back to article We need baby Googles, say search specialists… and one surprising VC

Google's vertical search tormentors in Europe have called for Alphabet's cash cow to be broken up, arguing that Google's solution hasn't improved competition. Google wrote its own remedy in response to the European Commission's ruling that it distorted competition, using penalties to demote rival niche search products such as …

  1. JimmyPage Silver badge
    Flame

    I'd settle for a Google that ****ing worked.

    I'm getting to a 1/2 strike rate now with searches some days.

    If Google really wants to make more money, they could offer a paid-for service that dumps anything advertised, and anything engineered to reach top (SEO shit).

    Then they could invest that money into proper AI (not the shit they're serving at the moment) so that natural language queries are really and exactly that.

    Because despite what they may say, they are still just keyword matching on steroids.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I'd settle for a Google that ****ing worked.

      As if by magic ...

      piqued by the idea of a space conveyor system, I googled "space conveyor practicalities"

      1) The Practicality of Pulsed Fast Neutron Transmission Spectroscopy ...

      2) Guidelines for Safe Handling of Powders and Bulk Solids

      3) Vibratory Conveyor in a Production Line – design adjustability is key

      4) Machine Vision: Theory, Algorithms, Practicalities

      5) Deisgn and Safe Application of Conveyor Crossovers for Unit ...

      no. 5 is "sic" btw.

      Don't try "LEO conveyor practicalities" - it's worse

      1. aeonturnip

        Re: I'd settle for a Google that ****ing worked.

        I know in an ideal world you should be able to google with any search phrase, but for now you need to choose your search phrase more carefully. Simply googling "space conveyor" did a better job. If you google "space conveyor practicalities" or "practicalities of space conveyors" there are no results - it's just possible that there isn't anything out there on this topic.

  2. Tigra 07

    It rubs the Monopoly on it's skin, or else it gets the antitrust again...

    They only need to sit back and watch as Google implodes under it's own idiocy of competing with itself. In the mean time Google has the best products because the competition hasn't bothered making theirs better (enough).

    Google search - Bing is shite. Yahoo is shite. DuckDuckGo has a fringe audience.

    Maps - Apple has attempted but hasn't done enough to compete. Here (Nokia?) maps is dreadful.

    Youtube - constantly declaring war on it's own creators but still nothing else comes close to as good. Vimeo? No chance.

    1. imanidiot Silver badge

      Re: It rubs the Monopoly on it's skin, or else it gets the antitrust again...

      Here (Nokia?) maps is dreadful.

      Really? I VASTLY prefer Here WeGo for navigation over Googlies Maps. The offline maps bit is a huge selling point and it is vastly less likely to send me on pointless detours because they are 1 meter and theoretically 2 seconds shorter (but slower in reality).

      1. Charles 9

        Re: It rubs the Monopoly on it's skin, or else it gets the antitrust again...

        Guess it's a case of YMMV. Because in many places, especially in the US, the Google maps are more accurate and up-to-date than the Here maps. Same with OSM, which is the Wikipedia of maps. Because it's all user-input, quality can be hit-or-miss.

        1. JohnFen

          Re: It rubs the Monopoly on it's skin, or else it gets the antitrust again...

          I agree. There are really only two Google services that remain superior to the alternatives. One is image search, and the other is maps.

          Google only wins on maps because OSM is inconsistent. In some areas OSM is fully Google's equal. In others, it's worthless.

      2. Elfo74

        Re: It rubs the Monopoly on it's skin, or else it gets the antitrust again...

        You do know google maps has had offline mode for some time, right?

        As for detours: it usually suggests a new route if the one I'm at has heavy traffic ahead, but it is just a suggestion (I can still force the original route, but every time I did I regretted it soon after)

        1. jelabarre59

          Re: It rubs the Monopoly on it's skin, or else it gets the antitrust again...

          But GoogleMaps is crap if you want to print it out. You're going to be trying to read it while driving, so why does it only print in 10-point type?

          And if you want to modify the path? All too often it will end up putting in loops back to the old path and back to your newer one, because it's brain-dead.

        2. Tim Seventh

          Re: It rubs the Monopoly on it's skin, or else it gets the antitrust again...

          You do know google maps has had offline mode for some time, right?

          Google Maps offline maps expire after 30 days(source 1, source 2). Not that offline if you ask me.

