from Hacker News

Microsoft CEO testifies that Google’s power in search is ubiquitous

by wunderland on 10/2/23, 8:24 PM with 227 comments

  • by bettercallsalad on 10/2/23, 11:56 PM

    I am not following these testimonies in anti-trust cases where they have a competitor of Google testify against Google. Isn’t testifying all about presenting evidence? If I am accused of theft in a criminal court and my arch rival is brought for testimony against me, it doesn’t sound like a fair process to me. Of course if it’s a substantiated material it would make sense but otherwise it doesn’t just makes sense at all. Google as a search engine is far better than Bing and that’s just a fact.

  • by jiggawatts on 10/2/23, 9:50 PM

    One way Google maintains their monopoly is that many websites block all bots except for the Google indexing bot.

    This makes it literally impossible for anyone to make a competing search engine because millions of doors are slammed in their face. There is no practical way to negotiate access at this scale either leaving no options for small startups — e.g.: AI-based search!

    One possible anti-monopoly measure would be to force Google to mask the identity of their bots. E.g.: force them to use a random IP address pool that third parties can also use without their permission.

    IMHO breaking up corporations is a bit heavy-handed and not the only remedy available.

  • by scaredginger on 10/2/23, 11:39 PM

  • by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on 10/3/23, 4:26 AM

    "Google has argued that the default positions are not overwhelmingly powerful and that users can switch to a new search engine if they like."

    OK, then why pay Apple close to $20 billion annually to be the "default".

    "Mr. Schmidtlein hammered Mr. Nadella with questions about instances in which Bing had been the default on mobile phones, only for users to switch back to Google."

    If Google search is so great, and Apple needs to use it as a default, then shouldn't Apple be paying Google.

    If users switch without Google paying to be default, then why pay.

  • by pokerhobo on 10/3/23, 4:30 AM

    Seems like the responses ignore that fact that it’s not illegal to have a monopoly. It’s illegal to unfairly use your monopoly to prevent competition. That’s what this is about.

  • by Woodi on 10/3/23, 4:57 AM

    But actually what we want from "search" providers ? What "search" actually is ?? Some OS that monopoly is impossible to avoid ?? Or hardware you can't don't have because your own government or law require it ? Or other dead end, shorter or longer ?

    Last week I installed some Debian and Duck was default in FF... What a unpleasant experience... 90's Yahoo catalog or pre-google "search engines" - all was working as expected. Only with Bing and that so called "privacy preserving" clone you are shocked that trivial things to find/match are absent in results...

    So Google search is "ubiquitous", simple the best. But is's trivial to avoid ! Not like Microsoft monopoly on OS-like trap. Or Android :)

    I personally would pay for good search app, offline, open-source, with _data_ updates. Or probably app is not needed here, just [pretty legal] data to buy. But Unity had some troubles just previous week... Free stuff is hard to match :>

  • by zitsarethecure on 10/3/23, 12:19 AM

    > "We believe the marketplace should determine what innovations consumers want." - Microsoft, 1998

    https://news.microsoft.com/1998/04/09/microsoft-advertisemen...

  • by GuB-42 on 10/3/23, 12:22 AM

    This is a prisoner dilemma situation.

    Both Microsoft and Google abuse their position, they could shut up about it, but instead it looks like Microsoft is defecting. I wonder if Google intends to counterattack. What Google does with Android, Microsoft does it with Windows, but worse.

  • by nologic01 on 10/3/23, 11:48 AM

    A duopoly in search that throws some crumbs to the former big-tech monopoly would be a definite improvement over the current monopoly /s.

    IANAL and don't particularly care about the minutiae and merits and politics of individual cases in the context of antiquated anti-trust laws. A lucrative monopoly allowed to operate over long periods can and will identify its own weak points and the abilities and competitive threats of the market. It will have more than ample resources to mitigate them. Whether that monopoly dominance is secured in legal, border-line legal or illegal ways is a mute point.

    In a healthy economy there should not be any monopolies unless they are very heavily regulated. We should celebrate commercial success up to a point but be deeply suspicious of winner-takes-all degeneration that is justified on the basis of bogus arguments (network effects, superior quality etc).

