In this video I’m going to analyze Google’s business model history and market strategy.
I’ll explain why I think you need to stop using Google and that ditching Google’s
services will improve your situation.
This suggestion doesn’t apply to small businesses which simply cannot choose to opt-out of the
world’s monopoly “search” engine.
Not using Google services as a business is a financial suicide.
As a user, however, Google does you more harm than good as its aggressive abuse of search
monopoly motivates the company to sacrifice quality of relevant search results for money
generating relevant advertising.
I am going to demonstrate how through various practices of search manipulation everything
Google shows you is advertisement bubble to sell you clicks, downloads, and purchases,
and why that’s a problem in the Information Age.
Google entered the realm of world wide web as a gateway to the Internet.
Similarly to the Internet Service Providers giving people connection via Internet access,
Google was giving people that essential connection from their home devices to websites from the
entire global network.
Google wasn’t the first search engine in the world, but without it looking for content
on the Internet was slow, complicated, and nothing close to neutral or relevant.
It had an advantage that allowed it to quickly overcome its competitors and turn into a tech
giant within few years.
In 2004 co-founder of Google Lary Page criticized other search engines for prioritizing their
own content rather than relevant search results.
Quoting Larry: “Most portals show their own content above content elsewhere on the
web.
We feel that’s a conflict of interest, analogous to taking money for search results.
Their search engine doesn’t necessarily provide the best results; it provides the
portal’s results.
Google conscientiously tries to stay away from that.
We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible.
It’s a very different model.”
Fast forward today, Google has faced multiple antitrust charges for abusing its search monopoly
power to eliminate competition and promote its own content and services irrespective
of merit.
More than 30 companies filed public complaints leading to legal proceedings in the European
Union, India, Russia, and the United States.
Google has been found guilty for proactively casting burdens on competition to Android
Operating System, Google’s own services such as Google Search, Google Shopping, Google
Maps, Google Product Search, and manipulation of general search without transparently informing
users.
The resulting verdict was $2.7 billion fine for abusing search monopoly domination.
Google’s position has shifted from “search result generator” in the early 2000s to
“content provider and aggregator” today.
Google’s practices have been deemed to have negative impact on consumers and innovation
and with their coming efforts to become a global Internet Service Provider, their history
of monopoly abuses is going to become a major concern for the Information Age.
In his book The New Digital World, Eric Shmidt in 2013 described Google as “Almost nothing
short of a biological virus [that] can spread as quickly, efficiently or aggressively as
these technology platforms, and this makes the people who build, control, and use them
powerful too.”
What happened to Google that used to shape the Internet and help websites to get discovered?
What made Google change from conscientious portal to the world wide web, to a quick,
efficient and aggressive virus?
In the year 2000 Google started monetizing its platform by launching a self-service search-advertising
programme we know as AdWords that charged advertisers on cost-per-impression (CPM) basis.
Advertisers where paying for each appearance of their ads no matter if a user clicked on
it or not.
Two years later this model was replaced by cost-per-click charging scheme, which precisely
means taking money for showing content.
Another three years later and Google implemented “Universal Search” that bridged all categories
of search into one stream of results, essentially allowing Google to start inserting links to
their own content and services.
The goal quickly transitioned from getting people out of Google to make them stay on
their websites as long as possible.
Why?
Simple answer – data.
Google realized the more information it can get from its users, the further it can expand
its advertising business model.
The quality of search became irrelevant.
From 2007, Google decides what appears in your search results not based on your search
queries or merits of the content you are looking for, but based on the economic interests of
one the greatest conglomerates in the world.
From this day forth, Google is no longer the search engine it was originally created to
be.
The only problem Google had was that it was never really innovative enough.
It couldn’t come up with services that could succeed against existing competition, even
with the monopoly of search engine.
Thus, it started with a massive chain acquisitions.
One by one, Google merged with other companies based on strategic importance.
From Applied Semantics it acquired AdSense, and from Overture it got AdWords.
ZipDash made it into Google Maps, Neotonic Software morphed into Gmail and Google Groups,
Marratech was incorporated into Google Talk and Hangouts.
There are 163 mergers and acquisitions that all fall under the single umbrella of Alphabet.
None of these are just services on their own.
They are tracking outposts.
The more web content Google acquires, the wider range of data its dragnet can collect.
The ace up in Google’s sleeve, however, is that Google helps to run up to 85% of all
known websites with Google Analytics and similar web services acquired from Urchin in 2005.
Boosting its marketing solutions offered to businesses, Google managed to spread its tentacles
all across the Internet to collect more data even from users that don’t use Google products.
The obsession with data at Google has no limit.
