Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eridrus | Hacker News Reader

> Google got great because of PageRank, but it stayed great due to network effects.

I think this overstates network effects and under-appreciates branding and simply reinvesting significant capital into continued R&D.

View on HN

Correct statment is.

Google got great because of PageRank, but it stayed great due to AdWords.

>Google got great because of PageRank, but it stayed great due to AdWords.

Google got great because of PageRank, but it stayed viable due to AdWords.

Fixed that for ya

And to add to that - I don't think when Google was launched, anybody thought about AdWords. This statement is technically true:

> How do you make money? Be on the lookout for what I call “multistage rockets”: “Today, we’re doing X. But our grand plan is to do Y, which will be really profitable”. These usually fail.

But, it is also completely non-informative. All startups usually fail. All (completely) new endeavors, even in established companies, usually fail. That does NOT mean though that it's not worth a try. You cannot generally anticipate apriori what will work and what not - and you CERTAINLY cannot anticipate it from the business plan (what was the business plan of Facebook? Instagram?). If you stand any chance to anticipate "what will work" - it's from the team, not the business plan.

unfortunately, you are just a data point for investors risk calculations.

Agreed. There are many flavors of moats. I originally wrote something more complex but it quickly turned into an amateur HBS study about Google. I hope the point is interpreted more metaphorically.

I've heard the line that Google succeeds because of network effects so many times on HN that I feel like that's the only business concept commenters know about.

I would suggest that in many cases the "data network effect" advantage of ML startups is overappreciated relative to the branding advantage they have. For example, DDG and others can, for the most part, match Google in quality of search, but almost no one will use them because of entrenched branding, this is especially true IMO in smaller ML vertical industries ideal for startups. e.g., if there is only room for one ML company that analyzes farm pipe leaks through camera, then branding and market dominance helps considerably there.

I may be wrong, I'm (mostly) a DL hardware guy, this is just my two cents :)

>For example, DDG and others can, for the most part, match Google in quality of search

Even for the long tail? I'm pretty skeptical of this.

Google will I'm sure vehemently deny that it is unbeatable but I think with 60k+ searches every second, Google will keep getting better. I think Google is unbeatable in search as we know it.

I'm not counting out google, but there are only two searches that actually count from a business perspective. product and services. All the rest are cost of doing business.

If you do your research on google and then buy from amazon or somewhere else and don't use the adword link google's business strategy fails.

One of the primary factors that enabled Google to stay great was their ability to crawl and index the ever growing web at a rate no other company could.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com