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Comment by manfredo | Hacker News Reader

When your search "calculator" are you angry that Google displays its own web calculator before returning 3rd party results? These are simple utilities, and I don't see why it's bad for Google to offer is own. In fact for web tests it's more useful to me. Much of what I access is Google services, so testing latency and throughput to their servers is better for me.

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> These are simple utilities, and I don't see why it's bad for Google to offer is own. In fact for web tests it's more useful to me. Much of what I access is Google services, so testing latency and throughput to their servers is better for me.

Small clarification: Google doesn't own the speed test. It owns the speed test client, but it performs the test against a third-party NDT server (an open-source server for bandwidth measurement)[1]. The servers are operated and maintained by M-Lab[2], a third-party consortium of companies of which Google is a member. The servers are all in commercial data centers and are completely separate from any Google service, so the speed test doesn't measure your bandwidth to Google.

[1] https://github.com/ndt-project/ndt

[2] https://www.measurementlab.net/

Well, as a precedent, the browser ballot screen comes to mind ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu

> The web browser choice screen, also known as the web browser ballot box, was a screen displayed in Internet Explorer that offered ten to twelve browsers in a random order.

Note the "in a random order".

They aren't just doing it for simple utilities, they are literally trying to create some kind of "box" above search results for every possible query, subjective or objective. "Best movies of 2019", "What are the ingredients of pancakes?", the name of any store, restaurant, location, etc.

And if they are producing results better than the blogspam that ends up in the top result, how is that a bad thing?

They are stealing the (often wrong) answers from the blogspam and putting it in their own box - how is that better? They should just filter out the blogspam - that’s ostensibly what a search engine company should be investing their time doing.

> They are stealing the (often wrong) answers from the blogspam and putting it in their own box - how is that better?

Saves a click and the ordeal of loading a gazillion quasi-malicious ads posing as information. Much better in my book.

It’s slightly better to load the (often wrong) blogspam answers into a box than to link to the blogspam, although in doing so, it gives the wrong answer more authority. It’s much better to actually spend resources to filter blogspam from results and link to quality sites which have done actual research.

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