Comment by recuter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by recuter | Hacker News Reader

A few thoughts on the game theory involved here:

So in the past Google distinguished itself by optimizing for their users to spend as little time as possible on their website -- as opposed to all the big portals of the time trying to keep you within their sandbox.

This trait made them a lasting household name out of the many competitors of the time. Now they are increasingly trying to go the other way and keep you in their goggly sandbox as much as possible. Yandex is taking this new approach even farther. Up and coming websites are compelled to create such wizards and whatever microformats the leading sources of search engine traffic ask of them - this is rewarded by totally standing out in the search results and doing an endrun around established players who would normally get clicked through to.

However.. its easy to extrapolate what will happen. The most useful and profitable of these integrations over time will emerge, as the search engines have all of the data to make that analysis. Then they get simply swapped out for their googly/yandaxy/bing offering.. the users are none the wiser, they have been accustomed to this interface and don't really care if its some website or google providing the wizard. The portal approach wins, the web returns to the dark ages. A new nimble search engine emerges optimized towards sending their users on and away from their property as quickly as possible..

/Here endeth this though exercise. I hope I've made my point.

Youe nimble search engine will have nowhere to send users.

Everything on the web will be either opaque walled gardens (like Facebook) or homogenous services with no obvious "pages" to go to, accessible via external wizards or internal forms or apis.

Of course there is always wikipedia, but for general purpose searches the surface of interesting web pages shrinks.

Perhaps. Let us play it out;

Suppose sites like Hipmunk succumb to the siren song and do the microformat dance like Google wants in order to show up as a fancy card/wizard in the results -- and eventually Google swaps them out for identical ITA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software) / Knowledge Graph / 'etc sourced ones, thus killing Hipmunk.

1) Antitrust lawsuits will surely happen. Perhaps at that point Google is so big and adept at playing this game so..

2) Inevitable overhead from being a large bureaucratic corporation leaves enough margin for the Hipmunks of the world to exist outside this ecosystem and still be used by prosumers. Which leads to a comeback of the old-timey Google styled search engines whose value proposition is to float such sources fairly in its results. With the margin being big enough they will gain popularity for the same reasons Google itself initially did.

Edit: Walled Gardens can hold, but only for awhile as 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy' always applies.

I wonder how long before/whether a major player will simply decides google et al freeloading off their hard-produced data and displaying it in search results makes being listed a net loss and goes for a social-only model of traffic sourcing with a block-all robots.txt Between Google pulling out prices and reviews & Google News auto-generating summaries and snippets of on-the-ground reporters it feels like a matter of time. Maybe a halfway house would be starting to de-index hot news/exclusives for the first few hours.

For content sites this is indeed a problem, but for somebody actually selling or providing a service over the web this isn't too bad.

After all it doesn't matter if the purchases come from your website or from Yandex Islands, as long as they come.

It matters if the cost of sale is substantially different, and it matters if it affects customer loyalty.

I think many people forget that companies don't have a website for the sake of having a website. They have a website for the sake of increasing sales/revenues and profits. As long as it meets that business objective, companies usually don't care how that's achieved.

If Google provides the UI, you don't have to pay any graphics designer anymore for your service website. :)

In Germany the publishers realized that it's a net loss but instead of doing what you described they lobbied a law [1] ("Google tax") that will prevent search engines from showing snippets and thumbnails. The law has passed and will apply from August 1, 2013 onwards.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_p...

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