Google's Antitrust case

So search engines are basically Mechanical Turks.

that the basis of PageRank back 20 years ago, more than 25 years ago, was to realize that instead of just trying to analyze what's on the page, what you should do is you can use the links between the pages because those are written by millions of people and that's human intelligence telling you what the pages are.

And so PageRank says, well, we'll leverage that human intelligence and that will be a better way of analyzing the web.

But then once you've got people using Google at scale, Then you have much more signal because you have people telling you which results are correct.

Say Google gives you 10 really links, not many more, but 10 really links.

Which one do you click? What do you search afterwards? What do you search for? You do a search.

You don't click on any of the links.

You do another search.

Then you click on this.

And so you have this huge amount of feedback, basically reinforcement learning, in which people using Google are telling Google what the good results are.

And that also works for the search ads.

The more ads you see, the more ads you serve, and you see what people click on, and so the more search ads you serve, the better the business.

And so there's a virtual circle.

Everyone uses Google because it's the best, and it's the best because everyone uses it.

And that's compounded by the fact that you need to spend a couple of billion dollars a year probably on GaffEx and Team to actually run all of that and keep making it better.

So there's a barrier to entry just to building a search engine anyway, which means you can't really have a startup doing it because this is too much money.

And so Bing has invested about $100 billion over the last 20 years, and they've got 5% to 10% share of US search.

Now, however, there's something else, which is what the court case was about, which is that everybody uses Google because it's the default that when you type something in Safari or Chrome or on your iPhone or your Android phone, then Google's the default search engine.

And there's a Google widget on the homepage of your Android phone, and 50% of searches on Android start there.

And Google is paying for that.

Google is paying a revenue share of 25 to 35% of the revenue they get from each search back to the device.

And that was $25 billion last year.

It's in their accounts.

And the court decided that this is illegal.

This is what violates antitrust laws.