Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain
pluralistic.net> A company that can't figure out the difference between a scam like Better Homes and Gardens and a rigorous review site like Housefresh should be pouring every spare dime it brings in into fixing this problem. Not buying default search status on every platform so that we never try another search engine: they should be fixing their shit.
Google has sucked for years, and the level of sucking has been covered extensively on hn.
The one thing that was a real shock was how much more gas was left in the ad model engine. They've managed to grow substantially over the past couple of years largely by pushing advertisers in to a ROAS model that is clearly optimized to make Google more money: gross almost 2x from 2019 to 2023 -- from $161b to $307b. Net income more than doubled -- from $34b to $73.8b.
Google, Google's employees, and Google's shareholders don't need nearly $1b in revenue a day. What they do just isn't that important anymore. That money is very much a tax, and ultimately the money consumers are paying for products and services is going to Google instead of making the product or service better.
The good news is there are now many alternatives that work as well or better than Google. Combine that with LLM options (Perplexity, ChatGPT), and the future looks Google-lite or Google-free. It would be even better if we had more decentralized & localized search options like YaCy. If we want to have any control over our search future we need it.
I'll just keep repeating this: Google today is a yellow pages. For search they offer little of value that isn't provided by others. Old people keep using Google because that's what they have been using for years or because it just shows up (like the yellow pages did, but now as a default.)
A few weeks ago I bit the bullet and paid for kagi, as a dev it's night and day for finding documentation and relevant, non-spammy results.
Do you know how well it works for travel stuff? Google has become particularly useless at surfacing local blogs and results over content marketing from travel services.
Was it actually revenue growth from adverts or was it from a sudden splurge in pandemic-era spending caused by governments all over the world panic-signing up for Google Classroom and buying Chromebooks?
Because I can see pretty much all of the 'growth' that occurred during 2020-2021 being unwound gradually as people realise that a lot of what happened was an absolute disaster for society.
When it comes to making any predictions for the future you really have to write off the 2019-2021 pandemic era figures as a glitch.
Their financials are public, from my reading the growth was not driven by Chromebooks or classroom (unfortunately for Google since they would love to diversify from search/ads)
Yeah, I think the future will be a more fragment, AI-driven search that will be integrated into everything via plugins in browsers, apps and native integration. You reading something -> search information about something, or find the community.
What about Brave search? Does anyone know what they are doing behind the scenes? It's ad-free by default, and emphasizes privacy as a core feature.
Well summarized. Anti-competition has become the new standard operating model.
At least in the US, I believe we've proven that anti-competition regulations don't work and that the government realized its easier to regulate the consumer than to deal with regulating massive corporations.
If you want to win reelection you're much better off taking massive piles of cash from big businesses and regulate consumers to help create the monopolies. Trying to protect consumers by breaking up monopolies and promoting healthy market competition will see you leaving office in a hurry.
In the US we've proven that it's easiest to just talk about anti-competition regulation to buy votes and then never actually get around to improving or enforcing it. After all, if you solve problems, you lose platforms to run the next election on.
I don’t think that last sentence follows. There are always more problems to solve. They’re just stupid and lazy and loyal to their owners.
There are always more problems, but for example, it's a lot easier to get voters heated over abortion rights than it is over whether or not a national ID should carry biometric data.
I'd argue there are always more problems, we don't have to solve them all nor should we assume that we can.
> I believe we've proven that anti-competition regulations don't work
You have? How? You barely have any. And the ones you do have you rarely enforce.
> Trying to protect consumers by breaking up monopolies and promoting healthy market competition will see you leaving office in a hurry.
That sounds like a flaw in your political/electoral system not in anti-competition regulations.
I agree with the sentiment here but..
> You barely have any .. anti-competition regulations
this is not true. However, the secrecy implemented around enforcement (bad publicity) causes the casual observer to think so..
There are very large enforcement actions that take place regularly.. they are far from perfect, and the failures tend to be the ones that are amplified in media..
> this is not true. However, the secrecy implemented around enforcement (bad publicity) causes the casual observer to think so..
That isn't the reason it isn't true. The US nominally has quite strong antitrust laws. The statutes are extremely broad in what they prohibit. But the enforcement is lacking and the courts over time have read the laws more narrowly than they were intended to be.
> the failures tend to be the ones that are amplified in media..
