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Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

It’s kind of a rich get richer situation. The cost and difficulty of competing against Google for search, for example, requires just gigantic amounts of resources, time, and research. Meanwhile a Google has had all 3 of those for years and years now. To beat them at their own game requires much of the same thing, unless the answer isn’t based on crawling the web and attempting to parse natural language.

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There are lots of products and services that require massive amounts of resources, time, and research in order to compete. Like spacecraft, military aircraft, pharmaceuticals, etc. Basically you can only compete on those fronts if you are a billionare/huge corporation. It would be very hard for a new player to compete with SpaceX given their head start. That doesn't mean SpaceX has a monopoly on spacecraft, you can always buy a Russian rocket.

A monopoly (in my mind) would be more like Comcast. Since they've lobbied for laws in a lot of places that make it extremely hard to dig up the ground and put in new telecomm infrastructure, they completely control the supply of terrestrial internet service and there are literally no other ISP choices in many places. Thus, your only alternatives are non-terrestrial ISPs (LTE, satellite, etc).

Google's original infrastructure was their main advantage, this is quickly being eroded. Ten years down the rode its not unreasonable to think that the costs to join the search business as a new competitor have gone way down.

I upvoted you because that is a good point about computing infrastructure. But I also feel that diminished costs from the now-widespread use of cheap commodity hardware with horizontal scaling may be countered by the changing nature of the web. A lot of news and shopping sites try to exclude crawling by bots with sometimes-exceptions for the agents of large, established businesses like Google. Spammers have been engaged in a furious arms race with existing search engines, and if your new search engine doesn't invest a lot of effort against sophisticated spammers, the user experience will be poor.

I suspect that my increasing dissatisfaction with Google as a search engine may be a byproduct of the arms race against spammers; maybe it doesn't easily find good niche content the way I remember it doing 10 years ago because the signals of 10 years ago are too easily gamed. If that's true, then no new search engine is ever going to be as impressive as Google was when it first arrived. Similar to how no new antibiotic is going to be as impressive as penicillin originally was. The pathogenic elements have evolved too much resistance to permit the same "miracle product" experience again.

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