Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

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What do you consider to be "Google"? The search engine? Google Maps? The advertising company? Google Ventures? Heroku? GoogleDocs? Or the whole crazy self-driving cars, automatically launched wind turbine kites, GoogleWave, Project Loon, and every other successful or spectacular failure they've been involved in?

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.

Small correction: Heroku is owned by Salesforce.com.

Indeed - I was thinking "App Engine" but my fingers typed "Heroku"

On the contrary, I feel the exact opposite: the entry bar for the search engine market is not high. Google delivered a good service from the first day, which was not improved so much since them. A newcomer have to reach only this quality and combine it with some spice, like P2P and it can reach a big market share. Although some revolutionary improvement in the search result offerings wouldn't hurt also but this has less chance (waiting for a better AI).

>the entry bar for the search engine market is not high

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!

I bet if you forced yourself to use Bing, and weren't turned off by its look and feel, you'd find it to be an equal replacement. In fact, I don't have to bet: both companies have detailed metrics that consistently show them within a few percent of each other on precision, recall, etc.

I suspect this in not only true, but a highly likely factor in whatever "replaces" both Google and Bing.

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.

I'm willing to bet that no significant (say, 10%) portion of the Google/Bing userbase will switch to an alternative engine in the next five years, regardless of whatever documents may be released.

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.

As far as search results accuracy (and usefulness) go, Bing vs. Google in the US is a whole different story than Bing vs. Google elsewhere.

I don't think you do. One of Google's faults is that it emphasizes quantity over quality; niche search engines could index a few tens of millions of pages and provide the majority of search functionality that people are looking for.

> You just need millions of computers, millions of petabytes

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.

(Relative) anonymity is already done, avg users couldn't care less about the implementation & less advertisement could turn out to be something like Ello.

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.

> You just need millions of computers

But far less if you don't personalize everything?

I think we violently agree!

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).

Or is it so that we just don't notice the huge improvements Google has made to the search engine, because we are using it every day and the changes are mostly evolutionary and not revolutionary?

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.

That party has sadly been made exclusive to giants. Lots of sites block crawling bots unless they come from the known majors.

When Google Search is superseded Google will have no money and necessarily implode. Their services will be sold or spun off. The entire empire is built on a single point of failure.

You're forgetting about Google's huge display advertising network. Even if no one used Google search anymore, Google would still be making a lot of money through display ads.

Few companies can take 70%+ revenue hit.

Isn't Heroku a subsidiary of SalesForce? Google's equivalent is Google App Engine.

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