Forget about "competition" and "who provides the service" for just a moment. (I'll return to them below.) I'm saying all of this as someone who doesn't use Google search. I would like to see more competition in search engines. But anyone seeking to work in that space needs to think about how users actually use search engines, and stop thinking in the conceptual model of "finding sites for the given search terms".
"65% of searches don’t result in a click" is a feature. You asked a question, you got the answer to that question. A search engine isn't a tool to find sites, it's a tool to find information; once upon a time that meant finding a site for that information, but ideally, it means finding the information. Sometimes you might be looking for "a site that has X", but often you're just looking for X. For that matter, 100% of searches via Google Assistant don't result in a "click", because the information has to be digested and presented via a voice interface.
It's accurate to say that Google is in competition with every site that provides information to users. Anyone in the business of providing information to users needs to treat Google as their competitor.
So, yes, a regulator or competitor who speaks in terms of how Google isn't driving users to other sites or prioritizing its own sites, and doesn't acknowledge that doing so is answering the user's question, is indeed speaking a foreign language.
If we were in some post-scarcity world, someone trying to help user's find information should be taking a very similar approach to Google (or finding something even better), and finding more ways to make information more digestible and presentable this way, and encouraging sites to provide information in a way that can answer questions like this.
In today's non-post-scarcity world, there is absolutely an anti-competitive issue here. But the problem is that the most efficient and often most useful way to answer a user's question may well be incompatible with the "just present links to sites given search terms" model.
In seeking to solve that problem, we can't start out by preventing people from presenting information in whatever way users find most useful and efficient. We shouldn't seek to shoehorn a search engine back into a simple "here are the results for your search terms" model. Any approach that unthinkingly tries to foster competition by breaking the ability to present information in the most useful way possible is rightfully treated as some outside hostile force that's destroying something useful.
And because so much of the effort to regulate this as an anti-competitive issue has been unthinkingly treating a search engine as nothing more than mapping search terms to outbound site links, that has generated a backlash even outside of Google (for instance, here on HN), from people who see how much value would be destroyed by such an approach.
Not all efforts to foster competition have been this unthinking. I've seen proposals that try to introduce the use of APIs to present such information from a variety of sources (e.g. "here's the service I prefer to use for flights/hotels/etc"). I don't know if that's the right approach, or if it's fair, or if it's necessary, but it's at least closer to the right direction, and it isn't destroying useful things like "answering user's questions" or "building a useful voice assistant".
I've always been fascinated by people who spend huge chunks of time creating and maintaining Wikipedia articles. Are they driven by a simple love research and curating information? Or maybe knowing their articles could potentially inform and educate millions of people.
I wonder how driven content creators would be if they believed no one would read their articles; if the information they carefully curated was mere bot food, digested and summarized on a Google search results page. The summaries may have greater utility for search engine users. Yet at the same time the ecosystem as a whole would be degraded if the incentives for creating rich detailed content are degraded.
Google relies on free and open access to a vast sea of information. Most of this information exists due to the labor of other people. If any company wants to use this information to create a free and open source search engine, voice assistant, etc., I say more power to that company. But when a company uses free and open data to power proprietary walled gardens, we should consider the regulatory implications and the effect on the ecosystem as a whole. And Google is large enough that when it creates a walled garden (keeping visitors tied Google properties and products) that it could have a significant negative impact.
I read a certain amount of entitlement in TFA too. Like "I deserve to have my site on the front page of Google, rather than its paid advertisers or its own pages".
Why? This isn't a government-provided public service. It's a commercial product. Why should they direct traffic to your site for free? They, like everyone else, walk the line between providing an excellent product for customers and creating revenue for shareholders.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of Google since they stopped not being evil. But I'm not sure that having a competing set of search engines would solve the author's problem - they would be writing passionate blog posts about "why can't we have a single set of SEO rules so I can get my site to the front page of all of them with no hassle?"
Worth noting that many times, the complaint is that the query is answered by an infobox... and the info in that box is provided by a website... and that website is the one complaining about a lack of clicks, because now people just use Google's scraped answers instead of actually visiting the site.
It seems valid to complain that Google is profiting off of a site while simultaneously harming that site's visibility.
> It seems valid to complain that Google is profiting off of a site while simultaneously harming that site's visibility.
I don't understand how Google is "harming the site's visibility" - it still gets some traffic free of charge from Google, right? If Google didn't list the site in the first place, it would be less visible and get less traffic. So I don't understand how Google is harming the site's visibility? Why does Google have an implied responsibility to send all possible traffic to a site it lists?
The entitlement may be sourced to the fact that the author is an SEO company.
As a sidebar... SEO companies would love to see Google knocked out of its current market position. Google has gotten very good at relying on signal that SEO companies can't control. They would much prefer a more gamable engine take Google's position from it.
We've seen this play out with the browser wars, though - different standards mean that each target needs a different approach. You'd end up having to create a different site with different content organisation for each search engine and then serve the right site to the right crawler.
It might be more gamable, but the competition isn't the search engine, or normal people posting normal non-gamed content, but other SEO teams. If everyone can game it, then it's a race to the bottom to see who can game it most/best and that's not a good place for anyone else.
It's accurate to say that Google is in competition with every site that provides information to users. Anyone in the business of providing information to users needs to treat Google as their competitor.
I think the problem that author tries to address is that Google uses their competitor's data in order to serve that information, which isn't that great since IIRC they do no profit sharing which undermines long term viability of collecting, systemising and maintaining that data.
"65% of searches don’t result in a click" is a feature. You asked a question, you got the answer to that question. A search engine isn't a tool to find sites, it's a tool to find information; once upon a time that meant finding a site for that information, but ideally, it means finding the information. Sometimes you might be looking for "a site that has X", but often you're just looking for X. For that matter, 100% of searches via Google Assistant don't result in a "click", because the information has to be digested and presented via a voice interface.
It's accurate to say that Google is in competition with every site that provides information to users. Anyone in the business of providing information to users needs to treat Google as their competitor.
So, yes, a regulator or competitor who speaks in terms of how Google isn't driving users to other sites or prioritizing its own sites, and doesn't acknowledge that doing so is answering the user's question, is indeed speaking a foreign language.
If we were in some post-scarcity world, someone trying to help user's find information should be taking a very similar approach to Google (or finding something even better), and finding more ways to make information more digestible and presentable this way, and encouraging sites to provide information in a way that can answer questions like this.
In today's non-post-scarcity world, there is absolutely an anti-competitive issue here. But the problem is that the most efficient and often most useful way to answer a user's question may well be incompatible with the "just present links to sites given search terms" model.
In seeking to solve that problem, we can't start out by preventing people from presenting information in whatever way users find most useful and efficient. We shouldn't seek to shoehorn a search engine back into a simple "here are the results for your search terms" model. Any approach that unthinkingly tries to foster competition by breaking the ability to present information in the most useful way possible is rightfully treated as some outside hostile force that's destroying something useful.
And because so much of the effort to regulate this as an anti-competitive issue has been unthinkingly treating a search engine as nothing more than mapping search terms to outbound site links, that has generated a backlash even outside of Google (for instance, here on HN), from people who see how much value would be destroyed by such an approach.
Not all efforts to foster competition have been this unthinking. I've seen proposals that try to introduce the use of APIs to present such information from a variety of sources (e.g. "here's the service I prefer to use for flights/hotels/etc"). I don't know if that's the right approach, or if it's fair, or if it's necessary, but it's at least closer to the right direction, and it isn't destroying useful things like "answering user's questions" or "building a useful voice assistant".