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Comment by advisedwang | Hacker News Reader

Even without building up a profile on you, the antitrust case is still there. If Google uses illegal means to retain an effective monopoly on search traffic, it still keeps a chokehold on ads and can keep prices artificially high.

Search ads hardly need personalization profile, as the query itself already has a incredibly strong signal for what would be good to sell you, and other query metadata (location, time of day) boosts that a lot.

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The reason Google pays to monopolize search is due to how it feeds into their personalized advertising.

This case against Google is addressing the symptom rather then the real problem/incentive. Make invasive personalized advertising "opt in" only and the marketplace will address the search issue.

You don't understand how lucrative search is by itself. Google pays to monopolize search because they make a lot of money from the paid promoted search results (AdWords). Those can be personalized but most of the time they're simply based on your query.

The personalization profile based on searches and other stuff is used for their display network (ads across the web), but that entire network is way less valuable than Google Search alone. [0]

[0] https://abc.xyz/investor/

That would solve only a tiny part of the problem. The elephant is the monopoly on search. Ironically, most probably MS is beating them around this time with more powerful search tech and it will be time to anti-trust MS.

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