The failures are prolific. In a functioning regulatory environment, whether because you don't have regulations that prop up incumbents and don't create regulatory barriers to entry or because you break them up and stop them from buying each other, you wouldn't have industries where any one company has more than 15% of the market. But that is common, not rare, and that is the measure of it working.
>In a functioning regulatory environment [...] you wouldn't have industries where any one company has more than 15% of the market.
Is that realistic? Intuition is telling me that's very idealistic but I'm prepared to be surprised
> Is that realistic? Intuition is telling me that's very idealistic but I'm prepared to be surprised
There are many markets where this is the case. Which trucking company has significantly more than 15% market share? Which law firm? Which car insurance company? Which university? Which construction company?
Nearly all of the consolidated industries got there through some combination of mergers, vertical integration and regulatory barriers to entry. Even some of the "natural monopolies" like last mile telecommunications are only so because of regulatory choices -- the natural monopoly is actually the roads, which the government owns, and if they provided easy and affordable access to roadside cable trenches there would be much more competition for data service.
> You have? How? You barely have any. And the ones you do have you rarely enforce.
Lack of enforcement was actually part of my point. More broadly, though, we don't need more regulation so much as we need less legal protections that allow companies to get away with it.
> That sounds like a flaw in your political/electoral system not in anti-competition regulations.
No disagreements at all that our political and electoral system is flawed. I'm not so sure if that's the direct cause here though or if its the other way around. Meaning, we could be here because runaway anticompetitive behavior led to political and regulatory capture rather than the flawed political system being the proximal cause.
I think you are missing the third leg of this, which is how those monopolies extend outside of the US and act as part of the states global soft power strategy in those other countries where they are also monopolies.
The US is no more likely to break them up as it is to cut its military budget in half.
Comrade, if you think the US is bad you should come check out Canada.
Google could fix it tomorrow if they wanted to, but the fact is they don't because there's no incentive for their business, which is advertising. As Upton Sinclair once put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
They absolutely can't. They've innovators dilemma'd themselves. Their cash cow is not making sense any more and they can't investigate any new technologies to save themselves.
They came out with Gemini really late and they look like they don't know what they're doing. They are going to be late to the next disruptor too
Google is basically becoming IBM of this era.
It's the very definition of selling out. This seems to be a very common trend with the vast majority of all previously respected institutions (at least in the USA). They have all sold out (literally sold the company, in many cases) and have now abandoned all principles (or pretenses) of decency and provision of value to customers. Now they are just trading on past integrity that is no longer reality. They will coast on their dwindling reputations for as long as they can get away with it.
The attitude is "Fuck you, pay me." but wrapped in massive amounts of PR spin in an attempt to obfuscate the realty and deflect the blame.
"Trading on past integrity" is a really nice expression. I was struggling to explain my feeling that "everything is a brand now", and this is it.
Everything that has a good reputation gets financialized and run into the ground, then the shareholders move on.
Buying anything has become a game of "has that already turned to crap".
> just trading
When Americans understand stockbuybacks should be illegal, that the entire stock market is a game played by monsters, then maybe, maybe you'll fix your shit
Stock buybacks are just a tax advantaged dividend. Why would anyone invest in a company if there isn't some way to turn that into a profit?
How does society at large benefit from providing tax advantages to those profits to investors?
The framing of this as a Google issue would suggest that other search engines wouldn’t have this issue, but I’m not sure that’s true? The “air purifier” search on DDG seems to give the same set of blogspam results: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=best+air+purifier+for+pet+hai...
Can someone with Kagi check to see if Kagi does better here?
Searched on Kagi, my first result was a reddit post on /r/dyson [1], second result was a Medium post without much substance, then there's a collection of blogspam neatly arranged in a box with just the title of the pages (not polluting much, I can just skip that box), third to ninth result are varying degrees of blogs and the tenth result is WebMD [2].
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/dyson/comments/1730x73/best_air_pur...
[2] https://www.webmd.com/pets/how-to-choose-an-air-purifier-for...
Isn't DDG just a proxy for Bing?
I can't imagine who would go to Microsoft for quality.
I believe I've seen DDG's CEO or founder on here claiming that they do not proxy requests through Bing and that they do their own indexing. I think they had been using Bing at some point but I'm pretty sure current DDG results is all DDG indexing. Probably still falling for most of the same tricks which blogspammers use for Google SEO, though.
