Ask HN: Do you think there will be a full replacement to Google?
Someone asked about a replacement for facebook.
I think a much more interesting questions is what will be the next replacement for google?
I think a much more interesting questions is what will be the next replacement for google?
The way to compete with them is through asymmetric warfare. Compete in such a way that they can't effectively fight back. For example pick off one (or a few) of their products and differentiate like crazy. Apple got stuck in a situation where they neede their own maps service. That's cost the badly because they're goign head-to-head, but at least they have the advantage of leveraging their ownership of the iOS platform. Meanwhile they're trying to differentiate by using an aerial 3D view instead of streetview, and now coming out with a competing local search service to streetview without it being just a clone. Duck-Duck-go competes with Google Search on privacy. Facebook competed by being completely unlike anything Google produced at the time.
Trying to beat Google at their own game is a failing strategy. Microsoft tried it with Bing search and Bing Maps, but just can't differentiate effectively. Look at how Apple competes with Microsoft. Received wisdom for decades was that Apple should make itself more like Microsoft to compete with them, but in the end their success has been based on what they do differently, not on what they do that's the same.
Google are not perfect. It's hard to compete with their sheer processing power and the size of their databases, however storage is getting cheaper and processing power is getting more abundant. It may not be feasible to compete with them head on at present, but during the coming years the likelihood of them maintaining their dominant position decreases with time, it doesn't increase.
Since the question is "whether there WILL be a full replacement for google" in short I would say most certainly - the question is how long it will take. I would be astonished if google were still the dominant search engine 20 years from now. 10 years? Even that would be a surprise.
I don't think Microsoft ever even dreamed of actually BEATING Google with Bing...
Realistically speaking all they wanted was to mitigate their dependence on Google services... and stealing SOME market share.
They probably hoped for more than they actually got at the end (especially outside of the US, where Bing isn't doing that great), but I find it difficult to believe they expected catching up with Google, much less beating them
Will anybody ever "own" all the market slices Google currently plays in? I _very_ much doubt it.
Will the Google Search engine remain an effective monopoly? I doubt that too - I remember when Alta Vista was world-changingly amazing! I suspect Google have deeply entrenched themselves in the employment market for people being very smart about making search better, and the bar is way higher so I doubt it's ever going to be a couple of compsci/linguistics phd students who topple the industry (the way Alta Vista fell), but things like DuckDuckGo and Blekko exist - and no doubt other more academic and less well know ones too, it not impossible (in my opinion) that someone will roll out a "instantly and obviously better than Google" search engine one day.
You just need millions of computers, millions of petabytes of net traffic and a lot of time to have the same index as Google. Easy.
For example, look at how useless Bing is. And that's Microsoft!
Prediction: some near-future Snowden document release will catapult DuckDuckGo or some other privacy-oriented search alternative into the limelight in a hockeystick curve growth kind of way. Maybe something that proves the NSA is firehose sharing de-anonymised Google/Bing search data with HealthCare Companies or the Insurance Industry or the IRS, and that there's widespread punitive action going on based on simplistic or poorly thought out responses to people's search history (people being denied health insurance because they did a few too many Google searches when their mother was diagnosed with cancer, or car insurance rates being raised across the board for people who search wine labels online...) All of a sudden someone who's "good enough" at search, but has TOR hidden service endpoints and nothing associated with them that comes under Five Eyes legal jurisdictions is going to look worthwhile switching to.
If some revelation like that were to happen, people would be outraged, they'd demand regulation, and meanwhile they'd continue to use Google/Bing; maybe some would switch to Incognito windows, but that's about it, in my opinion.
What if you build it like a distributed network focusing on anonymity / less centralization / less advertisement. Of course, it will be a completely different business then google, but this kind of search competition could quickly destroy google business.
Of course, crawling, indexing and distributing billions of URL's is not an easy job, I don't say that it can be done by someone over the weekend, but you don't have to be Microsoft at all to be able to do it.
Big companies like Google has a big inertia. Google built a complete industry (the advertising) over their centralized search system, which is very hard to be changed. This is why they are very vulnerable.
Attempting to compete with Google is akin to creating a new, marginally better implementation of a really widespread standard and attempting to market it: nobody is going to use it.
But far less if you don't personalize everything?
Knocking Google off their top-of-the-search-engine perch is likely (I doubt the'll remain an effective monopoly).
Whoever does that though, is unlikely to simultaneously knock them off the online advertising perch, the web/mobile mapping perch, or any of their other major "markets".
None of their verticals in unassailable (I don't think) - but I _very_ much doubt anyone will take them on and prevail in more than one important one at a time - the lumbering all-encompassing tentacled beast that is Google2015 is spectacularly unlikely to be duplicated by a single different player (in my not-so-humble opinion).
Hard to say. Personally I have noticed that they are doing pretty good job at keeping the spam out of my search results. It wasn't so always. Another thing that still amazes me is the almost realtime indexing of web.
