Google Only Improves Products Under Pressure, US Argues

Google -- under fire in court for allegedly resting on its laurels thanks to its 90% market dominance -- only made an effort to beef up the quality of its search engine in the European Union after being hit by a record antitrust fine, according to internal documents revealed in the US Justice Department's monopolization case against the tech giant. From a report: The Justice Department is arguing at a trial in Washington that Google's failure to improve its products -- unless put under pressure -- proves that it's illegally maintaining its monopoly. Alphabet's Google planned to improve its European search results only after a record 2018 European antitrust fine, according to the documents, which revealed that Google executives discussed a plan dubbed "Go Big in Europe."

The plan aimed to improve results in France and Germany in 2019 and 2020 with changes such as adding post-game soccer video highlights, more local content and news, pronunciation practice for different languages and more information on local television options available for streaming. The catalyst was a 2018 EU antitrust order that forced Google to offer a choice screen giving Android phone users five search engine options to choose from, according to US antitrust enforcers trying the case.

Well Duh

[tattood]

No company ever improves any product without pressure. That pressure can be from customers, or competitors or regulations. But it nobody is complaining about the product, why change it?

Re:

[test321]

They meant "under regulatory pressure", which we know because the example given is regulation in another jurisdiction. Also being a declaration from a government official during trial at court of law hints that it is to be read "under pressure from us, the Department of Justice".

Re:Well Duh

[gweihir]

Nonsense. Good companies are proactive and do continuous improvement just because they want to compete on merit and not on marketing or market dominance. You are probably not doing business with any of those, so you seem to have assumed anybody uses the same modus as the crappy companies you actually do business with.

Re:Well Duh

[omnichad]

Normally that pressure is called competition. And this proves that there isn't any. Definitely relevant in an Antitrust case.

Re:

[JasterBobaMereel]

Google has competition .... they charge nothing for their products, and advertisers can go elsewhere easily

There is no barrier for entry, anyone can make e.g. a better search engine, just like Google did, and take over ...

Giant corporations tried to compete with Google... and failed because they were worse - the ones that are are competing are doing so by being better

Re:

[omnichad]

The idea that anyone can come along and make a better product does not preclude monopolistic behavior. You can abuse your position regardless of whether there are theoretical competitors ready to swoop in.

From what Google has told me.

[AutoTrix]

I have high level contacts at Google and from my understanding from conversations, Google releases improvements to its search engines algorithms and ranking logic several times per day and then a major update several times a year. If the US tries to argue this, I believe Google will be able to flood them with incremental changes which they will have a significant burden to prove each and every one of them is insignificant, which is like true for the vast majority of the updates but, there will be dozens per year that offer so level of significant improvement in some tangible area which will destroy this argument. The burden of proof is on the accuser and simply, they will have to spend millions to just get up to speed with the rate at which Google Search is tangibly improved over time. Notably, since starting to work with SEO and SEM 15 years ago, there has been major updates and shifts in strategyever two to three years to combat different practices and improve the tangible quality of the results for end users.

Re:From what Google has told me.

[ArchieBunker]

From my perspective google gets incrementally worse every day. The results are less relevant and even with uBlock Origin installed the content returned is steered towards videos and then shopping. Half the time whatever I search for are terms that google just feeds right back into Amazon or some other retailer. Totally fucking useless. Even wrapping quotes around words no longer guarantees they will be used.

Re:

[test321]

there has been major updates and shifts in strategyever two to three years to combat different practices and improve

improve?

Re:From what Google has told me.

[gweihir]

Changes are often not improvements from a customer perspective.

Re:

[AleRunner]

Changes are often not improvements from a customer perspective.

Exactly this. A very large amount of what Google does is change in order to stay the same. As SEO people try to manipulate the results and find new ways to do that, Google has to neutralize those in order to continue to provide even the same bad quality of results that they do today. Although it's clearly valuable stuff, there's no real new innovation in incrementally doing that.

