Googlopoly: How Google Is Becoming The New Microsoft

Talk about anything at all....
Post Reply
User avatar
henke54
Posts: 382
Joined: Thu Apr 02, 2009 6:10 pm
Location: Flanders Belgium

Googlopoly: How Google Is Becoming The New Microsoft

Post by henke54 »

Jamie Court on huffingtonpost.com at 06/02/2010 wrote:Microsoft caught hell from anti-trust regulators for bundling its browser and software during the 1990s. A new report being distributed to US and European antitrust regulators today shows how Google has been using its greater than 70% share of the online search market to muscle its way into domination of other Internet businesses.

The Inside Google study found that since adopting “Universal Search” in 2007, which favors Google’s properties with prominent listings in its results, traffic to Google’s sites has soared at the expense of competitors. In a nut shell, Google search results give preference to Google products and services, like Googlemaps, YouTube, and Google product search, where advertisers pay to find you and make Google rich.

Google claims that its search is neutral, but the study shows that it’s NOT.
Scott Gilbertson at theregister.co.uk on 25 Jul 2017 wrote:Just in case you didn't believe Firefox was on a trajectory that should have it crash and burn into extinction in the next couple of years, former chief technology officer Andreas Gal has usage stats that confirm it. To use Gal's words: "Firefox market share is falling off a cliff." The same could be said of Firefox itself.

What's most interesting about this data and Gal's interpretation of it is that at the same time that Firefox is sliding into irrelevancy it's becoming a better browser. It's faster than it's ever been and uses less memory – less than its replacement, Chrome. Of course, as the ancient Betamax vs VHS format wars demonstrated, having a superior product does not translate to market share.

The big question is why? Why is Firefox, despite being faster than ever and using less memory than Chrome, losing ground?

Gal believes a big part of the problem is Google's monopoly on search and its aggressive marketing of Chrome. Log in to Google Mail, Google Calendar or YouTube, and Google will push Chrome through overlays, bars at the top of the screen and other means. The language of these ads implies that whichever browser you're using, if it isn't Chrome, it's slow and insecure.

As Gal puts it: "It's hard to compete in a mature market if your main competitor has access to billions of dollars worth of free marketing." Indeed, it's impossible.

"Firefox's decline is not an engineering problem," writes Gal. "It's a market disruption (Desktop to Mobile shift) and monopoly problem. There are no engineering solutions to these market problems."
comments on above article here
:roll:
Christopher Ratcliff at SEO on 25 Feb 16 wrote:As the paid search space increases in ‘top-heaviness’, as organic results get pushed further off the first SERP, as the Knowledge Graph scrapes more and more publisher content and continues to make it pointless to click through to a website, and as our longstanding feelings of unfairness over Google’s monopoly and tax balance become more acute, now more than ever we feel there should be another, viable search engine alternative.

There was a point not that long ago when you could easily divide people between those that used Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and AltaVista. Now it’s got to the point where if you’re not using Google, you’re not really using the internet properly.

Right now though maybe we should be paying more attention to the alternatives. Maybe our daily lives and, for some of us, careers shouldn’t need to balance on the fickle algorithm changes of the world’s most valuable company.

Let’s see what else is out there in the non-Google world. It’s not that scary, I promise. Although you may want to bring a coat.

Please note: this is an update of an article published on SEW in May 2014, we felt like it needed sprucing up especially many of the listed engines (Blekko, Topsy) are no longer with us.
LibreOffice 6.0.7.3
on Linux Mint Mate
User avatar
LilZebra
Posts: 43
Joined: Sun Mar 06, 2016 4:27 pm
Location: Canada

Re: Googlopoly: How Google Is Becoming The New Microsoft

Post by LilZebra »

I really WANT TO install Firefox onto my BlackBerry 10 OS device.
However when I go to the BlackBerry store, I am told that while there IS a Chrome ver. for BB10 and one for Android, I cannot install one directly for BB10.

So I must continue to use the built-in web browser.

