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Comment by SketchySeaBeast | Hacker News Reader

"Bing, their competition, has 2% of the market. They have 90%."

Who has the other 8%?

According to [this](https://netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx?o...), Baidu and others.

Cuil. On a serious note, it seems to me that barrier to entry for search is now exponentially higher than it was when they started. I'm not sure if it's even doable with small resources (in proverbial garage) anymore.

Probably not in the sense of the standard Google plays in now being very close to natural-language awareness. You can probably garage up a Webcrawler or a Lycos relatively cheaply, but it's going to feel clunky and complicated relative to the queries Google and Bing can support.

I keep mentioning "restaurants near me" in this thread because it's absolutely killer that's possible now.

I dont know how much money MS do with Bing, but if i were they, i would open source everything to see a lot of Google competitors pop here and there based on their tech, and later buy the most proeminent contenders. They are locked in to the 2% position, and thats the only alternative i can see to shake things up and have a change to grab more.

They could also provide the pure search index for other companies by using their cloud infra, and charge for the cloud use instead where Bing would be only one of the clients of this open search index.

It was basically the strategy the open source world with the lead of Linux did to them, and were able to take down their dominant monopolistic position over software.

http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

Has some interesting numbers. Claims 3.9% bing, 2% yahoo/Verizon, 2% baidu, .6% yandex, .5% shenma

Off the top of my head: Yahoo! and DuckDuck Go might be ahead of Bing.

Yahoo! search is powered by Bing and Google

DDG is essentially a reskin of Bing search.

Yahoo! is also Bing.

I thought they have a number of sources, of which bing is the primary, but sole?

They also use Yandex for Russian pages, and then there's a hodgepodge of sites that webmasters manually submit/index (i.e. 1990's level of indexing).

So DDG is essentially Bing.

Because of having 90% of the search engine market they have a uniquely comprehensive view into the human mind. I would not be suprised if these huge data aggregation companies lead the race into sentient AI.

I'm not sure their view into the human mind goes much beyond insights gleamed from searches like "cat videos" and "good restaurants".

If you've got your history enabled (which it is by default -- https://myactivity.google.com), you'll discover how much insight it actually has into your mind.

"Cat videos" and "good restaurants" is not all that people search for.

I feel like by now Google has enough dirt on anyone to personally ruin them. "Well, why did you look up 'Can you die from eating too much hair?' in 2012?"

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