    This rationale is even more important in the context of digital technology where the foundations of the current and future digital economy are being laid. And no, a Google Web [1] is not a good blueprint for the digital economy. Neither is a cozily arranged Google-Microsoft Web for that matter. For this new type of economy to flourish the "web" should be really neutral, not the fiefdom of this or that oligopoly extracting rents and holding everything back.

    [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/willskipworth/2023/10/02/the-in...

  • by anacrolix on 10/3/23, 2:32 AM

    Good. It is. For a company that pretended to be a startup as late as 2014, and had the motto Don't Be Evil, they are the reverse of that. They have destructive product handling, regularly destroying alternatives with their own versions then EOL them when the market is destroyed. Their Ads monopoly is awful. Google is a bane on the internet.

  • by zeruch on 10/3/23, 1:13 AM

    ...a power MSFT deeply wishes it had and would argue is fine if they were in Google shoes.

    There are some deep ironies in this case.

  • by Paul_S on 10/3/23, 7:42 AM

    I think Google is not going to keep its monopoly.

    Last Saturday I was searching for something on Google and not getting anything and just for laughs I tried bing. I have been using it for second opinion since. And I don't think bing got any better, but my god has Google got a lot worse.

  • by dang on 10/2/23, 11:30 PM

    Related ongoing thread:

    Nadella tells a court that Bing is worse than Google – and Apple could fix it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37743634 - Oct 2023 (11 comments)

  • by blagund on 10/3/23, 5:32 AM

    I, for one, find myself from time to time wondering, what are these subpar search results I'm getting? And then realize I haven't yet set Kagi as default search engine on this device yet.

  • by jsnell on 10/2/23, 11:14 PM

    > The image of the chief executive of a leading tech rival — Microsoft is one of the world’s biggest public companies, valued at $2.4 trillion — saying it could not easily fight Google was striking.

    Why is that striking? It's just a repeat of the playbook Microsoft used to great effect in the Activision trial. "Oh, woe is us, we've lost the console wars, we're in distant 3rd place and can't compete". They have absolutely no problem being mock-humiliated due to a supposed failure to compete if it gets them the result they need in court. (Which is the smart play, of course.)

    > But in court, Mr. Nadella said that argument was “bogus” because users generally don’t change their default search engine, even if they have the ability to do so.

    Oh, huh. Isn't Bing the default search engine for the default browser on Windows? I guess all those Windows users are searching on Bing then.

    Though I do wonder why Microsoft gets into the news on a regular cadence about yet again having reset the defaults with a Windows update. Seems like something that they wouldn't need to bother with if nobody changes the defaults.

  • by fractalb on 10/3/23, 6:02 AM

    I don't know how the US anti-trust works, but I'm wondering why hasn't Microsoft ever been investigated about being a monopoly in desktop operating systems?

  • by petesergeant on 10/3/23, 6:46 AM

    If I was Facebook or Apple, I’d drop a bunch of cash into common crawl or build my own equiv, give it away virtually for free, and let fancy AI search startups take aim at Google

  • by king_magic on 10/3/23, 11:13 AM

    I mean Bing still sucks compared to Google. I keep giving it a chance, but it is just nowhere as good. Make it better, and people might use Google less?

  • by pjmlp on 10/3/23, 9:08 AM

    Just like Windows happens to be on the desktop, regardless of the WinDev and marketing department attempts to mess it up, one cannot win in every front.

  • by charles_f on 10/3/23, 4:16 AM

    I donno, I've been using only duckduckgo for a few years and I don't feel any worse than on google

  • by mjan22640 on 10/3/23, 6:53 AM

    Microsoft CEO: "bing s*cks"

  • by mupuff1234 on 10/3/23, 8:34 AM

    Did he actually provide any meaningful evidence or was it all just rhetorics?

  • by mickmcq on 10/3/23, 3:49 PM

    In other news, Dracula testifies against Frankenstein.

  • by nojvek on 10/3/23, 1:41 PM

  • by sylware on 10/2/23, 11:49 PM

    lol, their significant share holders are big tech one: vanguard and blackrock.

    Same guys...

