Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?

45 pointsbemmu101 comments

What could ruin the Google profit party? I have a hard time imagining another search engine coming along that everyone would suddenly jump to, but I guess it is possible. It is trivial to switch search engines.

I can't come up with any reason why AdWords spend would suddenly vanish. Presumably companies are spending so much on AdWords because they are getting a return.

Because of smartphones, people are searching more and more. Local search ads seem like they could be a nice new rev source. At the same time more people are getting online, so more searches there too.

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But we can never imagine what's next. When they said, "What's the worst that could happen to IBM?" No one would have been taken seriously if they said, "A tiny little computer that sits on your desk."

Google is king of search as it's done now. I've personally seen a startup that can do a very new type of search. Who knows if this will be the "little computer that sits on your desk" but what we do know is that something is most certain to come along.

Disruption is never "if", it's always "when".

* When they said, "What's the worst that could happen to IBM?" No one would have been taken seriously if they said, "A tiny little computer that sits on your desk."*

What if they had said: "A change in the market that they fail to adequately forsee and plan for"? That's what will kill Google too.

And with all the technologies and companies that are gunning for them, how can they possibly "adequately foresee and plan for" the one which will be their successor?

So in other words, the main poster's question is a bit like saying, "What's the worst illness I'll get this Winter? I don't see anyone I could catch the flu from."

A scandal related to personal data large enough to spook your average consumer. We're talking serious stuff, like records being sold to criminals or given to the government without a warrant. The only thing that could cause a user to get over the large cost of migration is a massive breach of trust.

It doesn't even have to be related to search. A scandal involving Gmail or Google Voice would have a large impact on search.

> given to the government without a warrant.

It only barely registered with the general public when the telcos did it - why should Google be any different?

because google's brand is all about google being different.

Everyone already accepts shitty speeds and shitty customer service from telecos. Mentally Google is a different ballgame.

I sincerely hope that people will realise how they are giving up their privacy. If a massive breach is the way to go, then be it.

The Affero GPL.

If it becomes popular, it closes the server side loophole and Goog would have to either give up on using new open source software or else open source their codebase.

That's why Chris DiBona at Google Code won't let it on their servers. Search "Affero GPL" for more stuff around that.

Ps: if I worked at MS and wanted to destroy Goog, I would go around offering hackers $100k or $1M to switch their licenses to Affero GPL. Basically the size of the offer would be proportional to the userbase.

With a $100m (= size of Bing's marketing budget) you could do a lot of damage.

Note that this doesn't even get us started on how if Ballmer had any sesnse he'd have built in adblock for adwords bundled into IE9 and turned on by default as a feature.

Google could just use the version they have and extend it or fork it from the old license. I reckon they put in enough to the codebase that you don't want them out.

I think Google's biggest risk is in not owning enough of the most important corpora of web content which are getting created today: social information. The Internet is being reinvented as a network of people instead of just a network of publications. Facebook and Twitter are leaders in owning this people-content, but not really in searching it effectively yet. Even though Twitter is viewable (i.e. crawlable) and open, they still have proprietary data which could provide the best overall understanding of the information and relationships which flow through the Twitter platform.

The technology of web search continues to get commoditized today. Google is quite good at it, but Bing/Yahoo still do alright. Whoever provides a differentiated and important corpus of content for some fraction of web searches (i.e. social search or something like "real-time" or news) has the potential to capture the search behavior across all queries. Users only want to type searches into a single search box on the web.

What could ruin the Google profit party?

Anti-trust regulation to split Google and AdSense/AdWords would probably figure as the Ultimate Nightmare Scenario. I don't necessarily think that it is likely, but then again I never saw an OS/browser tag-team as being a threat to world peace.

Commoditization of search: at some point people will stop caring whose servers stand behind that little search box in the top right corner and whoever controls user experience will just pick the best provider out of many, driving down search profit margins.

This is why Google wants their own browser, this is why they want to control cell phones and other mobile devices.

How about Microsoft including an ad blocker in the next Windows Update.