DDG is powered by Bing plus other APIs and their own crawler.
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources...
> To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia.
> We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results.
> we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing.
I was responding to someone who said DDG is “just a proxy for Bing”. Not that the things in on that page aren’t true but I fail to see how that makes it a proxy; “proxy” suggests that the query actually goes through Bing servers. Sourcing from a service is not the same as proxying through it.
Yeah, it's all mostly junk.
The abstract thesis here is that if you have a near-monopoly in some domain, where the product's quality is dependent on someone else, for example,
* links and content on pages that Google search engine ranks
* reviews on the Amazon market
then everyone is going to use every trick in the book to come out on top, and that will just constantly degrade your product.
If there was competition in the domain, then the tricks used for one search engine might not work for other search engines. So the situation might be better in the long run.
I feel like there is another big point being hinted at in these articles but not quite stated: Better Homes and Gardens is committing fraud and lying to website visitors.
I feel like this deserves to get more attention. Yes Google Search is bad, but how much new good content exists, and if Google (or anyone) just started deleting large chunks of the internet from search indices, I think there’d be complaints.
I’m not trying to defend Google, BUT I do this all the BHG style “fraud” should be punished. Posting junk content for click through ads and affiliate links is a sad way to make a living, and we should have no problem with booting them from the visible internet.
Sometimes I wish owners of popular brands let them die with dignity instead of selling their brand to be worn as skin for soulless PE fraud.
They really don’t think they are based on their response to this whole thing https://x.com/bhmillard/status/1760714469942944146?s=46
> Better Homes and Gardens is committing fraud and lying to website visitors.
If it isn't outright illegal it's certainly disappointing.
Is the current Meredith company a different organization from the one started by the magazine's founder, Edwin Meredith?
Amazingly written, hilarious, but I figured out what’s frustrating me: the focus on being a consumer. If you’re using words like “enshittocene” I feel you should think a little more about writing a post focusing on why Google isn’t helpful for product reviews. Google n co are destroying democracy and the planet itself, and to spend our final days complaining that sometimes people buy bad products seems out of touch.
Google literally has one job: to detect this kind of thing and crush it. The deal we made with Google was, "You monopolize search and use your monopoly rents to ensure that we never, ever try another search engine. In return, you will somehow distinguish between low-effort, useless nonsense and good information.
Google (and Walmart) established their dominant position through clever marketing based on lies. We bought it and only now are starting to realize what we fell for.
Google's big lie was "don't be evil." They provided overwhelmingly valuable services for free. They did everything with minimal advertising and generally fantastic performance. Then they merged with an advertising company and pretty soon "don't be evil" was abandoned, along with almost every other principle that they had used to earn their dominant position in search and email.
Walmart in the 1980s and 1990s was all about "Made in the USA.¹" They sold themselves as a small-town company that cared about American jobs and American values. They did this while simultaneously dealing with American manufacturers using ruthless tactics. Walmart had a direct and significant (I would say critical) role in the widespread decline of manufacturing in the US.
1. This is not so prominent anymore but it was a lie from the start. Walmart has a long history with claiming to support American manufacturing while aggressively doing the opposite. https://www.thestand.org/2014/11/how-walmart-destroyed-u-s-m...
This a great, well researched response, and I don’t disagree with the sentiment, but I think we should be careful not go give these companies too much credit. America has, understandably, been investing less in manufacturing over time at a roughly steady rate of decline: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2017/april/us-manu...
So I don’t think it started in the 90s with walmart. Although the Fed makes an interesting argument in that article: we don’t manufacture less, we manufacture the same but it’s just worth way less as inflation ticks along. They describe American manufacturing as “fairly constant”, which I think would be considered a very hot take by most Americansmanufacturing's share of nominal gross domestic product (GDP) has dropped from 28.1 percent in 1953 to just 12 percent in 2015Walmart utilize some pretty underhanded tactics against their suppliers. At least they did back in the 90s and I have reason to believe they still do.
One example: Place a massive order beyond the capability of the supplier to meet the demand but at a premium price to incentivize them to try anyway. Then cancel at the last minute when production is almost finished but doesn't quite meet the original quantity ordered. Finally come back a few weeks / months later and offer to buy the resulting overstock at a deeply discounted price.
