What Google Can't Copy (Easily)
duckduckgo.com
duckduckgo.com
Also, Gabriel, your work is wonderful. Keep it up, you're an inspiration to me.
This is why their parking lots have electrical sockets to plug your car into or why they released Lively (when I was there it was but a one man project that I saw at an internal techtalk). It's all things Googlers wanted to work on. They will work on anything they find interesting and they'll generally get the full support of the company (at least that's how it was in 2007).
Now I'm at Microsoft and the biggest change to me is how focused Microsoft is at executing very specific projects. The other big change is how many strengths Microsoft has that most of the world refuses to acknowledge. Microsoft gets a lot of bad press, but holy shit when they target something, they go for all or nothing. There is a drive internal to Microsoft unlike any I've seen... when they want something, they won't stop until it's theirs. They want blood.
Any competitor launch immediately gives all similar internal projects a second look, by a larger group of reviewers. The people working on it get another burst of motivation. To release it, even in rough 'labs' form, now benefits from an additional 'news hook' and blunts any impression Google is not innovating.
It doesn't require a strategic plan, or large preemptive investment in ideas that are then intentionally held back -- it's just normal big-but-still-creative company dynamics.
Honestly, it would have been fine if they just forwarded me to google maps or mapquest.
1) 123 main street wichita kansas -> should show me map or link that obviously takes me to a map
2) two addresses with the word "to" in between should offer me a link with directions
3) "restaurant" (or other business type) plus an address or zip code should take me to something like this: http://www.google.com/search?q=restaurant+11211&ie=utf-8...
These really only save a few clicks, but I love having one box which can answer pretty much any question. Google does a decent job with the mapping, but it's definitely possible to do better. Of course, correctly guessing what a searcher means is always a tricky challenge.
I think that is wrong, and it's pretty much just the first one. Google has the scale to multi-variate test most things very quickly, and is long-term enough in their thinking that they aren't pushing a product just because a few blogs read by .0000000008% of their users are drooling over it.
They come up with ideas (some of which may be copies of competitors' ideas) test the hell out of them, and push the ones that work. End of story. I'd be surprised if they are more than marginally aware there are competitors to their search product.
Seems highly unlikely they've got lots of features just waiting on a post from a rinky-dink tech blog to incite them to launch.
They flamed out because they weren't sticky with users, but it wasn't for lack of original coverage or eyeballs. IIRC, Cuil managed to get covered in pretty much every major news outlet, which converted into about 3M uniques on their first day! As I alluded to in the post (and better described in the posts I linked to), Google did their best to take the wind out of their sales with timely released and announced features (longer snippets, bigger index, in this case).
In retrospect, it seems that they were going to (at least initially) fail on their own, but Google didn't know that at the time. And the point is that they were paying attention and responding. They took the competitive threat seriously, as I think they should.
Maybe it's too early to write them off, but I would have expected a better showing by now. It's a real pity because I would have liked to see some real competition in the search field.
[1] figures from 'alexa', take with grain of salt etc.
If I had a search engine, I'd be strongly opposed to facilitating the arrest and torture of Chinese dissidents. Because after all, I think my American users would actually care pretty keenly on whether companies they do business with facilitate the arrest and torture of Chinese dissidents.
Say Google, what was your policy on that again?
The bottom line, is that Google doesn't want to lose a 1 billion person Chinese market over a bunch of hippies. Long term(20-30 years) it'll account for 70-80% of their revenue, turning the back on it now would be the dumbest thing for them to do.
I disagree -- Google reacts to bad PR. It is about the only external factor they react to, since they've got a de-facto monopoly on the Internet's license to print money combined with essentially no regulatory oversight, anti-trust issues, etc.
See, e.g., how quickly they killed their I-can't-believe-its-not-Campfire app when seven PR-savvy guys in a room in Chicago threatened them with being seen as the Goliath for a change.
Looking at the market share figures I would say your argument falls apart at this point.
Granted, they'd have to be pretty adroit about it, but it is a compelling PR story since it makes Google look like the giant, not-particularly-moral, profit-focused advertising firm that they are instead of the two dudes in a dormroom that they pretend to be (and probably actually seem themselves as).
(Related: post-search deal with Bing, experimenting with user interface in this way is Yahoo's explicit strategy for competing in search.)
On the other hand, there are times when I'm searching for a datapoint and am frustrated that Google keeps throwing the same links at me. I have to constantly hit "next" to get the results that I want.
I wonder if there is an opportunity for a search engine to heavily invest in either providing people with completely fresh info every time they query for something or provide them just the results they've seen before.
This is probably not relevant to Duck Duck Go but thought I'd throw it out there.
I somewhat disagree. There are some things, most likely due to technical complexity and cost/effort, that google provides at a low level of quality. ie. gmail search!!
Maybe they can't change their main page, but they can easily launch variant pages that look like whatever they like. They already did so in several cases.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+d...