Google's Competitors Falsely Claim Google Dominates Because It Was 'First'
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Infoseek was the first search engine I saw. They were thinking of charging people for subscriptions.
Altavista came out with a bigger and fresher index, for a year or two they were the best, but they were being totally rolled by spammers, just like the others.
Then there was Google, which was spam resistant and much more relevant than the competition. Then Google figured out how to make money and nobody's caught up since.
Arguably Bing "doesn't suck" but it doesn't make money.
That's also untrue. I remember being viscerally mad at Yahoo for moving away from Inktomi because Inktomi results were much better for what I searched for...or I had gotten my searches to work for Inktomi. Who cares? Eventually, Google got better, and I started using them.
I use a lot of Google services, but when I search the web I use Google because it works. Searches have very little traction. The only thing it takes to move my searches elsewhere is consistently better results. All it takes for me to try a new search engine is Google not working well a few more times a month.
Edit: To follow up, google was able to deliver better results (due to pagerank) faster (due to map/reduce and sharding) cheaper (due to highly automated data centers filled with commodity hardware). This combination set them up for dominance, the ability to generate better, more context appropriate ads (due to pagerank, map/reduce, etc, etc. and an effectively massive excess of processing power per search) and the ability to be profitable at a much lower CPM for ads (due to cheaper operations) was what allowed them to become a multi-billion dollar company and leave all other search companies in the dust.
I remember sitting at a local Internet Cafe, frustrated that I wasn't finding what I searched for. The I saw somebody using Google and thought I should give it a try.
The difference that I experienced with Google was humongous, and it made an instant convert out of me, even though in general I'm pretty conservative about throwing away tools that work. Really, it wasn't even funny how better Google was.
This was happening in 2001.
Bing doesn't really do better, but that's the state of the engines right now anyway.
If you look for something specific, Google dumbs it out too. In the early days it didn't do that and you could search for good stuff. Now you get what everyone gets, whatever you're typing.
scala hlist
+scala +hlist
In the 90's I remember using Lycos, Altavista, HotBot, AskJeeves and others which have faded from my memory. Then along came this new 'google' search engine & I never went back to the others.
I still have a note scribbled on an old address book (the dead tree kind) saying "www.google.com - it's a new search engine".
It was certainly not 'the first'. Just the first really good one.
http://web.archive.org/web/19980205031323/http://www.highway... /nostalgia
That's a bit of a tautology. "It dominates because it was the first to produce a dominant product."
This whole thing looks too much like a witch hunt.
The question is not whether Google does good work, or that its search engine is popular on its own brand & merit. It does and it is. The question is whether Google is using its dominance in one area (telling people where things are) to gain dominance in other areas (telling people to use its products over others).
Even if Google's non-search products are objectively better, it can be a bad thing in the long run as the next generation of competitors are locked out by Google's dominance in search.
Defenses like "competition is one click away" are disingenuous, in my opinion. Clicks follow a power-law distribution. But I don't know what the right answer is. This might all be sour grapes. That's what the hearings and investigation are supposed to reveal.
Gibson was investigated along with other companies for price-fixing. That's more collusion / cartel stuff, but it also falls under anti-trust. The word "trust" is not an accident. When you do good work and capture the lion's share of a market, you are then subject to a much higher standard than otherwise. Even little things you do can kill whole markets.
It's not pretty, and I haven't made up my own mind. But so far this investigation does not appear to be frivolous or arbitrary.
It came about because in the late 19th century it was still forbidden to one company to have business in more than one US state, and even to own stock in companies in other states, so very complicated arrangements had to be created to have a national "corporation" - these arrangements were called "trusts", as the Standard Oil Trusts, which was probably the first one and for sure the most famous (or infamous).
Later, the law was changed to allow the modern corporation and trusts were obsoleted.
The problem is in how you try to fix this. You could just as easily end up hobbling google with nothing to show for it but enabling the last generation of middlemen to stick around even longer.
(Nextag and Expedia come to mind...)
> That's what the hearings and investigation are supposed to reveal.
Here's hoping. These proceedings aren't big on subtlety, so unless there's a smoking gun, I'm expecting mostly innuendo and posturing from everybody.