True, that would really hurt them. I can't even immediately come up with any reason why they couldn't do that, ad blockers are a very legit piece of software after all. Given how much sense this makes, what's been stopping MS from doing it so far?

Because MS is also an advertiser. Bing would become immediately worthless to advertisers if they did. Plus, assuming MS let their ads through and blocked Google's, Google would yell "anti-competition lawsuit" faster than you can say, well, anti-competition.

Remember the anti-trust party that was started when Microsoft started giving away a free browser in competition with Netscape? That would be nothing compared to the storm that would emerge if Microsoft tried to directly attack AdWords from its still-a-convicted-monopolist position with an action like that.

Agreed, but Microsoft could probably delay things for long enough to hurt Google sufficiently. It might be enough simply to auto-install it, hook customers on ad blocking, pay the fine, then send out a patch to make it opt-in only.

My guess is that at the moment it seems that the DoJ really has its eyes on Google, and Microsoft doesn't want to pull a stunt like this and distract them.

Could play into Google's hands though if they tried to directly compete against windows, they would now have a great angle to convince people why they should make the change to a more open and neutral system.

Ad blockers create an unlicensed derivative work of the copyrighted works that are received, and they could likely be sued for that.

Fair use.

...would only cover a portion of the document.

No, they don't.

Plagiarism checkers that store copies of whole essays are considered fair use, so I doubt ad blockers violate copyright law.

This is just silly. If you were scraping a site's content and publishing it elsewhere maybe there would be a case, but for personal use you can create as many derivative works as you like under fair use. If not then accessibility features like screen readers and magnifiers (many of which are built into browsers) would be illegal.

Users are free to modify site's content as much as they want, using adblockers or using cornify, etc. This is no different than someone cutting out parts of articles from a magazine to make their own collages. Once it's in your hands you can do what you like with it, as long as you don't republish it.

http://news.cnet.com/Web-ad-blocking-may-not-be-entirely-leg...

This cute legal theory hasn't been tested at web scale to my knowledge (closing down shop due to threat of lawsuit != the theory is tested, just that the depth of someone's wallet has been tested and found wanting).

What makes it curious in the web context is the following: say we can decompose the transmitted web page into the "content" and the "ads".

It is occasionally the case that the full ad content is directly embedded in the transmitted work but that is not the norm; far-and-away the most typical setup is:

- the content is transmitted as part of the page

- the ads are transmitted as scripts embedded in the page; the ads are thus not directly transmitted but if the receiving user's browser operates in a particular fashion than those scripts will execute and insert the actual ad-content into the page in a way the user can see it

If an ad-blocker works by stripping out javascript there is a smidgen of a derivative-work argument here.

If, instead, the ad-blocker works by altering the operation of the javascript interpreter (eg: leaving it unable to connect to the ad server) then nothing in the combined content+ads has been changed by the ad blocker.

If the ad-creating javascript were somehow involved in protecting the content (eg: the web page is transmitted "encrypted"; the page's javascript is waiting for a key to be transmitted in the ad content before decrypting the page content) then you might be able to work up a DMCA anti-circumvention claim, but your user experience would be so terrible it probably wouldn't make economic sense to do this.

All that said: an "ad-blocker" program is safe so long as it has substantial non-infringing uses.

Given the vast range of computers in use (in terms of cpu/ram/intended usage/etc) and given the vast range of hazards out on the internet (phishers/virii/etc.) a program that facilitates one or both of:

- "hostfile management" (blocking or restricting address to particular servers or ip ranges, etc.)

- "javascript management", adding additional checks or safety controls to how a browser interprets javascript

...is clearly going to have substantial non-infringing uses and should have a clean legal bill of health provided it is marketed as a generic security / performance solution and not an "ad-blocker".

Thus in the unlikely event that your legal theory vis-a-vis ad blocking is found to have teeth all that will be needed to continue ad blocking as before will be to rebrand the software as a more generic hostfile+javascript management with a way of sharing and importing configuration files from other users (allowing the users, then, to block ads themselves).

