5 ms·

The issue is that what was before them didn't depend on training ML algorithms against ridiculous amounts of current and historic data, including per-user data

The issue is that what was before them didn't depend on training ML algorithms against ridiculous amounts of current and historic data, including per-user data which is not accessible to anyone except Google. Google's search engine at this point is nearly impossible to beat. The only way to outcompete it would be to come up with a better system for finding information than full-text search.

superuser2 10y ago
"Because having a dominant position in this market makes the monopoly too good to compete with, no one should be allowed to succeed in this market" seems like a stupid rule.
- vertex-four 10y ago
  How about rewording that to "markets in which there are only 1-2 possible good providers are not, in fact markets at all", and try to figure out what you do with things that are not markets?
  - chimeracoder 10y ago
    > markets in which there are only 1-2 possible good providers are not, in fact markets at all First, it's completely false that there are only 1-2 possible good search providers, given that there are already several good search providers that exist today. You may think Google is better than Bing or DuckDuckGo[0] or Baidu, but there's no arguing that they aren't good. And the barriers to entry for search are about as low as possible. Google can't stop you from writing your own web crawler, and there's no law preventing you from indexing pages yourself. Yes, that requires time and money, but so does every large market opportunity. [0] No, this is not redundant, because DuckDuckGo does use its own crawlers in addition to the search results it gets from Bing.
    - vertex-four 10y ago
      > You may think Google is better than Bing or DuckDuckGo[0] or Baidu, but there's no arguing that they aren't good. That's not the point. As long as it's nearly impossible for another company to become market leader, there isn't competition there in any meaningful sense. Competition would mean that Bing or DuckDuckGo or Baidu could reasonably overtake Google. One of the only reasons Bing has any market share at all is that their search engine comes on IE by default, and Baidu is primarily used in China because China is protectionist. DuckDuckGo is tiny in comparison. EDIT: The issue here is that offloading costs to someone other than the consumer - in this case, advertisers - distorts the market so that there's little/no reason to use the second-best search engine. If people had to pay what their searches cost them, some people might realise they could save money by not going for the top option, and we'd have reasonable competition with people choosing between alternatives on multiple axes. This is what keeps, for example, the zipper market functioning.
      - baddox 10y ago
        > As long as it's nearly impossible for another company to become market leader, there isn't competition there in any meaningful sense. Competition would mean that Bing or DuckDuckGo or Baidu could reasonably overtake Google. That's taking things a bit too far. I'm not aware of any widespread legal or economic definition of "competition" that requires a reasonable chance for multiple firms to become the market leaders. I think that a market can be healthy and competitive even if there is one firm with a solid, say, 75% of the market and no imminent threat to its position as market leader.
      - superuser2 10y ago
        I don't disagree, but it doesn't seem to follow from "the search engine business isn't fair" to "okay, then nobody can operate a search engine" or even worse "you can have a search engine, but if you make it too good, we'll shut you down."
        vertex-four 10y ago
        Sure. Under current law, it's not illegal, and there's nothing any Government can do about it. In an ideal world, though, what do we do with things that are not markets? In lots of cases, we artificially create a market by opening up some of the lower-level infrastructure. In the case of ISPs in the UK, we forced BT to split off the part of their business that owns and sells access to much of their physical infrastructure, allowing anyone to run an ISP. In Google's case, it might be worth forcing them to open some of the data they have to competitors. Of course, given that Google isn't actually tied to any specific country, that's impossible in practice. But what else is reasonable to do with businesses that exist in markets so distorted that they no longer function as markets?
- baddox 10y ago
  It sounds like an informal description of the idea of government regulation of natural monopolies. Such regulation is very popular for things like municipal water and electricity infrastructure, but I haven't seen a good argument for why the Internet search engine market would be a natural monopoly.
  - superuser2 10y ago
    I still have electrical service. Regulating an industry is different from preventing anyone from operating (effectively) in it - that's just the pathological failure case of poorly thought out regulation, not generally the goal.
- Terr_ 10y ago
  Several hundred years ago the same could be said for political power, and now most societies try to limit its concentration as well. But it doesn't mean nobody goes into politics.
eloff 10y ago
Maybe, maybe not. I'm sure nobody saw Larry and Sergey coming either. Just because you don't see how it can be done, doesn't mean it can't be. But either way, that's not causing Google to break any anti-trust laws. They don't have to make it easy for competitors, just not unfairly use their power to stomp on them. One could even make the argument that the reason Google has done such a good job at search over the years is because Larry and Sergey are very afraid of being disrupted by another Larry and Sergey. They have to stay on their toes and they know it.
- vertex-four 10y ago
  > But either way, that's not causing Google to break any anti-trust laws. Sure, I'll agree that they're not breaking any laws.
- bahmboo 10y ago
