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Comment by FredPret | Hacker News Reader

It's going to take a long time for alternatives to make inroads into Google.

There are lots of marketing dollars looking for a home, and Google is going to be one of the better bets for some time to come.

They may turn into a zombie but they won't die for a long, long time.

For example, cable companies still exist and have a ton of paid ads on them.

Fox makes $3-5B in sales per quarter: https://valustox.com/FOXA

Sinclair isn't doing so good but they're still selling in the hundreds of millions per Q: https://valustox.com/SBGI

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With the amount of mindshare, infrastructure and over 90% of the search engine market share that Google has, it will take decades to even begin to challenge Google's market share in search.

We've seen this with Neeva which is now no more. Perplexity appears to be no different and only appeals to techies and at the same time is already dependent on Google search for their results, according to The Information.

In fact I can only see them getting shut down like Neeva or the case of Perplexity likely to be acquired. Amazon looks more of a potential acquirer for Perplexity AI.

They'll probably never budge from the top of the search pile.

But search itself may decline over time.

The same happened to everyone from steam train companies to Xerox to cable companies. These guys are next.

“If everybody sees it coming, it’s not coming.”

I don’t think so. All a startup needs to do is build 50+ data centers around world. Lay thousands of miles of terrestrial and under sea fiber optic cables. And finally build a browser and obtain 80% market share.

not just this - most android smartphones do have google search bar by default, in some it's not trivial to disable it and most ppl are using it. This alone is a huge moat. Add to this a huge nr of chromebooks that children use in schools (and after them too since the OS is familiar) - default search for these is google too. Default ff search engine - google, default iphone search engine - google. Every time someone buys an iphone, google gets one more user automatically. Some may switch, but absolute majority will still use default

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