          If you want truly offline, try Maps.me or some other map apps.

          1. Tigra 07
            Thumb Up

            Re: It rubs the Monopoly on it's skin, or else it gets the antitrust again...

            You can download Maps for the entire country with Google Maps and they don't expire, they just update every so often. The entire map of the UK is over 1 GB and useful if you travel a lot and don't want to waste data while out and about.

            1. fuzzie

              Re: It rubs the Monopoly on it's skin, or else it gets the antitrust again...

              Maybe select territories only. Last I tried, granted, it's been a while, it refused cache anything larger than about 100km square. It handily pre-caches its recommended route, but if you stray from it in an area without coverage or with less than 4G coverage it stars to falter badly. I also discovered, to my pain, that if it doesn't know street numbers, it directs you to the centre point of the road. This lead me 10km (yes, it's a very long road) off the real location, in totally the wrong suburb.

              I tend to pre-check routes into unfamiliar territory before setting off (just to see where/if there are funky areas). Friends have on several occasions the past year ended up at locked farm gates, having been sent down "faster" detours. Google definitely has better coverage/quality in "first tier" territories, but falls off quickly, especially extensive rural road networks.

              On the positive, GMaps has better points of interest coverage, e.g. through business and building names, etc. No doubt from their web scraping and Yelp data ingestion. The interface has also improved a lot since they hired the HERE designer.

        3. fuzzie

          Re: It rubs the Monopoly on it's skin, or else it gets the antitrust again...

          Google's "offline" mode is very limited (and the cached content expires pretty quickly). It also only allows small areas to be cached. With HERE I generally download an entire country (or state(s) in the US).

          Google Map also insists on a bunch of stuff like GPS Location, WiFi and an active SIM to even start up (it blankly refused to start when I had issues with a SIM not roaming). At least with HERE I could fire it up, and use GPS only, together with the compass to dead reckon my way to where I needed to be. Even without GPS I could look up my location in the offline maps and work out directions that way.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It rubs the Monopoly on it's skin, or else it gets the antitrust again...

      Apple Maps are just fine now in my experience (i.e. where I've driven in the last few years) but no matter how great or how awful Apple Maps is, it is irrelevant as competition for Google because it isn't an option on Android.

      The only purpose Apple Maps serves from a competition standpoint is making Google's share of mobile maps equal the ~85% share of Android, rather than the ~100% share of Android and iOS combined.

    3. jelabarre59

      Re: It rubs the Monopoly on it's skin, or else it gets the antitrust again...

      Youtube - constantly declaring war on it's own creators but still nothing else comes close to as good. Vimeo? No chance.

      Well, there is NicoNico, except most of it's content is in Japanese.

    4. JimmyPage Silver badge
      FAIL

      Re: Google Maps (for driving)

      Totally useless *for me* as I have a requirement that I know what the speed limit of the road I'm on is displayed.

      HERE Maps does this beautifully (If they could have a setting to start in "Driving Mode" it would be perfect).

      Despite many calls for Google Maps to have the same (we are talking years, if you dwell on the Google Product forums as I do) it's just not happening.

      Shame, as actually, Googles Maps "driving screen" is nicely laid out.

      You can get 3rd party "apps" that claim to overlay the speed limit for you. But even after registering on all kinds of open source geodata sites, that's a day of my life I will never get back.

      That said, I suspect some of Googles inertia is simply waiting for more Android Auto equipped cars.

    5. John Lilburne

      Re: It rubs the Monopoly on it's skin, or else it gets the antitrust again...

      Youtube - constantly declaring war on it's own creators but still nothing else comes close to as good. Vimeo? No chance.

      The issue here is that the internet is a winner takes all machine. Once certain level of take-up is present on one platform the rest tend to fold as all their users migrate. Once that happens you have a monopoly and any new entrants are unable to compete. Niche startups get swallowed by the big players.

      Who wins the game is completely random. I don't recall in the early 2000s that Google was any better than any of the other search engines, I do recall that a bunch of nerds and geeks declared it was so, but I never saw any empirical evidence to backup the claims.

  3. Joe Werner Silver badge

    Haven't others (ElReg and commentards) said this before?

    I guess I'm not the only one to remember the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit, and bundling the browser with the OS (along with a ton of other stuff) is exactly what Google does as well. And what they have been doing for a long while. Why haven't others noticed this earlier?