I'm being very speculative, of course, but the way I look at it: we initially had web directories, where we'd look up categories to find websites we wanted. That wasn't because we wanted directories, but because there wasn't sufficient technology for a search engine. Now, we have search engines, but is that what we really want? In some cases, yes, but in most cases we often just want the first result, or even just some information that's on that page. So why do we still use search engines? Because there isn't sufficient technology for something better...at least not yet, but Siri and Cortana and Google Now are getting there. Eventually these conversational interfaces and the metadata behind them will become so good that the direct use of a search engine will become an edge case.
I think a better question might be how many years until Google replaces its homepage with Google Now (or something similar) instead of a search box?
Maybe not in the sense of "A site where you enter text and find pages containing that text". Just like Microsoft Windows might never be replaced as the most popular Desktop OS. Desktop OS just become less and less important.
But certainly in the sense of "A way to get answers to your questions". I expect computers to learn about the world and give answers directly. Just like image recognition software can tell you the answer to "Does this image has tomatoes?". Software will be able to answer "Do tomatoes grow in China?". Or answer "Paint me an image of tomatoes in China" the way Googles deep dream net can already "paint" lots of things [1].
It will be interesting how this turns out for "content creators". When computers learn and become creative, there will be no more SEO :) Because your site will just be read and ingested by a bot and make it better to answer questions. No more clickt-hroughs to your website.
What may -or may not- happen is that the web indexing business become less relevant that is today. You see, a lot of people think "the internet" is Facebook, or Whatsapp. Apple is trying to move publishers to its own garden. These movements all threaten Google's web advertising business in some way or another.
In America, perhaps, but in whole-world perspective, not necessarily.
Google is having some anti-monopoly issues in European Union (not unlike Microsoft in the past), and Russia threatened to ban Google altogether.
They always had a hard time in China, too - their services being suspended or blocked from time to time, their market share decreased several times over the years.
So if we're talking about "what can happen in 10-20 years", then absolutely there is a possibility that Google's world dominance gets crushed by governments which gang up against it at some point rather than by competitors. And replacements will just fill the void.
The primary thing non-tech people think about Google is search, but Google's primary (by a large margin) revenue is from it's ad network.
So if we discount the other sectors of the company which are currently rounding errors in terms of general mind-share and revenue, we come down to search and ads.
Search I believe will become less dominated - I'm really happy to see the rise in popularity of things like DuckDuckGo, but I wouldn't be surprised if as others have said, device-linked services such as "Search" on iOS/OSX or Microsoft powered devices, where they hook into a variety of services directly to provide common answers.
I'd love to see a result where we have less of these huge data-hungry monster companies like Google, Facebook, etc and more services/products focused on user privacy and control.
You really think we're going to be searching for "one version of truth" forever?
Everyone thinks different, and a full replacement of Google will be a personalized search engine, matched to how you think, not how the "average human" (or the average AI) thinks.
The web is going to become what people make it, not what these companies tell us is their single authority version of the best user interface for everyone, or the best answer for everyone.
The future of the internet is not wikipedia, it's augmenting our own biases enough that our egos aren't catastrophically challenged every day while feeding ourselves just the right of to-each-of-us contrarian opinions to grow.
The internet is a giant exercise in expanding the collective human mind, so the idea that there will be these gigantic portals that serve "answers" based on a "golden algorithm" is at best, inappropriate for anyone but the hypothetical "middle of the bell curve human" and at worst, it's a spiral of awful that converges on something really wrong.
Oh, hey! That's what we already see with the internet. Millions of human minds connected for the first time in an elaborate feedback loop -- we get these non-adaptive non-linear emergent effects, these harmonics, like "flame wars", hatred, and all kinds of weird new forms of harassment. People are just getting used to this huge mesh their brains now exist in, and they are still dysfunctional at it.
"Single versions of truth" ( single UI, single UX, single algorithms ) for everybody don't help this, they reinforce the feedback loops and amplify these harmonics. They don't mitigate and create diversity, they create, "a cacophony of homogeneity".
The future of the internet is people writing the algorithms that curate the content for them. Then the gap between the human and the computer ( today, by computer we mean, the web ), will be as small as we like to make it. That's when we get the real benefits of extending our minds into this digital medium.
And then there's Facebook. The key for them is to figure out a viable business out of head search queries i.e. instead of going after all possible searches. Perhaps mainly target shopping oriented search queries via recommendations from friends?
Of course, this is all easier said than done. Apple has seen its struggles with Maps and even Google couldn't do much with Google+.
The biggest and baddest are not taken down by other biggest and baddest, they're taken down by packs of hungry hyenas that don't care for their own personal survival.
I think Google will remain the primary general search engine for 10+ years. They're embedded. Direct competitors universally follow the pattern of "Copy Google's ideas about search, but with less economic resources".
However, I expect more specific, targeted search engines will eat into Google's market.
Possibilities are endless and unimaginable: but a current example is Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha searches displace Google searches.
I can't think about a big IT company that disappeared the last 50 years.
IBM while still huge, has little relevance to desktop or mobile computing. As has been pointed out, DEC and other huge mainframe and minicomputer companies are dead. Microsoft and Intel, while also still huge, are not doing well in mobile.
Unless Google are very careful, lucky or both, they will be unwilling or unable to make the painful change necessary to remain dominant in whatever the web and mobile becomes next.