If they had actual competition in the search space they would be driven to go beyond this and try to deliver visible improvements

Re: From what Google has told me.

[AutoTrix]

Google's customer is not the end user of Google. It is an advertising business and combating spam and improving relevancy improves the marketing ability for businesses wishing to advertise, increasing clicks and reducing costs per click and improving the quality of the user delivered to the advertiser. This is the business of Google Search, or Bing, or DuckDuckGo, or Brave.

Re:

[gweihir]

From the point of view of the article and from the point of view of anti-trust law, they are. But obviously you are correct and the only customers that Google cares about are not the end-users. As that takes too much conditionals and qualifications, I did not state the obvious in my response.

Re: From what Google has told me.

[AutoTrix]

They have definitely tangibly improved the quality and relevance of users delivered to their customers. There is less spam and the quality rank of truly relevant businesses has improved.

What do you mean by improvements?

[rsilvergun]

First and most obviously Google needs to provide some valid search results. And we all know damn well they're in a constant arms race with SEO parasites. So how many of those improvements are just what any normal org would call maintenance?

Also I can tell you that Google.com on mobile is now a cavalcade of advertisements for me unless I switch to the desktop site on my phone (which doesn't work well thanks to the tiny text). So the next question is: How many of those "improvements" are just there to pad Google's bottom line?

And that's just search. I think we all know what the Google graveyard is at this point. They don't innovate much at all without a ton of pressure. Hell, YouTube is now cracking down on ad blockers. Could they do that if they had a competitor in their space (10-30 minute videos produced by individuals or small(ish) teams)? Can you jump ship to another site with the same or equivalent content to escape the adverts?

Re:

[piojo]

... unless I switch to the desktop site on my phone (which doesn't work well thanks to the tiny text).

This is off-topic, but have you tried Opera on Android? It has a gloriously effective text reflow feature. With this browser it's only a few times per year that I can't read small text, either because of the initial render being good or because pinch to zoom keeps the right text on screen.

Bing wants to eat their lunch

[PhrostyMcByte]

Bing is getting investments right and left, but still can't beat Google at search results. If Google was truly resting on their laurels (I think they do this in other places, certianly) then I'd expect Bing to eclipse them.

In reality I suspect that web developers have made apps more complex and harder -- if not impossible, for poorly made SPA apps -- to interpret, index, and search. SEO has outpaced their ability to fight it. The web is simply harder to search today than it was 10 years ago.

Failure

[darkain]

Can't have failed products if they're killed off! :D

Google improves products?

[gweihir]

News to me. Looks much more like they continue to enshittify everything the offer.

Criteria

[McLoud]

If not having improvements is an excuse to label some company a monopoly, they really should take a look at Microsoft than

Of course the US gov't would say this.

[Virtucon]

Unfortunately, we can't iterate lawyers out of existence. They're like cockroaches and always create specious legal arguments out of thin air while consuming resources. Change is always a constant with many motivations. Evolutionary: "Hey we can do it better this way and produce 3x as much", directional: "If we don't change it we're going to have a problem here." or environmental: "If we don't fix this the roof will collapse from the lava that's about to fall on us."

All of them have their priorities and c

Search is just part of the moat

[FeelGood314]

No one pays for search and google doesn't charge for add search placement only sponsored links. So in many ways the search page is just another high traffic page on the internet with ads.

Search is part of the moat around google's real monopoly that is advertising. They own the market for matching buyers and sellers of advertising space on the internet. You have a high traffic site and want to sell advertising space? The only game in town is google. You want to buy advertising space on websites you

\o/

[easyTree]

The Justice Department is arguing at a trial in Washington that Google's failure to improve its products -- unless put under pressure -- proves that it's illegally maintaining its monopoly.

The fact that my neighbour doesn't wash his car until it is dirty proves it is stolen.

Re:

[easyTree]

Wait, let me try again:

The fact that the justice department apparently cannot string together a coherent argument indicates that they lack incentive to hire the right people because they have a monopoly.