So as cute as it is this isn't a theory that will do much more than prevent any serious commercial ad-blocking venture from getting serious traction.

I think Google would put immense pressure on them via anti-trust if they did that.

Besides, not everyone wants all ads blocked. When I search on Firefox, I don't even see ads on the RHS of Google. Sometimes I want to and don't need MS deciding what I'll see. MS would lose huge if they did this.

Because ad-blockers are trivially simple to get past.

Google would patch their ad code to get around it in an hour, tops. It's a cat and mouse game, and Microsoft isn't a particularly fast cat.

There must be some contractual or legal reason for them not to. Otherwise, they'd have done it a while ago, to try to "kill" the web as a platform.

That said, yeah, this would hurt Google bad if it somehow happened.

Because MS is also into advertising that is not likely.

But if it did that Google would block Windows users' access to their services and show a message that MS is responsible for this mess _and_ sue MS for anti-competitive practices.

They might not have a leg to stand on with an anti trust suit if Microsoft blocks their own ads as well.

Not that that will prevent a suit, but it would be useful as a defence.

Do you remember that one time when Microsoft tried to add "smart tags", keyword-based links that showed up as squiggly lines? Do you remember the uproar, even though there was a simple op-out mechanism, and how quickly they dropped the whole idea? That would be nothing compared with a bundled ad blocker.

There is a similar feature in IE8 called "Accelerators", but with less uproar.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/features/...

To become so bureaucratic that all the smart people leave.

Like Yahoo!

Conversely, to fail to become sufficiently bureaucratic that the lunatics run the asylum. They are too big not to fail.

I think we don't know the answer. 10 years ago few would imagine Microsoft not being a tech leader. 30 years ago few would image that PCs would replace IBM mainframes for most of the computing tasks. 150 years ago few imaged computing machines exists.

There are always something out of left field that knock dinosaurs on the head and flip them over. Unfortunately we never know what that will be until it hit the dinosaurs.

Umm...just FYI, Microsoft is still very much a tech leader.

Revenue from MS Office and Windows is great, sure. But those products are more than ten years old, and are increasingly being commoditized. What new technology has Microsoft led in the 2000s?

Surface isn't an invention. Portable media they lost out on bigtime. Web video they lost on. The CLR is innovative and great but more than 10 years old now.

I've pondered that very question off and on for several years. I don't know what the "worst" thing would be but some places where I think there are clouds (pun intentionality uncertain) on their horizon - in no particular order:

1) Culture fail: leading to dithering and waste that swamps the ship. Until a recent few years, Google hired and operated like Larry and Sergey's late night bull session dream: hiring "people like them", creating outrageously extravagant perks (like grad school life on steroids with high pay), using the "20% free time" rule to implement a kind of AI search for business ops, etc. They over-hired. They lacked coherent focus. They became a perpetual ego-stroke for the boys at the top. They built an arrogant and self-validating culture. They developed a culture that is often snobbish beyond accomplishment. On and on. They even had a "uniquely theirs" house style for interior decorating. Historically those elements are a recipe for a company that at some point seizes up and becomes incapable of fighting in the markets (c.f., e.g., the collapse of SGI whose former campus, ironically, is mostly occupied by GOOG). Under Schmidt, et al. in recent years this appears to be starting to be reined in but I'm not convinced yet the professional management is making advances beyond shoring up results quarter by quarter - I don't see the new, customer-centric culture yet.