None of those are surgical. The breakup of Ma Bell may have helped competition, except that instead of a national monopoly we were saddled with a dozen regional monopolies. It's all a huge mess and I wish I knew the answer.
Monopoly does not mean bad product. It means having nearly ALL the market share.
In actuality, there are far more heinous monopolies created by way of gov't regulation than in any other way. Massive regulation is an advantage to bigger dominant companies because it creates large barriers to entry into a market. Some companies lobby for more regulations because it helps them to ensure that others cannot enter the market.
Otherwise, smaller more nimble companies would come along and undercut the dominant company. This is how capitalism is meant to work but in these days or massive government interference in the economy things don't work this way anymore.
Look at the wal-mart strategy if you want an example. While there's competition, prices are low (sometimes even running at a loss). Once the competition goes out of business and you have a local monopoly? Crank those prices, extract as much profit as you can from your now-captive market.
Most markets have significant barriers to entry even when the government isn't involved at all.
Do you have a few examples of Wal-mart changing a product's price from low to gouging?
I don't go to Wal-mart a whole lot, but do drop in for this and that and I don't think I've ever seen anything that was notably over-priced.
But what I have heard about is them putting the screws on suppliers. In a world where they have less of a monopoly a supplier could say, "Screw you... we're not going to move our manufacturing to China to save twenty five cents per doodad", but now suppliers largely do what Walmart says to do.
It was the same with Microsoft 15 years ago, though AFAICT Google are nowhere near as nasty as they were.
Google's competitors have asserted that Google is using this dominance to promote its own products unfairly and steal ideas and information from its competitors, e.g. Yelp's assertions of data theft where Google Places is concerned.
I must have missed this whole "first" argument. In any case if you review the testimony I think you'll find the majority relates to the argument that Google is dominate and abusive. This may or may not constitute a monopoly.
The contrasting argument seems to be that there's no lock-in which apparently is a necessary facet of monopoly although it's worth noting no one but Google seems entirely convinced of that. It seems that if you're unfairly promoting yourself and there's no serious competition, it might be grounds for some sort of injunction.
Maybe the strongest argument against Google's dominance is that such a dominance coupled with self-promotion or the power to shut out competitors makes the barrier to entry into these industries very difficult.
Lying under oath has to be a clear and deliberate misrepresentation of the truth. That can't be proven in this case. It's a perfectly valid opinion to believe that Google is successful because it was first, whether you agree with that opinion or not.
No it isn't. It's factually false.
That said, you'd have to be clueless to think that there were no search engines before Google. Haven't they at least heard of Yahoo?
He is a lawyer acting as a PR flack, both professions where many express whatever opinions they are paid to express. It could well be possible to prove that he didn't believe what he was saying. Who knows what emails went around before his testimony.
What he said was certainly false, and he should have known that. For him to not actually know requires him to be competent enough to get hired by a top law firm, and competent enough to be selected by them to testify to Congress, but incompetent enough not to know basic facts about his topic. Such a person might exist, but Occam's Razor suggests that he was indeed competent enough to know the truth, but willing to lie to benefit his client because he (correctly) thought he'd get away with it.
What definition of "search market domination" are we using such that that is true?
I'm pretty sure that Altavista had a huge market share at its peak and I suspect that it wasn't the first one to have a comparable share.
This was the first comment I saw on the article and I immediately began to cringe. This is so dead WRONG! For the life of me I can't find the reference but I believe their is a book that talks solely how being first in a market is a massive myth.
Same with Google.
Google was the first to the "search only" market. Well after AltaVista abandoned it. When Google came on the scene search engines were a feature of portals. They made the market of the search-engine only destination.
And herein lies the fallacy and the confirmation bias that exists about the success of companies. Just because you know it to be first doesn't mean it was the first to market.
> Well after AltaVista abandoned it.
So you're saying AltaVista was first? (technically it wasn't) scratches head
"In marketing, first-mover advantage or FMA is the advantage gained by the initial ("first-moving") significant occupant of a market segment."
Notice the term "significant occupant". Second, notice the term "market segment".
Just because you know it to be first doesn't mean it was the first to market.
