They can’t “break up” Google, it’s an American company! it’s not based there.
Also the previous competition chief ridiculed such notions when he was recently asked about it by Parliament citing the utility companies (German ones) that would be first in line for a breakup debate if that was a tool they wanted to use:
The decision to reopen settlement talks followed vigorous criticism from a widening range of politicians, including the economy ministers of France and Germany. The latter, Sigmar Gabriel, argued in May that a forced breakup of Google should be seriously considered because of its vast market power. Werner Langen, a European lawmaker representing German Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU party, echoed that suggestion, drawing parallels with U.S. efforts to break up monopolies in oil and other industries. "If we don't give them a bash we're not going to solve the problem," he said.
Mr. Almunia showed little sympathy for such demands. "I would tell you one thing, as a German friend," he said. "The day I [hear] that the railways will accept unbundling, electricity companies will accept unbundling, and we will discuss [unbundling] with telecom operators and others…let's discuss unbundling Google, but not before.
via http://online.wsj.com/articles/google-must-improve-search-se...
The fact that they are drafting a motion targeting one company is so shamelessly political it’s almost a public display of corruption.
Not to mention that the ludicrous levels of attention and weigh this issue is getting in the EU is unheard of and unwarranted:
One technology industry source with knowledge of the motion also called it a "politically-motivated campaign to do something that is a regulatory matter". He added: "These guys are calling for the break-up of Google. That is not in proportion to the degree of concern articulated by the commission during its investigation.
I actually really applaud this step. Don't get me wrong, this should not be considered anti-American, but if you run a global company getting revenue from a lot of countries you should be prepared to follow their laws and pay taxes. It is that way for physical goods, and it's pure stupid arrogance to think that delivering online products exempts you from all of it.
Besides it's a disproponate legislative move targeting one company, it will in the very least raise questions.
That's never stopped the US government...
Maybe a 90% market share originates simply from better quality?
When I search non-local stuff in English I have the choice between at least Google, Yahoo!, Bing and DDG, which all give decent, comparable results. When I search for German content or local stuff there is really only Google.
German Google search results are terrible compared to what English speaking people are used to. For German queries it is the only option.
I guess for other languages spoken in Europe it's similar.
Or is it that search algorithms don't cross languages easily - or that the core developers and testers use English as a lingua Franca anyway?
Still a fascinating point - can you put some kind of example or test up?
So for example if I search for "that movie with dinosaurs" on Bing and Google, Bing's no.1 result is an IMDB link to a movie called "Dinosaur (2000)." That's not a "stupid" suggestion, but it is still not how people use search engines. Google shows me "jurassic park" and "the land before time" neither of which contain the word "dinosaur" in the title.
That's because millions of people have likely searched "that movie with a dinosaur" and clicked on the "Jurassic Park"/"Land Before Time" links. This information cannot be gained by simply just indexing no matter how amazing your indexer is.
So let's say, theoretically, that someone stole Google's code. They then reproduced Google's infrastructure, search algorithms, and so on but WITHOUT Google's massive database of historic queries. I legitimately do not think that this company, even with all of Google's stuff could catch up with Google, because 1. Those historic queries now ARE the core of Google's results, and 2. Google will always out-pace the competition in generating new intelligent results (due to more usage).
It is a circular problem. Bing could be twice as good as Google under the covers, but it will never catch up for the reasons I said above... Ditto with DDG or anyone else.
PS - As an aside, Google's search query parsing is significantly better than Bing's when it comes to programming/technical queries. Every time a quote appears in a bing query it treats it as a literal query string, Google seems to understand the context of the double quote (i.e. that it was from the source material) and give you non-literal query string results.
Don't blame Google because they are really good at what they do. They aren't stopping you from using another service, nor are they stopping others from creating their own search engine.
[This is not a strict distinction. For example, one could argue that 'search' became a public utility when the EU introduced the "right to be forgotten"]
"the resolution calls on the European Commission “to consider proposals with the aim of unbundling search engines from other commercial services” to introduce more competition into online search in Europe."
How would unbundling 'other commercial services' make other search options any better? I imagine with Google only focusing on search they'd get closer to 100% in the EU rather than causing more competition. Something's off in their reasoning.
This is a signal from politicians to the European Commission that they can go hard.
There are very profound and far reaching issues here. Imagine if instead of Wikipedia we had some encyclopedia where half of page 1 was sponsored editorial and the rest of what made it on page 1 was done in a totally opaque environment by a company who had commercial interests on what was showing up. If your company operates in a fairly narrow market, has limited retention, and needs to use search traffic vs demographic traffic to build your audience, you are effectively operating day to day with a giant guillotine over your neck.
(Very happy to see DuckDuckGo get some meaningful traction, and for Google's sake with the regulators the better DuckDuckGo does the more room there is to let off some pressure.)
"when you want a fancy Apple robot, but that robot is dumb unless it has access to all of your current and past data." makes it look as if you want humans to have control over who has access to their data. I think that should be the norm, and if laws are retired to get there, I think we should get them.
-Companies should be able to own and trade their users data with other companies. This should be like a stock or ad exchange. More pull requests for certain data, higher the data connection price.
-Also blogs should be able to charge $0 or some amount for search bots to crawl them. Its demand and supply if. NYT might be able to ask for some price while Buzzfeed can say .. eh we'll set that to free.
-Now for user, Example If I pay $200 for a robot - The company can say, hey it is $10 to use it monthly(because the robot company figures that is avg cost to fetch data, lets say from Goog FB AMZN etc). But some companies can say, the data of their users is owned by them and their user so if the user want to use his/her data then its free. But if the company wants to use to for some other means without user consent then its up for sale.
Its kind of like twitter's firehose, just more universal. Will encourage companies to develop APIs since now they can charge its use. I'd love a google now/robot to suggest me what netflix flick I should see based on my Bing search history.
For Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Porsche the US is their largest market. Between 20% and 25% of all sales typically come from the US for those automakers.
Jobs will be lost? Nah, auto supply will shift to domestics and or Asian manufacturers. The Germans will simply lose a big fat market, and it's unlikely all of Europe will agree to strike back against US automakers.
Economic war is the only thing that is likely to come out of the EU trying to split Google.