  I worked in search in late 98. When our team saw the first google search page results we talked for an hour and we all agreed that our company should purchase them for $10 million. We talked some more and decided $100 million would still be cheap and would absolutely seal the deal (who knows?). But not invented here prevailed of course. It's better it went the way it did.
- JackFr 10y ago
  If you consider that the product is not search, but rather eyeballs for advertisers (for which they give away the search for free), Facebook has already disrupted the heck out of them.
  - TulliusCicero 10y ago
    From a consumer perspective, the product is search. If tomorrow, Safeway stopped charging money for groceries and instead had extremely intrusive ads all throughout its stores, their product would still be groceries.
    - steego 10y ago
gregw134 10y ago
>The only way to outcompete it would be to come up with a better system for finding information than full-text search. I think you're spot on. What features could a better system have? One limitation of Google is that you can't group search results...perhaps a better system would cluster results by topic or demographic that views the content, so that you can focus on different perspectives on a search result.
- vertex-four 10y ago
  My politics lead me down the path of thinking about how one's social graph could help them find things, either in an automated fashion, an explicit "hey, help me figure this thing out" fashion, or something inbetween.
- qbrass 10y ago
  Yippy.com (formerly clusty.com) is based on that.
jondiggsit 10y ago
I think it's important to take a longer term look. Google has been a real force to be reckoned with, for what, >15 years?
shrugger 10y ago
All the sweeter it'll be for someone to come along and stomp them. Considering how high the bar is, there's all the incentive in the world to try and be Google better than Google, at least the way I look at things. I mean, the company that comes along and figures out how to do search better than Google is going to take practically the entire internet by storm. Maybe some sort of computational knowledge, data-driven AI will find its way into being, or something. I'm quite excited about it though. I don't think it's impossible at all. I don't think Google really can be split apart either, since Alphabet sort of already did that. Google isn't forcing anybody out of business, and by their own methodology, that would be counterproductive. I mean, putting optic lines down only forces Comcast and the like to step their game up a bit, they are more than welcome to continue doing business, and customers are more than welcome to tell Google to fuck off if they'd prefer their competitors. There are currently other search engines that still exist, like YaCy and DuckDuckGo, ixquick, and others. They wouldn't be around if they didn't think that there's something they can do better than Google.
- mgkimsal 10y ago
  > Considering how high the bar is, there's all the incentive in the world to try and be Google better than Google, at least the way I look at things. Goog has ~20 years of patents behind them, and anyone coming up now will have to figure out a way of being 'better' while not infringing on any patent. And/or, they'll need to have enough deep pockets behind them to weather patent infringement suits.
  - shrugger 10y ago
    Patents have a shorter shelf-life than Google. I think eventually we'll come to the conclusion that software and hardware patents are counter-productive and abolish them.
pkaeding 10y ago
Google took over because PageRank was a revolutionary change over the evolutionary changes that came before (think Lycos -> Altavista). All anyone needs to do is to come up with the next revolutionary thing. Just do that, and you will overturn Google and take over the world. Keep in mind that Google hasn't been a superpower for very long. All of this 'no one can ever disrupt Google' talk is nonsense.
- ap22213 10y ago
  I know all the history books say it was PageRank, but that wasn't the only reason. As I remember things, Google gained adopters as much from its interface being super fast, dead simple, and easily shareable.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    I have to agree.. I remember the first time I saw google search... I was still using yahoo as it was my home page at the time. I found the yahoo version much more useful, that it outweighed google's better results. Over the course of that year, I saw things get so bad with Y!, that you could sign up for a new email address, and before you could change your opt-out settings, it was too late, the address was sold, and you already had spam in your inbox. That's when Yahoo lost me as a user... To this day, I have seen decisions of Google that I may not agree with... and others that make me leery in terms of depending on their products/applications. But nothing so sleazy that they've lost me as a user/customer. I know what their business model is... but afaik, they aren't directly selling my information to third parties. This is a pretty big deal.
  - rdancer 10y ago
    You remember your searches on Altavista, Yahoo, or Hotbot having the same quality as Google???
pessimizer 10y ago
The impression people have of Google's search engine is impossible to beat, similar to the impression people have of the usability and stability of Apple's products. Google search is no better than its only competitor, and in ways (especially the image search) it's regressing. A web grep would be 10x as useful as the modern google search for me. At this point, Google is not the leading search engine due to its quality, any more than the reason Facebook is the leading social network is because someone couldn't build one just as good in a month. Google is the leading search engine because it used to be the leading search engine, and because your phone defaults to it, and because that's what you remember. If Myspace had put a minimal amount of resources into the coding of its platform instead of pocketing the maximal amount of cash, Facebook wouldn't exist. If Altavista had kept a clean page, and maybe showed a bit more personality and interest in algorithms, Google wouldn't exist.

