Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust
Forget about &quot;competition&quot; and &quot;who provides the service&quot; for just a moment. (I&#x27;ll return to them below.) I&#x27;m saying all of this as someone who <i>doesn&#x27;t use Google search</i>. 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 &quot;finding sites for the given search terms&quot;.<p>&quot;65% of searches don’t result in a click&quot; is a feature. You asked a question, you got the answer to that question. A search engine isn&#x27;t a tool to find sites, it&#x27;s a tool to find information; once upon a time that meant finding a site for that information, but ideally, it means <i>finding the information</i>. Sometimes you might be looking for &quot;a site that has X&quot;, but often you&#x27;re just looking for X. For that matter, 100% of searches via Google Assistant don&#x27;t result in a &quot;click&quot;, because the information has to be digested and presented via a voice interface.<p>It&#x27;s <i>accurate</i> 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.<p>So, yes, a regulator or competitor who speaks in terms of how Google isn&#x27;t driving users to other sites or prioritizing its own sites, and doesn&#x27;t acknowledge that doing so is <i>answering the user&#x27;s question</i>, is indeed speaking a foreign language.<p>If we were in some post-scarcity world, someone trying to help user&#x27;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.<p>In today&#x27;s non-post-scarcity world, there is <i>absolutely</i> an anti-competitive issue here. But the problem is that the most efficient and often most useful way to answer a user&#x27;s question may well be <i>incompatible</i> with the &quot;just present links to sites given search terms&quot; model.<p>In seeking to solve that problem, we can&#x27;t start out by preventing people from presenting information in whatever way users find most useful and efficient. We shouldn&#x27;t seek to shoehorn a search engine back into a simple &quot;here are the results for your search terms&quot; model. Any approach that unthinkingly tries to foster competition by <i>breaking</i> the ability to present information in the most useful way possible is rightfully treated as some outside hostile force that&#x27;s destroying something useful.<p>And <i>because</i> 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 <i>outside</i> of Google (for instance, here on HN), from people who see how much value would be destroyed by such an approach.<p>Not all efforts to foster competition have been this unthinking. I&#x27;ve seen proposals that try to introduce the use of APIs to present such information from a variety of sources (e.g. &quot;here&#x27;s the service I prefer to use for flights&#x2F;hotels&#x2F;etc&quot;). I don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;s the <i>right</i> approach, or if it&#x27;s <i>fair</i>, or if it&#x27;s <i>necessary</i>, but it&#x27;s at least closer to the right direction, and it isn&#x27;t <i>destroying</i> useful things like &quot;answering user&#x27;s questions&quot; or &quot;building a useful voice assistant&quot;.