Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Google's monopoly over search, email, ads, Android and Youtube will be hard to beat by smaller and nimble competitors. It's far too entrenched and the moat it has built is too tough and impossibly expensive for newcomers to beat. And if newcomers do turn into a threat, they will be swiftly acquired and absorbed into the machine.

If it was possible, it would have happened already. Everyone is waiting for a Youtube competitor, but nobody can afford to build and run one at Youtube's scale.

Same for the likes of Nvidia.

The only real threat to Google is government regulators breaking their products up into separate entities that will have to fund and fend for themselves without Big-daddy G's ad money.

View on HN

Search is a disaster now, with the screen resembling a late 90’s teenager’s website with ads taking over everything visually. They’ve increased noise at the cost of signal and that itself will be the downfall. Now they are letting the ad cancer spread to YouTube with multiple unskippable ada before each video.

Ads will go to wherever they are most effective. Google to Facebook, then Tik Tok, etc.

Android - does anything about Android these days seem like it is a driving ambition for a company the scale of Google? And what does it contribute to their bottom line apart from ads via the platforms above that are eating themselves?

The unskippable ads are getting progressively more aggressive too. Two 30-second unskippable ads on an 8-minute video? It’s a disaster.

The 30% (or whatever it is) cut in the app store?

Keep in mind that a lot of issues with search are oblivious to the general public. I don’t think I have ever heard a complaint, outside of tech circles.

How much noise can be introduced before the general public feels they aren’t getting meaningful results? It is just a matter of time, because Google shows no ability to restrain itself from selling out to advertisers.

Google is so entrenched they're the default search engine on 3 major browsers and it even became a verb in the English dictionary. Do you think the average members of the public are gonna start Googling stuff on Bing anytime soon?

I think most non-tech people don't even realize if they are or aren't getting meaningful results. They got conditioned that whatever is on the first results page of google is what's relevant for what they're looking for and if it's not there then it must not exist.

I really don't see any major market shift away from Google search any time soon. Maybe if Apple launched their own could change things up a bit.

> Google is so entrenched

This entrenchment is what makes a company like Google fat and lazy and take their users for granted. Behaviour that we are seeing growing year by year. If they stop paying Apple to be the default in Safari (or the government says they can’t, or Apple just decides to kick them in the shins the way they did to Facebook with anti-tracking tech), users would go to whatever else became default. I.e. there is no sacred loyalty earned that would cause anyone to take actions to switch back.

FWIW, literally every non-tech person who I’ve switched to DDG has been happier with the results when I’ve asked them what they thought.

> Do you think the average members of the public are gonna start Googling stuff on Bing anytime soon?

They are already, by accident. And a large amount of them doesn't even realize it's a different page...

I dunno, the thing everyone tells me when I say I'm developing a search engine is "oh thank god, Google is so awful lately". Like I've gotten this reaction from my barber and random taxi drivers.

I do think if it's it's less of a conversation topic outside of tech it's because people outside of tech are less reliant on internet search.

If anything I think people have an exaggeratedly poor view of Google's performance. I think it works pretty good, it's just that some of the ways it fails are confusing and frustrating. There's so much magic it's not entirely obvious why you're getting the results you are getting.

Given that there is an increase in people adding “Reddit” to their search terms, it would seem people aren’t getting the information they are looking for directly from Google searches.

I also see a lot of older family members simply query Siri for 99% of what they are looking for.

I heard the exact same thing about every previous giant that failed. It was always "this time it's different!"

Meh, if I had a dollar for every time someone said "this time Microsoft is gonna fail for sure", I'd be richer than Elon. People were singing Microsoft's funeral at every new Windows or product launch and assumed it would burry them for good. Turns out, despite many failures, Microsoft is still among us, still growing, buying new companies and IPs, branching in new areas and firing on all cylinders despite all the haters and doomers predicting otherwise for the past 3 decades. Maybe individual products will die, like Windows, but Microsoft as a company will survive, as it grew to be a lot more than the Windows/Office company.

My point is, people are generally bad at making accurate predictions into the future and competent CEOs are good at turning things around.

They had something like a near-death experience under Ballmer. Nadella brought them back from it. For a long time, people really did give them up for dead.

My point exactly. If they survived those harsh falls, I doubt they're in any danger anytime soon.

Well, there are no hard-and-fast rules to follow. If they'd stuck with Ballmer, he might have flown them straight into the mountain.

Did they have unique advantages even in the bad times? To my mind, they still had the allegiance of the big companies, which can be pretty sticky.

Microsoft produces critical infrastructure. Could it dwindle to become a sort of legacy supplier, keeping the lights on at thousands of industrial facilities?

As soon as the millions of niche use cases on the low end of the compute market get absorbed by ChromeOS or MacOS, which is not likely soon.

> Same for the likes of Nvidia

I understand the logic behind Google's position. What's the logic in Nvidia being similar?

Nvidia makes graphics chips and they are a large portion of the market at around two-thirds, but it's not like AMD doesn't exist. While Nvidia is doing very well, Intel looked to have an unassailable position and then they had some bad years and AMD caught up and Apple moved to their own chips.

I'm not saying that Nvidia isn't a great company, but Intel was completely destroying all its competition for a long time and then found itself in a bad place it needed to recover from. Couldn't Nvidia find itself in the exact situation that Intel was in? Sure, it wouldn't be due to fabs, but it could be due to something else.

I heard the same things about Microsoft in the 90s. MS still dominates the desktop OS, but newer platforms emerged that reduced the importance of the desktop.

Even now the importance of the surface web, which is Google's bailiwick, is diminishing.

Google gained their monopoly over search when they had only a couple hundred employees, competitors definitely do not need to be very big at all to be a threat to Google technologically. The government interventions that will matter will be stopping Google from bribing companies to use their software--no startup can possibly afford to pay Apple $15 billion per year just to be the default search engine on iOS.

I think search alone is like 70 percent revenue, you win search - Google collapsed. And Google's search is old dinosaur vulnerable to innovation

I think these hypothetical "nimble" competitors don't exist, or would be overestimating their nimbleness with respect to Google. Google has spent decades becoming incredibly nimble in the way that counts in their industry: their foundation of software and systems is so refined that they can write and launch a product in no time flat. There are almost no technical hurdles standing in the way of anyone at that company. It's not some kind of abusive behavior by Google, it's just them being a tough competitor.

You'll see. Give it 10 years. Those AI chatbots could be an existential threat to them.

Like I've been saying for a while, if large language models are the future then Google is sitting pretty because they have the absolutely state of the art LLMs and so many training and inference resources to win that race running away.

> their foundation of software and systems is so refined that they can write and launch a product in no time flat

They definitely have way more bureaucratic than even a few years ago. Part of it is regulations and the cost of complying with increasingly complex legal matters. Also, compared to 5 years ago they have almost twice the employee count. That means they’re even more herding to do.

Yes, the underlying tech may be good, but if they spend extra time in meetings and complying with “extra” requirements that smaller companies can avoid, then they’re at a disadvantage. Especially since they’ve shared and open sourced or sold a lot of tech that makes them special (k8, grpc, protos, spanner, etc).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com