2) Collapse of advertising. Advertising can collapse out from under Google in at least three, plausible ways. First, some other content delivery medium comes to dominate as the place where effective advertising goes. Google can't be everywhere at once (not even Google) and, frankly, I think the big market for Internet advertising is going to look a lot more cable TV than web surfing. Second: a new market maker. As technological opportunities to place ads change, ad placement will drift away from what you can build on a search engine to more targeted placement. Right now it's cheap and easy to put some space in your content in Google's market - Google is a market maker taking a cut. As mass consumption of content condenses to a smaller number of content providers - providers better equipped to make sophisticated sales of their ad properties will emerege (e.g., e.g., content providers who do more than add links and declare a few keywords). New market makers will enter and take Google's margin on ads to $0 (in the limit). Third, on-line advertising as a paradigm may get severely shaken by its poor performance (for most advertisers) in bad economic times along with alternatives. An alternative I think likely to work, for someone, is the request-driven marketing paradigm. If I need to or want to buy X, typing search terms into a search engine seems a painfully indirect and horrible way to go about it. Instead, in any large market, I want domain-specific heuristics to connect me to the general search thing of "what consumers are saying" and connect me to the ad placement thing in the sense of domain-specific searching through ads. Ads on such a "decision engine" (!) should ultimately be based purely on actual sales commission, not CPMs (though even commissions will be a pretty small slice - perhaps bundled with on-line transaction handling service).

3) Misplaced capital investment. On the one hand, Google makes a plausible play to build their massive manufacturing plants for commodity computing (their newest generation "data centers"). On the other hand, if their closed, arrogant culture and over-reliance on ads causes them to fail to monetize those centers well they may wind up being left holding the bag where they have to sell of to someone who knows how to make money off of them. They seem well on their way to failing hard on those data centers by trying to monopolize what system software runs on them.

In general, you pretty much know that something is going to take them down, at least if history is any evidence. They wound up, a few years back, outrageously overcapitalized. Not just over-valued but actually over-capitalized. History shows that no management team in that situation - the extreme outlier in capitalization - is ever competent to invest the money flows wisely enough to keep it up.

22 points for this? Really?

1) Google hired and operated like Larry and Sergey's late night bull session.. Under Schmidt, et al. in recent years this appears to be starting to be reined in..

You do realize that Schmidt has been there since before they went public, right? ie, he was there for the hiring. They currently have slightly less headcount than at their peak, but they say (in their last earning call no less) that their main limiting factor is their ability to hire good engineering talent.

2) "Collapse of advertising.... New market makers will enter and take Google's margin on ads to $0 (in the limit)"

Any evidence to support this? Given how effective AdWords is, it seem unlikely that people will stop paying for it?

"Ads on such a "decision engine" (!) should ultimately be based purely on actual sales commission, not CPMs"

You mean kind of like the "Action based commissions" that Google is trialing with selected vendors now?

3) "They seem well on their way to failing hard on those data centers by trying to monopolize what system software runs on them."

What does this even mean? You mean they haven't open sourced their BigTable implementation? They did publish the BigTable paper - that hardly seemed "closed, arrogant" to me.

"They wound up, a few years back, outrageously overcapitalized."

Do you mean how they left money on the table when they floated using their dutch auction style of stock allocation?

Or do you mean their stock price peak of $700? That is around 20% above it's current price, and given that the US is on the tail end of a recession it would seem to me there is a fair chance that peak will be beaten within 2 years.

GOOG's current P/E ratio is around 34. That's fairly comparable to APPL (29), and Goldman Sach (36) - all seem fairly reasonable for companies showing strong growth in earnings.

1) (Google as Page and Brin's bull session fantasy): Schmidt has been there for a long time, sure, but it's only in recent years that they've so clearly polarized between the "the guys" and Schmidt, the former representing vague hype and themselves and Schmidt being the voice that calms investors and analysts. As a small example, in the business press, Schmidt is being portrayed as the guy who spins cut-backs on employee perks as prudent business while Page and Brin are being portrayed as guys who own a love-shack jet, invest in eccentric and nepotistic genomics projects, and treat reporters rudely.

2) (Collapse of advertising): Yeah, the on-line ad market ain't growing like it did for a while and in some sectors is contracting. Meanwhile, the "fat middle" of the long tail of the blogosphere is undergoing contraction and professionalization which suggests it is going to evolve into an industry that has far greater leverage in brokering its ads and is not so reliant upon Google. Don't get me started on the coming collapse of the (remaining) major "social networking" sites (which, to a first approximation, have yet to generate a return for most investors other than insiders).