    I would totally like it if I could remove a lot of the Googly nonsense on the phone to free up space and make it more useful. (I don't like the iOS interface, and Windows phone is dead (unfortunately, really liked using it - and that's coming from a long term Linux user).)

    1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Haven't others (ElReg and commentards) said this before?

      I would totally like it if I could remove a lot of the Googly nonsense on the phone to free up space and make it more useful.

      Some of the base packages can't be removed, even if the phone is rooted. You can remove the updates, though, which can recover quite a lot of space; and if the phone's rooted, you can disable the apps you don't want, so at least they won't start and won't clutter up the UI. (You can do that from the command line with a terminal app, or use one of the various package management apps available on FDroid.)

      I had pretty well de-Googled my previous phone, but then the screen died on it, and with the new one I just haven't bothered. The short lifespan of the typical smartphone[1] has discouraged me from rooting and customizing them.

      One thing to beware of is that some OEMs install customized Android kernels that lock out some package manager features. My Samsung turned out to have a protection tweak that let me disable Google packages but not re-enable them if I later decided I wanted them. This was particularly a pain with the Google calendar, because it's hard to find an app (even on FDroid) for simple calendar functions that doesn't require the Google calendar. Apparently calendar systems are beyond the typical Android developer's capabilities.

      [1] My father had a Motorola unit in the mid-1990s that lasted around 10 years. My first mobile was a Motorola feature phone which was good for 5 or so. My first smartphone was a Nokia Symbian model that went 5 years, and I only replaced it because some pixels had failed on the screen and I was worried it'd suffer a more serious failure sometime when I needed it. It still works; it's my backup whenever my current phone dies. After that I had an LG that died after 18 months and a Samsung that died after 18 months. Currently I have an Asus that's still going at 8 months; we'll see how long it lasts.

  4. Charles 9

    What I remember is the breakup of AT&T into the Baby Bells. And look what happened. They just glommed themselves back together so now we not only have AT&T we have Verizon and all the rest as well. I don't think breaking things up is all it's cracked up to be, as they'll just find ways to come back together, probably using competition from rival firms as a justification.

    1. Kabukiwookie

      Indeed, as soon as the market is divided up by just a few players, all real competition goes out the window and consumers wind up either paying through the nose or experiencing poor services (or both) due to the oligopoly.

      Real competition can only be achieved by either limiting the size of companies or restricting the amount of market share each is allowed to have.

      Real capitalists would be rooting for more regulations that ensure a real competitive market; anyone who is in favour of getting rid of any regulations that control a market isn't a capitalist, they're a corporate socialist.

      1. Charles 9

        But then they'll just counter that limiting them to a certain size will simply render them too small to be viable, especially if one gets bold enough to break the rules and then bribe the government to look the other way. SOMEONE'S going to cheat.

  5. Pen-y-gors

    break it up!

    We can have lots of little Googles. One indexes search terms starting with A-C, another does D-F, then G-J etc.

    Should work, no?

    1. imanidiot Silver badge

      Re: break it up!

      Separate the ads business from ALL the other ones and things will get much better already.

      1. Charles 9

        Re: break it up!

        How do you ensure they stay separated without them playing Six Degrees of Separation?

  6. Teiwaz

    Google is immature, with a short attention span and a ME ME ME attitude....

    Do we really want a handful of smaller even more immature ones?

    Their search is fast losing relevance under their greed and paid placements (three now, last I looked, all also fat lazy sites that have given up being lean and useful for bought attention).

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Makes little sense to me

    The EU won a record $2.7bn judgement

    No. The EU competition commissioner ordered a $2.7bn fine.

    Google has pushed the pendulum of technology to the absolute limit of commoditisation

    Commoditisation is good. It means things are available and cheap to consumer, and rent-seeking companies go out of business.

    McNamee envisages "eight or 10 different monopolies" that would then be obliged to compete with each other.

    How and why would Google Maps compete with YouTube or Android compete with Google Search?

    1. stephanh

      Re: Makes little sense to me

      "How and why would Google Maps compete with YouTube or Android compete with Google Search?"

      They would compete for the advertisement budget of their customers.

  8. Neil Barnes Silver badge

    eight or 10 different monopolies

    I wonder if McNamee has ever read a dictionary?

