Comment by sudshekhar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sudshekhar | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated thought:

With the growth of 'category kings' (Amazon, Stackoverflow, Wikipedia etc) does anybody else feel that google's search becomes less and less useful?

I never understood the 90's obsession with domain names until I skimmed several news articles from that era. The main logic was:

1. People will go to a couple of websites for most their needs, the ones with memorable names will be easier to go to.

2. Things like search engines (Google) weren't as hot as curation directories (yahoo) because nobody expected so much fragmentation on the web.

3. The more fragmented the market in an industry, higher the value of search ads. If you know the most options and high quality reviews are available on Amazon, you don't really bother with as many reviews.

While this analysis failed for the past few years, with the amount of consolidation happening in the industry recently its possible search engines loose their main source of income (e-commerce) and start being used more from ideleness/curiosity perspective.

Wonder if google should pre-emptively start penalizing the aggregation marketplaces and promote direct providers (essentially try to be the Ebay for everything) to prevent such an outcome.

>> does anybody else feel that google's search becomes less and less useful?

Not for me, not at all. I do like your thoughts on domain names though, I've never considered that.

> Not for me, not at all.

At the risk of being presumptious, I would classify searches into broadly two categories:

1) Finding good providers/discussion places regarding something you need, say news, goods, experiences etc

2) Finding more info about a specific piece of content/goods . Eg: Product reviews, solutions to some technical doubts etc

For most people I know, 1) is pretty much sorted. They have a list of places they check for clothes, groceries, jobs etc. News is read from specific websites/apps. Reddit/HN/Fb/Twitter provide most the social interaction and discovery aspects.

2) is where I see Google providing much more value. But the way things are proceeding, most of the top links relevant to a google search are generally from aggregators themselves. Amazon for most ecommerce, Tripadvisor for travel, Stackoverflow for tech, Practo (in India) for doctors etc.

Let's assume Stackoverflow introduces points for using (and help 'improving') their own search. Most people will open stackoverflow first before searching on google. Amazon has already achieved this level for most things related to e-comm (specially less expensive products).

There will still be a market for Google ofcourse, but it will be a much smaller chunk than currently being predicted.

I actually stumbled across this line of reasoning when somebody asked me if its a good idea for individual service providers (docs/merchants etc) to open their own websites. For 99% of them it isn't.

Ofcourse, any counter comments are welcome!

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