the data from, what's the problem?

Product Search is just another form of summarization/snippeting that just presents the data in more digestable format.

Remember Google Fusion Tables? That was an attempt to extract facts from pages and put them into tables, so if you ask "What's the masses of the planets of the solar system", you could get a table of 8 planets and masses, with the results coming from 8 different sites. But the links could still be there to the original site, it's just formatted as a table instead of as 8 blue links with summary paragraphs, which is harder for humans to process.

Where do we draw the line? You've seen how Google has a new system that can automatically caption images with deep neural networks. (http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/18/new-google-research-project...)

Now what if this same system eventually allows the search engine to summarize your web page by 'reading it', and then auto-generating a paragraph that explains what it thought it was about?

There'd be no actual direct copying of text (like there is with search snippets), instead it would be more like a human going to a library, reading a book, and writing a review

Would this also violate copyright?

Google had over 80% of the market before Chrome was even released, and they achieved most of that with MSN Search being the default on Windows.

The majority of Web users on the most used browser (IE) manually chose to use Google.

What is a Search Engine? Is this some kind of legally regulated category that says you a) must only return Web results and b) in the form of 10 blue links?

Should a search which a search engine knows the direct answer to (word definitions, the current weather or time, etc) send you to another site for the answer. Why are "search engines" prohibited from direct answers, but voice agents like Siri allowed? Is there something fundamentally different between a text box and a voice input?

Likewise, if a search engine has indexed data and can return deep links to other sites formatted differently, why is that different? For example, if you search for "Playstation 4" and Google simply returned the first 10 hits (Amazon.com, eBay, Walmart, etc) as a page of 10 blue links like it did in 2006, instead of formatting them in a nice box at the top of the screen with summary price extracted, would this still be illegal? Why is it legal to display organic search results as blue links, but if you display them in a box and call it "Product Search", it's suddenly illegal? This makes no sense to me. The only difference between the Google Product Search box at the top, and displaying the links is simply better visual presentation.

The world has moved on from ten blue links. Mobile devices have even more constrained real estate and network latency pushing the need for summarization and smart presentation even further. A new class of consumer expects these devices to almost act like intelligent agents when answering queries.

Is the European Commission saying it will be illegal to build JARVIS or the Star Trek computer, because a smarter search that doesn't delegate to other niche search engines, and instead returns direct answers, is unfair competition?

At the heart of this seems to be the idea that Google search should return links to other shopping comparison engines instead of direct links to Amazon, et al. That frankly seems like a good way to hurt customer experience. If you have a good product comparison engine these days, you're probably going to end up as a native app anyway.

By the time this EU case winds down (Microsoft's took a decade), the traditional web search engine might not even exist anymore.