On my PC with Fedora 24 Linux I have more control over which browser I use. I went from Netscape Nav. > Mozilla > Mozilla Firefox
Then in about 2014-15 I was havin problems loading some sites with Flash content. Switched to Chrome and found that it loaded pages really quick. Still didn't want to use it due to talk of privacy breaches by Google.
Then a few months ago installed a newer ver. of Firefox, and it worked for a while, except that some Flash site still don't work. For example, I can watch CBC's The National, or Global National (Canada). But CTV News does something different. A few months ago I *used* to be able to watch local and national CTV news, but now I get an error saying some flash plugin won't work on that site.

When I ran Chrome in 2014-15 my computer had but 2 Gigs of RAM. It would frequently lock up with just 3 or 4 tabs open. I had a memory checker and used Chrome's memory check utils. It wasn't until I doubled the RAM that Chrome and Linux become more stable and no longer "froze" due to lack of memory.
LibreOffice 6.1.3.2 (Linux Fedora 29 on x86_64) with 'Notebookbar'
OpenOffice.org since 2002-12. LibreOffice user since 2013-current.
HSQLDB 2.5.0
eremmel
Posts: 1080
Joined: Tue Dec 30, 2008 1:15 am

Re: Googlopoly: How Google Is Becoming The New Microsoft

Post by eremmel »

Did you consider to use SRWare Iron, based on the same Chromium code base as Chrome but with less/no leaking of private data to google.
It's Microsoft marketing that tells you computers are qualified for non-technicians
W11 22H2 (build 22621), LO 7.4.2.3(x64)
User avatar
LilZebra
Posts: 43
Joined: Sun Mar 06, 2016 4:27 pm
Location: Canada

Re: Googlopoly: How Google Is Becoming The New Microsoft

Post by LilZebra »

I've installed the "Otter Browser" (based on Opera) It's based on WebKit, which is something that Firefox should implement. I can watch CTVNews.ca again. Yay! But there are several bugs in Otter like Firefox produced .html bookmarks file not importing.
LibreOffice 6.1.3.2 (Linux Fedora 29 on x86_64) with 'Notebookbar'
OpenOffice.org since 2002-12. LibreOffice user since 2013-current.
HSQLDB 2.5.0
chuanist
Posts: 11
Joined: Sun Nov 26, 2017 8:16 am
Location: Berkeley, California USA

Re: Googlopoly: How Google Is Becoming The New Microsoft

Post by chuanist »

Opera is available for Linux. It works very well on the Linux-based Mac OS, very fast, and comes with a free VPN via Scandinavia. For reasons given above I removed all Google products from my Mac, which required going deep into the OS to clean out files that Google installs without asking or telling users.

In particular Apple's Maps is now well enough developed that I can live without Google Earth, which installed an automatic update routine that was giving me problems.

http://www.opera.com/computer/linux


P.S.: yes, I misspoke. BSD and Linux are not the same, only similar. However, Opera for the Mac does work quite well on every OS I've tried it on, through 10.12.

P.P.S.: If anyone is virulently against the Mac OS I won't be much help. I've been using Macs since 1998 and very much enjoy the user experience.
Last edited by chuanist on Mon Nov 27, 2017 12:58 am, edited 2 times in total.
OpenOffice 4.1.5 for the Mac

Running on Mac OS 10.9.5 (for the graphics apps)
User avatar
LilZebra
Posts: 43
Joined: Sun Mar 06, 2016 4:27 pm
Location: Canada

Re: Googlopoly: How Google Is Becoming The New Microsoft

Post by LilZebra »

chuanist wrote:Opera is available for Linux. It works very well on the Linux-based Mac OS, very fast, and comes with a free VPN via Scandinavia.
MacOS (or currently macOS) is not based on Linux which is a mish-mash of BSD & System V (AT&T) UNIX. No, MacOS, based out of NeXT's "Mach kernel" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel) , is based on BSD (Berkley).
LibreOffice 6.1.3.2 (Linux Fedora 29 on x86_64) with 'Notebookbar'
OpenOffice.org since 2002-12. LibreOffice user since 2013-current.
HSQLDB 2.5.0
Post Reply