  • by graycat on 10/3/23, 5:52 AM

    This post is aimed at the lawyers and judges in the current DoJ/Google legal case.

    From this case, I'm concerned, apparently threatened:

    (A) I have some expertise in computing, worked in and with computing for decades, written some serious software, taught computer science in college and graduate school of famous universities, and published peer-reviewed original research in artificial intelligence.

    (B) Now computing is my main activity and the foundation of my business startup.

    (C) From credible quotes in the media and (A) and (B) just above, my opinion is that the lawyers and judges in the Google case (a) are poorly informed on and have no meaningful understanding of computing, (b) are often seriously misinformed on computing, and (c) are on the way to doing serious harm to computing, the economy, and my work.

    I see no opportunity for this legal case to do any good and would like the DoJ just to say:

    "Sorry, never mind. We made a HUGE mistake and now drop the case."

    For example:

    (1) Operating System. I use versions of Microsoft's Windows, really want to use only one operating system, considered the choices, and picked Windows.

    It seems to me that Microsoft continually makes changes to improve Windows.

    Some of the changes are for the user experience and user interface. Mostly I find the changes poorly designed and irritating but not a serious problem.

    Other changes are for, e.g., computer security and new hardware, and I like those changes a LOT.

    I REALLY LIKE their .NET software and its documentation.

    I REALLY like the Windows NTFS file system. And I REALLY like the fact that the basics of Windows has been quite reliable, with lots of utility, for 10+ years.

    And I intend to start using Windows Server 2019. Versions of Windows Server may be the most important software in the economy of the world.

    (2) I have lots of computer programs installed.

    Some of the programs I've written myself in various computer languages.

    Of course, for me the most important of these programs is the Web site server program I've written for my startup.

    Otherwise my most heavily used program is the text editor KEdit, first written by an IBM employee in France, and for that program I've written dozens of macros.

    Next is Rexx written by an IBM employee in England, and for that language I've written dozens of programs.

    I have the D. Knuth mathematical word processing software TeX which I use for writing nearly all documents, letters, etc. For TeX I've written dozens of macros.

    I have a spell checking program Aspell I use heavily.

    I have Adobe's Acrobat installed and use it to read some important PDF files.

    To keep up with some changes in email standards, I intend to install a recent version of Microsoft Office.

    I am a heavy user of the Internet and, thus, of Web browsers. As I type this, the computer has installed Firefox, Chrome, Brave, and Edge. I use all of them, use Firefox the most, may change to use Brave the most, and may install the current version of Chrome.

    So, each of these Web browsers is an installed computer program out of some dozens I have installed.

    With these Web browsers, I visit Web sites -- thousands of them.

    Some of the Web sites are search engines or other means of finding content. Some of the search engines are Google, Bing, and DDG. But I also do searches at Wikipedia, YouTube, Stackoverflow, etc.

    (3) Defaults. The legal case has a lot of emphasis on "defaults" in Web browsers and search engines, and to me this emphasis is, understated and in just one word, bad.

    For the only such "default", I have set Firefox as my "default" Web browser, but this setting has almost no effect. E.g., if I am using Adobe's Acrobat to read the PDF (portable document format) file for the paper

    "Tensor Programs I: Wide Feedforward or Recurrent Neural Networks of Any Architecture are Gaussian Processes"

    and in the Acrobat display click on a URL (uniform resource locator) of a Web page, then Acrobat will use my default Web browser to read and display that Web page. I rarely do any such thing and there are other approaches that are plenty easy.

    For a "default search engine", I don't have one.

    In recent months I've noticed that I can do some Web searches from an HTML single line text box displayed by Firefox, but so far I've never done this. I don't like this feature by Firefox because I see no reason to use it and it takes up limited space in the Firefox window.

    Google is just a Web site, and I get to that site just like I get to any of the thousands of other Web sites I go to. No "defaults" are involved.

    DoJ, lawyers, judges, please, Please, PLEASE forget about computing, the Internet, computer operating systems, computer programs, Web browsers, Web sites, and search engines. Just FORGET about them.

    PLEASE.

    Anything you do will be a threat to the economy, my work, and me.