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Comment by wavephorm | Hacker News Reader

No, the author missed it completely. Google's business is massively threatened in many different dimensions. Google is in a desperate fight to save their business, and the Google+ product is entirely a defensive reaction to the threat imposed by social networks, targeted searches (Yelp) and non-web searching (Siri) and information discovery. I do not forsee a future where people perform searches by going to www.google.com. A conventional search engine is going to look quaint in the coming years and that's bad if you make 97% of your revenue from something that has or will peak.

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The author's argument seems to be hinging on his notion that Google has "superior everything", "it is Google after all".

I was with him to a point - the notion of absorbing products into features of G+ is a powerful strategy that would make it difficult for the competition - but the problem with this approach for Google is that it takes their search product further and further away from what made it great in the first place. Taking this strategy to its logical conclusion almost by definition means making search more complicated than it needs to be.

Google likes to say its mission is organizing the world's information, but its customers like to believe that Google's mission is simple, effective search. When it comes to defining the brand, the customer always wins. This could be Google's downfall.

I don't agree with the author on many counts, but I wish that everyone who makes the point about Google being threatened by "social networks, targeted searches, non-web searching and information discovery" would elaborate a bit further.

Let us look at factors you have pointed out:

1. Social networks: Google has 3 positions in Alexa's Top 10 for the US market. Only Facebook and Twitter are the only two sites that are social networks on that list. Other than Twitter (protected accounts), Bing and Paypal, every other site on that list is crawl-able by Google. Even for Facebook, it is better to have public than private pages (6,330,000,000 pages in the Google index). *

It is very much possible for Facebook to be double the size that it is at and also for Google to grow at the same time. There are more people using more of the internet every year. They all need to connect with others and also find other information they are looking for. Growth for both Google and Facebook need not be mutually exclusive.

The most tangible growth-related metric of year-on-year growth for Google is still pretty impressive: http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html Till a lot of the numbers start veering drastically off-course, I won't worry much about it.

2. Targeted searches: There will always be niche companies who do this over a million domains. I do not think Google would bother too much with it purely because of the clout they carry in the search market. If you have to get good non-organic traffic, you need to be indexable on Google these days. There is also the fact that Google would not want to dominate in everything related to search as it leaves them badly exposed to anti-trust issues.

3. Non-web searches: This is more of an input/interface matter. It has been possible to search through speech for a while on Android and it is something that is only bound to grow as speech recognition gets more and more better across all platforms. What matters is the quality of results and if competing platforms can provide better results from a non-Google platform, then Google would be in trouble. Parsing spoken text is different from delivering results for a query. So, Siri doing a good job of parsing what you are saying is different from Siri being able to serve results from a different search engine than Google.

If the majority of people who do speech-based searches get their results from Google, it will be something for Google to rejoice and not fear. In fact, I think Apple may have even done Google a favour with Siri. There is now going to be a race to be the best voice-based interface on non-iOS platforms as a result of Siri. There is also the increased awareness of this feature now due to Siri.

4. Information discovery: If I am not mistaken, Google already is the leader on this front. They layer a lot of additional information into search results (which, I am not a fan of) and there is nobody of a comparable size who is competing with them on it.

* Alexa is a flawed metric. I am using it as a comparative/indicative measure. Google's page count is broken; but they do have a LOT of pages on Facebook that is crawl-able.

RE #1: Even if Google grows thanks to indexing Facebook pages, isn't "Where do people search for these pages?" the question that matters. And I'd bet that if people are trying to find a friend or a group or whatever on Facebook, their first attempt will be searching with Facebook.

That being said, Facebook's search could definitely use some help, and the more they improve it, the less anyone will need Google to search for things inside the Facebook ecosystem.

Absolutely correct there about Facebook being the primary destination to find Facebook friends. Point I am trying to make is that Facebook being open to being indexed by Google also contributes to Google's growth.

Searching for most names on Google throws up first results from Facebook, which makes it one more reason why I'll search for a name on Google than the situation where Google would not have the results on the what is probably the most authoritative page for most people. Thus, in the latter case, creating a situation where I am forced to use Facebook at the cost of Google.

Edit: I think there is a popular zero sum perspective to these things, which is not necessarily true when you look at it closely.

Google might fail in the long run for the simple reason that new, valuable information being added to the internet isn't necessarily going to be available on the web, in indexable fashion. Google won the web, and they're strangling it to death in the same way Microsoft strangled the PC industry.

Meanwhile the rest of the computing industry is heading in a direction opposite to what Google can make huge sums of money in and dominate in the way they currently do. Instead of static web pages with low information-to-noise ratio and plastered with ads the internet is moving toward a data-consumption model through highly targeted mobile and mobile web applications. The search engine bully will no longer have a place at the table.

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