The EU has taken the position that all of these vertical specific search engines are industries that should be treated separately from "general search". I think this is faulty as
- from a customer perspective, I just want an answer to my question regardless of the vertical
- from an industry perspective every small competitor is of course going to complain that big bad X is taking their business
So we just end up with arbitrary enforcement of the rules based on which companies the EU is angriest at.
The Google Shopping case is very interesting atm. Google have given other companies the opportunity to bid on that slot, and have separated out Google Shopping Ads as as it's own profitable entity that has to bid on that slot alongside other companies. Unsurprisingly, most of the companies that were basically surviving due to free traffic from Google have not really bought many of these slots.
If the EU does not strike that down, it will provide a template for resolving many of these commercial result complaints in a similar fashion.
>>I just want an answer to my question regardless of the vertical
You want the best answer and Google was not the best one for local for example. But they stuffed it there because the could. When competition is bankrupt or no one enter the space because Google will not rank you fairly then the problem is bigger.
Like hotel bookings, do we know if they are best for shoppers or best for Google's bottom line?
I already get different and irrelevant results that I do not care about when using google in different countries, one can only assume how much worse that would be with different local search engines. I would rather not see results for a local pasta when searching for haskell.
> Like hotel bookings, do we know if they are best for shoppers or best for Google's bottom line?
Sounds like a business opportunity. If the market isn’t being well served, it would seem that someone might try to serve it. You know, like maybe TripAdvisor or Booking.com or Expedia or the numerous similar companies.
We are basically saying that nobody will enter the search business because Google is too good? That doesn’t make any sense. Nobody is compelled to use Google. Every browser lets users choose alternatives. That people don’t is probably because they think Google does a pretty good job for their needs. If that isn’t true, then it should be realistic for a competitor to make it better. IBM owned computing until they didn’t — nobody thought competing with IBM was a high percentage play, but people did.
If the Europeans want to make some big tech, then perhaps making the investment, M&A, and taxation environment more favorable is a good place to start. Capital gains taxes are so high that there isn’t a huge amount of incentive for moon-shot investments in Europe. Employment law (in France at least,) is so Byzantine that there is a real fear of hiring fast and scaling quickly because the consequences of a misstep are hugely expensive. Investors in Europe look for high percentage 2x companies to fund rather than making big, bold bets on 100x companies. One of the reasons is that you have a tax structure that punishes success so the risk-reward ratio favors safer investments. There is money in Europe, but much of it is through government programs that require government friendly business plans and friends in high places to even be considered. And the money that those programs do provide, it certainly isn’t US-level. It’s extremely rare to raise €50 million in Europe, but it happens all the time in the US.
It’s the indefinite pessimism of Europe that’s the root of it. See the book Zero to One for a great explanation of that concept. Google isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom. Look at DailyMotion as a case study. The French government blocked the sale to Yahoo — which would have been a huge payday for the founders and investors — a payday they would have, in the tradition of Silicon Valley, could have been used to start angel or VC investing. (Although the original founders sold to France Telecom for a relative pittance, and France Telecom has the innovation level of a can of peas. So it’s possible to say that the sell to Yahoo wouldn’t have made any ripples in terms of creating new angel investors.) Instead DailyMotion, rather than becoming Yahoo’s YouTube, languished into near obscurity compared to YouTube.
The point of the story is the socialist government of France cared more about some misguided nationalism rather than actually creating an environment for innovation, business and growth. Even in France, YouTube is far bigger than DailyMotion and it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with Google being anti-competitive, but everything to do with this petty provincial bullshit common with European government ministers.
How is it an opportunity? There used to be a whole selection of businesses in those niches. Some great, some terrible, some American, some European. Google have been continually adding niches to their web search over the years. All the way back to Froogle that became Google Shopping, that went from a comparison search to paid listings only.
Are most people still going to search for price comparison sites when it's right there on a Google tab? Are most people aware that tab may be ad only, when Google have constantly done their utmost to disguise ads, "highlighting" them in almost invisible colours?
Not a very compelling business opportunity to enter a market where 90% of the clicks never get outside Google. Half of those who were doing fine in those niches are forgotten, or closed. Just because some search monopoly decided it wanted to grab all those other pies too.
For electronics there's Geizhals in the EU. That collects prices from most online stores and gives you the cheapest offer for any given product. It's also nice for researching gear in general, since it has tons of filtering options.
Probably not now. There were a few, or that openly and cleanly used affiliate links. Then it got fairly scummy. Stuff like bookings would normally take a booking fee.
I think isthereanydeal.com is still quite popular for price comparison of video game downloads. One of the many problems with more general price comparison sites is that Amazon, the big player in most markets, restricts use of their pricing data on sites which show prices from other sites.
I do not completely disagree, but I don’t think European legislators like to “punish success”. They respond to an electorate that feels much more strongly about economic disparities than in the US, because they are more painfully aware of their roots: thousands of years of violent oppression by elites, of which we are reminded every day with royal families, castles, abbeys and so on.
A rebellion against a few taxes, hardly thousands of years of exploitation and mass-murder. Europeans have seen more history, there is more cynicism about the consequences of money and power. People in the US still believe grafters can make it big, the American Dream, temporarily embarrassed millionaires, anybody can be President, and all that.
So we just end up with arbitrary enforcement of the rules based on which companies the EU is angriest at.