The fact that you know it to be first (assuming you know the market somewhat), implies that it was quite likely first-mover. In that if someone else was previously a significant occupant, you would have known of them. My friend who did New Haven Clique in 1994 and got 20 Yale friends to join wasn't first-mover.
So you're saying AltaVista was first? (technically it wasn't) scratches head
In the search space I think it probably was AV (and of course they abandoned to go portal -- which brings up the discontinuity argument that plagues first-mover discussions). The only other one I could think of was OT, but they were more of an engine and less of a search page destination. Almost everyone else was portals (although Yahoo/InfoSeek portals from the past would only barely resemble what we call portals today).
There is a reason most YC companies are trying to disrupt markets rather than compete head-on-head with existing business models. Because while it isn't impossible to break into markets dominated by competitors, it is much harder and you are at a severe disadvantage. How do you reach consumers? How do you build brand awareness? How do you advertise profitably? And why should the NYT or RWW or anyone write about your business when there is already a bigger story out there?
There are ways around these problems, but they all involve tradeoffs that work against small startups and that take time and money to overcome. Blogging heavily to try to overcome SEO problems will take at least 12 months in the best case to see any results and gets less effective every year, while requiring quite a bit of work up-front that does not drive revenue. Viral loops can take time to function effectively in the real world. And meanwhile you have to be building something that will drive revenue eventually in addition to addressing user concerns, iterating and improving your product.
Your best bet is often just to produce something really good and aim for word-of-mouth. But even in this case, your speed of growth will be much slower than initial entrants ceteris paribus, and you'll often need to compete by giving more stuff away for free. If Google didn't have VC funding they wouldn't have been able to spurn the sponsored placements that their competitors used and would have ended up with an internal marketing department. Would their product have seemed so much different/better then? So ask yourself -- can you give away your product for free for four or five years while you find a better way to make money (AdSense)? And do you really have an advantage in this search compared to your profitable competitors who are also looking to innovate and improve their products, and who also have non-trivial budgets to back their development efforts?
Of course there are examples of companies taking market share from initial entrants and eventually dominating markets. The point is that if you're a small startup this is really difficult. As I see it, the only really decent example listed above with relevance to this community is Reddit, but even that is a somewhat cautionary tale given the fact the founders sold it. Which isn't a critical observation, but probably gives a fairly objective read on what Alexis and crew must have felt their prospects were for keeping the business independent.
>There is a reason most YC companies are trying to disrupt markets rather than compete head-on-head with existing business models.
I also think the reason most YC companies disrupt markets is because they are generally younger and less experienced entrepreneurs who have little to no market network. And in many cases either sell B2C or sell to B2B to the same tech companies that sell B2C. Many small businesses (the one I worked for currently) are created by individuals who have massively entrenched business networks. The practice I currently am growing has gone from 3 people to 10 by the end of the year. We compete with IBM, Accenture, Capgemini, etc. in the professional services industry. We do ZERO SEO or generate word-of-mouth. Are we disrupting a massive services industry market? Yes.
Honestly I feel like you've gone off on a little tangent here about my original point. While you've raised many wonderful and valid points (that I don't have the time to give my answer) it doesn't negate the fact that being first really doesn't mean anything other than "I learned a lot". Ideally I want to be third or fourth, so that way I can just take all of the painful (read->expensive) learning experiences that the first guy did when trying to capture his product/market fit and just run off from there.
Categorically, let's look at some successful companies/products - Apple's iPad/iPod/iPhone - not first / Google's search - not first / Ford's Automobile - not first / Reddit - not first / Microsoft Office - not first
Being first as a qualifier for success is a myth. Doing it RIGHT first will make you successful.
More deeply, it is a strange incoherence: "only disruptive companies are successful" leaves you wondering what there'd be to dirupt, since everyone else went bankrupt years ago.
http://steveblank.com/2009/09/10/customer-development-manife...
Larry and Sergey were right, it's a shame they fell for a few $billion more:
"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users."
"But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results."
I agree 100% with them here!
An argument quite often used by those who can't compete on the same level.
Google is leading not because they were the first, but because they serve their customers well and continue to evolve. Go to the Google blogs and you will see great examples about how they spend lot of time trying to understand what users are meaning with their queries and refining the search to provide more relevant results.