By "decision engine" I mean we'll see ad delivery based less on what a person happens to be reading or searching for, and more on what they explicitly declare to some service that they want to shop for. We've already seen that to some degree in some of the most easily commoditized markets like air travel between A and B, or car insurance, or cars, or electronics parts (http://octopart.com/). That trend is accelerating. Check out a page like: http://octopart.com/parts/category--interface+ics--ethernet/... Aren't the Google ads down the right column of that page just a bit ironic?

3a) (Google's data center potential to fail because of their impulse to monopolize what apps run on them): Ok, well, I have an app that uses (let's say) Oracle Berkeley DB/XML and newLisp atop a GNU/Linux distro of my choice. I'm willing to tweak it for their particular network and storage topology. What's the price?

3b) (overcapitalized): I simply mean that they have to spend more money per quarter than they are competent to spend (or than any other organization with that executive structure could be competent to spend). The same investment dollars would likely perform better if invested with a more diversified set of controls on how they are spent. If you're skeptical of big government, you oughta also be skeptical of big corp.

Trying to avoid saying much, as I work at Google. That said...

Re: 3a: cough AppEngine cough. Anyone foolish enough to run Oracle on Google's datacenter hardware would stab their own eyes out within a month, tops.

Until recently, these were the exact reasons that I avoided GOOG stock.

Nowadays, however, Google has a more immediate problem: Bing.

What would happen if Microsoft starts doing search deals with ISPs, portals, & mobile companies? Why would any company integrate Google search if Microsoft was willing to pay them to use Bing? Isn't this already happening with the Microsoft-Facebook and Microsoft-Yahoo deals?

Microsoft already pays ISPs to use IE and Microsoft search, and has done since the mid 1990s.

Google is also paying browser manufacturers to include Google search.

Sure, but nobody was suggesting they didn't already do this, unlike whitebit with Microsoft, whom I was replying to.

Forcing people to use bing isn't really going to work IMHO.

It does though - Bing has gone on to capture an absurd amount of market share in just the few months since its launch. Users will use whatever is in their title bar - and for most users on IE this will be Bing.

I made a bet with a friend 5 years ago that by 2015, Google will be a public utility.

(This is also the worst thing that could happen to Google)

How much were you willing to bet?

I'm potentially in on that bet, too, but what do we mean by public utility? It's a hard bet to decide the outcome of.

-t

hence it was a gentleman's wager.

I don't think there's any one silver bullet that's going to take them by surprise. For search I think the biggest danger is not being able to keep up with spammers and tricksters. People may not abandon Google search but it would make their advertising platform far less appealing and open the door to competitors. For everything else there's the privacy & reliability concerns. A few big high profile privacy breaches, some frequent outages, or any hint of corruption in how Google handles personal data would take their toll.

Purely on competition I think Google Docs is a weak spot. IMO it's pretty bad and has not been improving. Microsoft's Office Online looks pretty good. As inept as Microsoft is it would be unwise for Google to let them get a foot in the door. They might end up regretting the years they decided not to make any significant improvements to Google Docs.

Government regulation.

Agreed, I think eventual trust-busting will occur.

It used to be called the place where the Clinton admin. was in exile, and seem to have survived Bush quite well. You'll just come to the conclusion, that it is the government, and self-regulatory government is an illusion, just as a self regulated market.

If people doing SEO found tricks that Google isn't able to overcome, and those became prevalent and persistent enough, people would start to lose faith in the quality of search results. Then they would go looking for other search engines.

already happening... Just the other day there was an 'ask hn' thread on this.

The Semantic Web blossoms beyond the need to infer meaning from bodies of text. If the information on the web becomes more structured, structured beyond the need for Google.

If web pages and web services were to all completely expose their information as RDF and embed rich metadata inside bodies of text the need for Google's fancy AI and Entity extraction would be none.

Google's bread and butter is advertising. That advertising is driven from their search domination - their ability to extract meaning from web pages and match that meaning up to searched terms. Semantic web completely commoditizes that function - if you can crawl, you can search.

