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echelontoday at 10:18 AM4 repliesview on HN

No wonder Kagi is angry.

Google is a monopoly across several broad categories. They're also a taxation enterprise.

Google Search took over as the URL bar for 91% of all web users across all devices.

Since this intercepts trademarks and brand names, Google gets to tax all businesses unfairly.

Tell your legislators in the US and the EU that Google shouldn't be able to sell ads against registered trademarks (+/- some edit distance). They re-engineered the web to be a taxation system for all businesses across all categories.

Searching for Claude -> Ads in first place

Searching for ChatGPT -> Ads in first place

Searching for iPhone -> Ads in first place

This is inexcusable.

Only searches for "ChatGPT versus", "iPhone reviews", or "Nintendo game comparison" should allow ads. And one could argue that the "URL Bar" shouldn't auto suggest these either when a trademark is in the URL bar.

If Google won't play fair, we have to kill 50% of their search revenue for being egregiously evil.

If you own a trademark, Google shouldn't be able to sell ads against you.

--

Google's really bad. Ideally we'd get an antitrust breakup. They're worse than Ma Bell. I wouldn't even split Google into multiple companies by division - I'd force them to be multiple copies of the same exact entity that then have to compete with each other:

Bell Systems -> {BellSouth, Bell Atlantic, Southwestern Bell, ...}

Google -> {GoogleA, GoogleB, GoogleC, ...}

They'd each have cloud, search, browser, and YouTube. But new brand names for new parent companies. That would create all-out war and lead to incredible consumer wins.


Replies

marginalia_nutoday at 10:40 AM

Could probably argued that search access is an essential facility[1], though it doesn't appear antitrust law has anywhere near the same sort of enforcement it did in the past.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_facilities_doctrine

thewebguydtoday at 4:20 PM

> If you own a trademark, Google shouldn't be able to sell ads against you.

This is frustrating even from a consumer perspective. Before I ran adblock everywhere, I couldn't stand that typing in a specific company I was looking for would just serve ads from any number of related brands that I wasn't looking for that were competitors.

throwaway290today at 12:29 PM

what stops Kagi from indexing internet and makes them pay some guys to scrape search results from Google? one guy at Marginalia can do it and entire dev team at a PAID search engine can't?

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onetokeoverthetoday at 11:52 AM

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