Even if you go offline, Google is developing capability to track your purchases in physical
stores that you might have made because you saw an ad on your phone or laptop.
The reason why this is so important is because Google no longer brings you relevant search
results, but relevant advertisements.
Google has switched its position from a service you use to be able to make you a product that
Google sells.
Nothing that you ever search using Google can be trusted as an objective generation
of results.
Google chooses what to show you way before you hit “enter”.
It no longer provides you with the best results.
It provides you with Google’s results.
This is extremely important whether you look for current news events, or just making ordinary
shopping research to save some money.
And if that wasn’t enough, Google will filter which websites will appear and which won’t
even if you directly look for them stemming from their current political persuasion.
For example, the “search” giant took a stance of champion fighting against extremism.
You might think that it is noble that a private company devotes its own resources to a public
cause.
But is it really?
Unlike government, private corporation doesn’t have a system of checks and balances.
Business is checked by free market, but what if it’s no longer free after it was hijacked
by a single conglomerate?
Who decides and on what basis what is and isn’t extremist or worth filtering?
At which point is Google trying to be so polite that it won’t show what’s important?
Like these search queries that won’t suggest you anything incriminating about any politician
or personality ever if you search them on Google versus on DuckDuckGo or Yahoo.
This is no longer a debate of whether Google can or can’t do this as a private company.
This is about you, the user of the Internet developed by scientists from all around the
world.
You the user, who is being tricked and manipulated by big data analyses on daily basis.
There were times when Microsoft used to ridicule and criticize Google for their advertisement-based
business model.
Until they realized that this where the money flows and they’d better learn to do it as
well.
So now instead of having a remastered version Windows 7, which is the best operating system
Microsoft ever produced, we have Windows 10 that’s riddled with targeted advertisements
and invasive tracking policies.
Google set a precedence for all tech start-ups whatever their product is, the only way to
become dominant is to make their consumers data generating hot spots.
Market diversity is just as important as biodiversity.
If one species take over, one way of life becomes more dominant than others to the point
its mere presence becomes a threat to other species and the whole ecosystem.
Google is a threat to other companies and business models.
Not because they are big and successful, but because how they got there and what they with
this position.
The new goal of tech corporations is not to become the best in their field, but to be
the only one on the market.
Creating a clever product that everybody wants is the hard way to do it.
Patenting, pricing out, merging and licensing your competition is the one that will grant
you protectionism of the state which smaller businesses don’t have the luxury to have.
Google does have alternatives, but it doesn’t have a competition.
Meaning you as a user can choose other products of other companies, but as a small business,
if you don’t get along with Google, you don’t exist.
And because we all depend on this ecosystem, we are subject to the dominant monopoly of
Google.
This video is uploaded to Google’s servers, because Youtube is the second largest search
engine.
If it wasn’t on Youtube, this video wouldn’t exist.
I could have posted it to Facebook, but there is no difference in their business models
anyway.
Other video sharing websites pale in comparison to Youtube.
Small to medium size businesses simply cannot choose to opt-out from Google and that’s
a dangerous situation.
Facebook is no longer just a social network, Microsoft Windows is no longer just an operating
system, Google isn’t just a search engine anymore.
They are data generating digital marketing aggregators.
If you feel like Google is not living up to your standards, you need to know there are
plenty of Google alternatives that you as a user can choose from.
As my default search engine, I use DuckDuckGo which has nice user interface and doesn’t
track your search at all.
For web browser, I always go for Firefox, which is developed to respect your digital
freedoms without intrusive policies.
If you want something more lightweight, I highly recommend Brave which blocks all trackers
by default.
If you decide to give Firefox a go, install uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger to block
social media trackers, including Google targeted advertisements.
For email, my favorite is Protonmail, which gives you state-of-the art user experience
on top of true end-to-end encryption for best security and privacy.
There are other similar options if violet is not your color.
If you keep your identity separate from your browsing, you can prevent from connecting
the dots.
You can use Tor or simply any other web browser with no history just for your online accounts.
And then use Firefox or Brave for day to day browsing.
There’s infinite amount of possibilities and I am going to cover some the best ways
in the near future on my channel.
The less opportunities you give Google to track you, the more objectively and neutrally
exposed you’ll be to web content.
You’ll jailbreak from the bubble that Google created around what its algorithms told them
would sell you the most.
If you want relevant search results based on your queries and merit of the web content,
and not your browsing history, private emails, you should at least know that Google is not
the place to go to.
You are free to make your own choice.
But I think economic diversity and protection of our digital privacy are two crucial pillars
on which a free and successful society should be based on.
And that’s why you need to stop using Google.