Obviously the blame doesn't all belong to Walmart but when a company is struggling and desperate it only takes a couple of deals like that to put them on a fast track to liquidation of their assets until all that remains is a company dedicated to marketing imported products under a previously prestigious brand.
The company I have specific knowledge about, Rawlings Sporting Goods, shut down most of their US manufacturing at the end of the 1990s and moved everything to China. Walmart had a big hand in driving the nails in the coffin of that ~80 year old company.
> We didn’t agree to a deal with Google!
We refuse to bring down governments who don't write the laws necessary to break up Google. So there is complicity there.
Well if it doesn't have that one singular job, you're admitting it shouldn't exist. Monopolies are illegal, Google shouldn't exist. Neither should Amazon, Microsoft, etc. Having massive marketing apparatuses that are larger than your company shouldn't be legal. Leave it to Americans to fully profiteer lies, marketing, and propaganda.
I agree ;) tho I think it’s unfair to blame the Americans, the Brits brewed up capitalism as revenge for their weather
Maybe it's legitimate, but this story got ramped off the front page of HN faster than I could send it to a few folks.
While it seems google is partly to blame for SEO garbage they should be filtering, they can’t really be responsible for the fact that the internet is mostly overwhelmed by machine generated garbage. Copies of copies of garbage that google simply wasn’t designed to handle.
So... the problem isn't that Google search isn't good but that (1) the ads sold are many and to some people who are scammers, and (2) enough of how the search engine algorithm works has become common knowledge and exploited by SEO experts seeking to inflate the relevance of sites by using what they know of how Google ranks search results.
But for this to become a problem Google first had to come up with a system better than everyone else's.
Sounds like a classic dilemma to me.
No, the schemes being used are decidedly low tech for the most part and trivially detectable. Google's result quality isn't dying a death of a thousand cuts due to hordes of disreputable actors, it's dying a death of Google being dependent on a small basket of sleazy companies that they're economically in bed with.
If it's trivially detectable, you could enlighten all of us on how you do it.
It’s sad that a product that I used as a North Star has lost so much momentum. Search has only had incremental updates but nothing major. ChatGPT has been the biggest development in search…
It’s one of the reasons why I started AskPandi as a side project. It’s an answer engine that gives answers without fluff. No link sifting, no ads, no popups, no cookie consents.
It’s making browsing the web fun again.
> Last year, Google did a $70b stock buyback. They also laid off 12,000 staffers (whose salaries could have been funded for 27 years by that stock buyback). They just laid off thousands more employees
Presumably 12,000 google employees working for 27 years could deliver more benefit to google (and to the world, and probably to google's shareholders as well) than a stock buyback?
I'm guessing what's happening is that Google doesn't really care and is not really incentivised (in the short term) to provide high quality search results. It wouldn't make enough profit to work on that. And if any competitors become threatening enough they have ways of bringing them down that are cheaper than maintaining product or technical supremacy.
Bummer optimizing hiring devs on leetcode skills doesn't lead to better search result engineering.
It has nothing to do with hiring competent engineers. It has to do with Google's business not being incentivized to provide better search. Google's business is advertising, therefore you are the product.
I don’t think this problem is news to anyone anymore.
But what I’ve still yet to hear anyone share are good solutions?
The situation with Google’s search results is basically identical to the one with Amazon and cheap crappy products. In both cases people seem to have just given up.
Mr. Doctoro is right about goggle being shit.
But in the casse of this article, the repeated reference to a "deal" goggle made with us, is just not correct. There was no deal.
Goggle never promised anyone that they wouldn't flood their search results with shit.
Goggle will do whatever makes it the most money, like laying off 1000s of workers while buying back 10s of billions of $ in stock. I bet those workers thought they had a "deal" too, they didn't.
The only correction is for us citizens to elect legislators, and demand regulation anad breakup of massive monopolies.
Instead some of the poorest trailer park trash in the us south are sending their spare nickels to the cheeto's gofundme campain. In spite of the fact that he's billionaire brat child from a NYC family slum lord empire.
So, don't expect any of this to change in the us, except to get worse, because at this point american's are just too stupid...
Maybe AI will save us.
ChatGPT is this blogspam?
I think it's that Google thinks it's claws are so deeply embedded in our habits that it no longer matters whether their products are any good.