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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

Google Search is more of a monopoly than Microsoft Windows.

There's less of a lock-in effect though. The only thing stopping you from using a different search engine is that you're more comfortable with Google, it provides better (catered to you) results, etc.. That is, competitive advantage.

When people leave Google Search (and they will, nothing lasts forever), they'll leave fast.

That may be true of Google search, but Gmail? Or Google Accou ts, for that matter? Almost certainly not. It's far easier to switch from Windows to a Mac or Chromebooks or even Linux than it is to switch from Google and its associated services.

Further, because of mobile, there are significantly greater number of Google users than there are Windows users.

I guess I am annoyed because as someone who uses Firefox as their primary browser, it always frustrated me that there was t more outrage at Google pushing people away from Firefox. But the moment MS started doing it, it became an outrage.

The account would be by far the hardest thing for me to walk away from. Email is federated and I can export the mail out of Gmail without too much hassle. I don't because I like the interface they provide (for now). Calendar, same deal. I'm there for the convenience, not because another calendar application wouldn't work for me.

Accounts would be the hard part because that's my phone login, and there's no standard account service I could migrate to that would give me a functional replacement.

The real thing keeping me on the Google platform is the convenience of having these things tied together. But that's not exactly a strong lock for me. I can and do hop services while sacrificing convenience. This might be a stronger hold on others but it's still not Microsoft's you-can't-do-work-in-any-organization level of hold between Office, Windows, Exchange, etc..

Google has lock in, it's just less obvious. Other search engines might not be as good because they don't have access to my search history* and email data for instance.

* This has actually been annoying for me lately. The results favor the things I've already clicked on which is often exactly not what I'm after.

Have you tried these search engines? These are proxy to Google's or other's results. You will not feel lock in with this for sure because it is bare bone.

https://www.startpage.com/

https://duckduckgo.com/

http://ixquick.com/

https://searx.me/

I'm not saying there's no lock-in, just that it's not as rigid or strong. Better search results (for you) is exactly the kind of reason you want to be using one search engine over another. If another search engine started providing better results, you'd be able to swap, and the only effect would be the psychological disorientation from the change interface (I struggle to use DuckDuckGo because my eyes scan the wrong part of the screen while trying to take in the results).

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