Surely a company like Google, filled with a ton of smart people who deal with the web every day and have a little bit of free rein to go crazy with it, will have some idea of what to do when - or if - the Semantic Web ever takes off.

Sure, their immediate ad-driven revenue model might break, but I very much doubt this would be an overnight change, nor one Google is not already thinking about.

May I have some of what you're smoking?

The Semantic Web depends on having everyone who writes web pages also categorize them. Whenever you have 20 different people categorizing content you're going to get 20 different interpretations of what the semantics mean. The vision of a decent, consistent categorization emerging across the web is a pipe dream.

Furthermore the fundamental problem that Google solves is not finding content. It is narrowing in on worthwhile content. In a world filled with people pushing commercial content with a dubious value proposition, you can't depend on content creators to provide an accurate assessment of their quality. That's where Google comes in. They not only categorize, they rank data well enough that end users are happy to accept the results.

I agree with you perfectly. However your point can stand on its own merits without needing to be impolite.

Much of the web is databases with a thin layer on top, and the whole point of the SW/LD architecture is that different sites don't need to agree on ontology; it just becomes an alternate, aggregatable database view, in a sense.

I think a lot of the SW hype's overblown - and I've worked in the field - but you're attacking something which doesn't exist.

While it may not exist, there are still people who promote the possibility. In particular the person I am responding to subscribes to the vision enough to believe that some day the user supplied categorization will be sufficient to make Google unnecessary.

Facebook know more about their average customers than Google does (keeping in mind most Google users don't use gmail).

Facebook use this to move into search. So when I search for 'cappucino book', FB knows I mean the web framework from the context of my discussions with FB/Twitter friends.

FB encourages users to make FB their first destination, users do this because it's search and their friends in one place, and why would you want anything else, when, in this scenario, FB's results are always better than Google's anyway?

My take is there is a yet a better way to search the Internet. We are still looking at search as a keyword driven application. Which is not the optimal approach to search. Though no one can argue that google give decent results to most of the searches you key-in. Search can be more intelligent and personalized as everyone expects a different result to the keywords "will apple fall".

If search can be made personal and more of a 1:1 activity that will go wrong with Google.

How about click fraud getting wildly out of control? Google's profit is based solely off of online advertising. Click fraud is a never ending battle to undermine that business and Google has teams of phds hard at work to understand what is click fraud and what is not. Now if click fraud reached a point where advertisers can't trust the pay per click model, Google's revenues go poof.

A major change is that good search algorithms or giant server farms could become sufficiently useless that a remote search engine makes no economic sense.

I don't see that happening in the near term but there are sci-fi scenarios in which it might happen; I'll sketch them so the pattern becomes clear.

EG:

- user's local storage and local cpu / throughput goes through a quantum leap and most users most of the time have locally cached copies of any content they might find useful, and the cpu power to search it all efficiently

- some quantum leap in bandwidth and other IT infrastructure means you can scour large chunks of the web directly in a short time period (eg: if everyone had terabit fiber-to-the-home and backend infrastructure were built out enough you could just download entire websites and full-text search them in the time it takes now to search @ google)

- some quantum leap in "software agents" and safely-executing remote code comes to pass and users send out long-lived, virus-like agents that constantly scour-and-index-the-web-for-them (executing at the site of the content host

This is basically a sci-fi "what-if" but as a thought exercise it gets the point across: right now it makes sense to have a centralized spider-and-archive-and-index-and-rank facility b/c the web is so huge and its pipes are so tiny compared to the # of end users and their individual computing capacities; a sufficiently radical shift in end-user capacities would make it moot. All probabilities for the above I'd put at .01% or something similarly lame.