  9. Daggerchild Silver badge

    Cut along the undefined line or else!

    Break them up? Sure! All you need to do is first define a very fast inter-competitor interface protocol and a Data Source market. Be aware it may necessarily mean giving the user's data to ALL potential competing sources, whoever they are - how can they compete to answer a query otherwise?

    If you don't have a data-market interface layer then breaking them up means .. well, nothing - they'll just throw cables over the wall, sign a contract between each other for services, and it will look exactly the same - it will just cost everyone more money to do exactly the same thing.

    "Hello Siri. Where is a good place to buy the best hammer?" - Mapping, product recommendation, store recommendation, price search. Isn't AI already integrating competing data sources without the user having a market choice?

    Alternatively, you'll have to forbid systems that integrate results from competable data sources and force the humans to do it manually so everyone gets a fair bite of them.

    1. Claptrap314 Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: Cut along the undefined line or else!

      This is the key point. The value of data defined by the uses that we can make of the data. This in turn is strongly correlated to the number of connections of the individual pieces of data. And that to the amount of data.

      There were those who worried that the breakup of AT&T would destroy consumer value. That was probably marginal. The worry about the same in the face of a proposed M$ breakup was fairly clear (except that almost all of their offerings were garbage). In the case of G especially, but also f, it would be pretty much crazy to argue that a breakup would not destroy consumer value.

      G has a sort of interesting feature in that it has managed to more or less constantly fail at social proper. That means that a geographic breakup (by country) would likely be a lot less damaging to consumer value than breaking up the business units. Not certain how effective that would be, but it would certainly lower G's power.

      Especially if, say, there were a Google tld with the country codes pointing the various entities ( www.us.google, www.uk.google, .....)

      As I mentioned, not sure that this would actually gain much.

      1. Charles 9

        Re: Cut along the undefined line or else!

        "There were those who worried that the breakup of AT&T would destroy consumer value. That was probably marginal. The worry about the same in the face of a proposed M$ breakup was fairly clear (except that almost all of their offerings were garbage). In the case of G especially, but also f, it would be pretty much crazy to argue that a breakup would not destroy consumer value."

        It would also probably, much like AT&T, not stick well. Instead of a telephone monopoly, the Baby Bells glommed back together into an oligopoly (the new AT&T, Verizon, et al) each as big as the old AT&T was originally. How do you stop such a breakup from gravitating back together again either through M&A or through attrition of underperformers?

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Google isn't going away

    Google is too deeply etrenched/embedded to be worried about anything.

    Google (Youtube) doesn't even have to explain it's income.

    Google members appear in emails to heads of state.

  11. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
    Holmes

    "The letter to Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, the EU's competition regulator, comes from search and travel sites, and the Open Internet Project, which is backed by publisher Axel Springer and Getty Images."

    So, what you're saying is that companies which compete with Google would like Google to be broken up so they don't have to compete with Google.

    "Google has pushed the pendulum of technology to the absolute limit of commoditisation," he said, "to the point where people who spent their whole lives developing really valuable compelling entertainment, and really valuable compelling journalism, and really valuable compelling novels can't make money doing it any more."

    [citation needed]

    From my perspective, we're in a golden age of television, where we're getting "really compelling entertainment." "Really valuable compelling journalism" has largely been killed by the Internet generally, specifically by the expectation that you can get content for free (or paid for by advertising), but that trend began well before Google came on the scene. As for the novels, if anyone is to blame for shafting novelists, it's a combination of Amazon and the publishers.

    As an anti-Google hit piece, I give this article 2/10. Must try harder.

    1. Joe Werner Silver badge

      Of course the competitors complained. Who else would if the antitrust entities are sitting on their hands.

      As to tv providing entertainment, and a "golden age" of it: not in the countries I have been living in over the past decade or so...

    2. Tromos

      "a golden age of television"

      Bring back the stone age!

  12. JohnFen

    My attitude is shifting

    A few years ago when people started calling for Google to be broken up as an abusive monopoly, I thought that was over the top. I'm still not entirely convinced, but as time goes on, I'm become more sympathetic to the argument.

  13. Snowy Silver badge
    Megaphone

    Next they could break up Facebook

    Make it split the sharing stuff with your friends from the spying/data mining/advertising parts.

  14. buybin

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