Weaker versions of the scenario include anything that reduces the use of the web and consequently reduces the need for search services:

- next-generation rich-client driven chat + forums + social-networks become the dominant areas of internet activity (with the web relegated to low-grade entertainment, reference material, and shopping); users don't need external search engines for these activities and the service-operators' databanks are deliberately opaque to conventional spiders

- despite all the naysaying the semantic web takes off in some fashion, with enough widely-used, useful-enough ontologies and so forth that user-run agents and user-run spam filters and user-run relevance+credibility assessors can auto-navigate the web to find what the user is looking for without passing through a conventional search engine

...etc., which I'd move up to .1% or so likelihood.

google doesn't make money off "search". you don't pay them to click the search button. Google gets paid when people pay for you clicking on those ads (or viewing them with doubleclick). If the money that is spent on those ads+clicks is spent elsewhere that's the worst thing that could happen to Google.

Search share matters, because that share is matched with ad inventory being filled. If that inventory isn't filled, but they are still high in search shares, it doesn't matter. Odds are this won't happen though. Here's what is worrisome to me though:

Referral traffic is a good indicator of where things are going. Less and less traffic is coming from search referrals, and more and more is coming from social networks. If the paid referrals follow suit with the organic referrals , then Houston has a problem.

They might find themselves on the wrong side of the growth divide. Advertising money follows consumers ready to spend. US consumers are badly indebted. Most of the growth is going to be in emerging markets.

I get the feeling that people there may prefer their own national champions as they become more confident and less inclined to favor foreign brands.

The fastest growing regions often shape the fashions and trends. The people closest to those developments will recognise new trends first. So if there is some kind of paradigm shift in the making it may not be google who gets it first.

On the other hand I do remember the Japan hype of the 1980s. The japanese were supposed to take over everything until their own bubble burst. It's so hard to make predictions (at least about the future as they say)

A superior Chinese language search engine coupled with a deep(er) recession in the US would hurt their profit machine. The web could also change with regards to categorization. For example if I want a book I go to Amazon, if I want to learn about boardgames, I go to boardgamegeek, if I want general knowledge I go to wikipedia. So on a long enough time line if I want to do X on the web, I go to Y. Where Y is not Google. Also I assume one of these days someone will figure out how to implement a metaverse that everyone wants to use and then searching might be different there as well. Or maybe Wolfram will figure out something useful to do with his engine.

I don't think advertising is going to be able to sustain Google indefinitely. As more tech-savvy users get on the web, their tolerance for advertisements will dwindle, along with advertisers' return. Google probably knows this, which is why they've moved into other markets like Android and Google's office tools. As far as search goes, I think they're either going to be king forever as we know it, or a 'better' search will come out... though I can't think of what could make search better than what Google has.

I, personally, would like to see Google become their own ISP. When there was news they were buying up 'dark fiber' I thought this might be in their future plans.

However, Android isn't a direct moneymaker. Android is just a way to ensure that they make money off mobile search. aka advertising.

Android is actually a way to keep Apple from dominating, and to keep other mobile devices open.

Google knows it dominates certain services like search, so it can use Android to make sure other devices stay open in order to compete against it. This forces them to let people choose and Google knows more often than not that choice will be for Google services. For example if Android allows Google talk, then Apple will become tremendously pressured to do the same because it's supposedly a really useful feature.

Android forces others to be more open, Google dominates, therefore more open means more customers for Google, more eyes looking at Google ads, etc.

"As more tech-savvy users get on the web" => you realize you got it the wrong way round there, right? In other words, advertising will just get better on the web. Google's golden there.

Dark fiber is great for peering but it's the last mile that costs real money. Even Google doesn't have enough money to pull it off on a really large scale.

what about P2P search? or essentially a distributed search engine (or engines) running on volunteers' servers? Google's good fortune for now is that search is not yet a commodity. Can distributed search engines make search a commodity?

It just seems vulnerable that despite the diversity of Google's products and services, they make basically all their profit from displaying [very relevant] ads.

The fragmentation of traffic sources might limit Google's growth (i.e. Facebook and other social media are quickly becoming a very meaningful place to advertise). In addition, international competitors and Bing might put more pressure on them.

But in terms of something killing Google - that would have to be a really fundamental screw up and/or shift in the way the Internet works I think. Then again, history is full of wrong predictions :)

When Google doesn't find a way to stay on top of real-time search, social search and regular search - or doesn't find a way to combine those before a competitor does - they are going to fail. It's not a given that Google stays on top. Remember Yahoo, Altavista et al? Search is going to adopt to changing times and possibilities. And the #1 spot will be up for grabs again soon enough.

They could bring Brad Lidge in to save the company.

That joke may not age well, but at this moment, fantastic.

If an effective search method was developed that wasn't based on pagerank and link volumes, but rather the internal quality of a page

Not sure why you were downvoted. There is life after page rank. Just imagine "real AI", only million times faster - could make for some good search engines.

It has already happened: they've screwed up search, when moved away from PageRank to some reputation-based algorithms (and set-up the Facebook & co. as sites with biggest reputation, which is nonsense, as that's UGC). It's not so visible in English-language search, although begins to be, but, for example, for Russian I've stopped using it altogether.

Some search startup comes along (probably via local search) that has a real focus on user experience and design.

They could go public, discounting the benefits of staying a private founder run company like SAS, and instead going for the quick pay-off of an IPO.

Then the usual pressures for quarterly results would slowly eat away at their "don't be evil" motto.

Imagine what that would be like!

How about...

The AI Google is growing becomes "too powerful to fail," a more insidious version of the "too big to fail" we hear from banking. The humans at Google lose control of their business as automation increasingly leaches more money from any business possible. It becomes harder and harder for the Google humans to unwind each ad transaction to determine whether the ad leads people into scams. Users start to step back from their engagement with Google. Alternatives begin to get traction. Humans at Google start to become alarmed. As a defense against the power of the AI, Google transitions over to a new system and allows the old data to fossilize. The new system allows for a higher degree of human input, though it's still not under human control. At this critical point, competitors move in and take away a lot of the market from Google.

Now you know why GOOG tried to play the card as being analogous to "Banking Secrecy", calling for immunity and special status. The issue is privacy.

In the short term, not much. In the long-term, disruptive technology. Something will come along and do to Google what it has done to Microsoft.

Eventually, the game will change, and the existing players won't be able to compete.

They seem big enough and profitable enough that to really dent their progress, it will probably take something no one has foreseen, and which they can't easily chase without ruining their current business.

It is trivial to switch search engines physically, but not necessarily psychologically. Plus you could easily switch, I switch occasionally, but to permanently shifting your usage trend is tougher.

That they dont get split into smaller pieces [like Ma Bell]

Legal crackdown on monopoly claims.

VSS

I know this is off-topic, but bemmu, you need to paypal me $20 as per our bet made in #startups on IRC. You haven't showed up in the chatroom lately. If you had won the bet, I certainly wouldn't have reneged. You can send payment to the email in my profile.

It is the collapse of the US Empire.

Which is bound to happen given History, like it or not, even if it is not allowed to fail (wall street).

If you look at GOOG closely, you will realize, that it is not based on the purported commercial grounds at all. No single Company can:

- map the moon as a "cool factor"

- get all the UN translations for Bayes

- inherit the Corona Project

- hand out Tb of mail storage ...does your default Corporate Entity allow that for their employees, let alone for anybody?

- have urchins and alike everywhere

- use NASA site as a terminal (that's a challenge(er))

- view all the streets it is allowed to (think urban w[t]f)

- operate one of the largest computers on the Planet, though interestingly enough still with only a few percent of Intel's production

- scan all books ...and "legally" violate (C) at the drop of the hat (have the power to make law up as you go)

...you would have hard trouble doing any of the above, let alone do all of them at once (with still some omissions) without strong backing. If you rather think of it as a RAND, you will notice, that all this has nothing to do with the order of magnitude of the rev. sources you are alluding to. And think of search the other way around (like zeitgeist), it will make much more sense.

thanks for factually contradicting my points. But true: I did not comment on the tubes (optic, u), nor the droids, neither the scholar (Terman)

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