superuser2 10y ago

"Because having a dominant position in this market makes the monopoly too good to compete with, no one should be allowed to succeed in this market" seems like a stupid rule.

vertex-four 10y ago
How about rewording that to "markets in which there are only 1-2 possible good providers are not, in fact markets at all", and try to figure out what you do with things that are not markets?
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  > markets in which there are only 1-2 possible good providers are not, in fact markets at all First, it's completely false that there are only 1-2 possible good search providers, given that there are already several good search providers that exist today. You may think Google is better than Bing or DuckDuckGo[0] or Baidu, but there's no arguing that they aren't good. And the barriers to entry for search are about as low as possible. Google can't stop you from writing your own web crawler, and there's no law preventing you from indexing pages yourself. Yes, that requires time and money, but so does every large market opportunity. [0] No, this is not redundant, because DuckDuckGo does use its own crawlers in addition to the search results it gets from Bing.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    > You may think Google is better than Bing or DuckDuckGo[0] or Baidu, but there's no arguing that they aren't good. That's not the point. As long as it's nearly impossible for another company to become market leader, there isn't competition there in any meaningful sense. Competition would mean that Bing or DuckDuckGo or Baidu could reasonably overtake Google. One of the only reasons Bing has any market share at all is that their search engine comes on IE by default, and Baidu is primarily used in China because China is protectionist. DuckDuckGo is tiny in comparison. EDIT: The issue here is that offloading costs to someone other than the consumer - in this case, advertisers - distorts the market so that there's little/no reason to use the second-best search engine. If people had to pay what their searches cost them, some people might realise they could save money by not going for the top option, and we'd have reasonable competition with people choosing between alternatives on multiple axes. This is what keeps, for example, the zipper market functioning.
    - baddox 10y ago
      > As long as it's nearly impossible for another company to become market leader, there isn't competition there in any meaningful sense. Competition would mean that Bing or DuckDuckGo or Baidu could reasonably overtake Google. That's taking things a bit too far. I'm not aware of any widespread legal or economic definition of "competition" that requires a reasonable chance for multiple firms to become the market leaders. I think that a market can be healthy and competitive even if there is one firm with a solid, say, 75% of the market and no imminent threat to its position as market leader.
    - superuser2 10y ago
      I don't disagree, but it doesn't seem to follow from "the search engine business isn't fair" to "okay, then nobody can operate a search engine" or even worse "you can have a search engine, but if you make it too good, we'll shut you down."
      - vertex-four 10y ago
        Sure. Under current law, it's not illegal, and there's nothing any Government can do about it. In an ideal world, though, what do we do with things that are not markets? In lots of cases, we artificially create a market by opening up some of the lower-level infrastructure. In the case of ISPs in the UK, we forced BT to split off the part of their business that owns and sells access to much of their physical infrastructure, allowing anyone to run an ISP. In Google's case, it might be worth forcing them to open some of the data they have to competitors. Of course, given that Google isn't actually tied to any specific country, that's impossible in practice. But what else is reasonable to do with businesses that exist in markets so distorted that they no longer function as markets?
baddox 10y ago
It sounds like an informal description of the idea of government regulation of natural monopolies. Such regulation is very popular for things like municipal water and electricity infrastructure, but I haven't seen a good argument for why the Internet search engine market would be a natural monopoly.
- superuser2 10y ago
  I still have electrical service. Regulating an industry is different from preventing anyone from operating (effectively) in it - that's just the pathological failure case of poorly thought out regulation, not generally the goal.
Terr_ 10y ago
Several hundred years ago the same could be said for political power, and now most societies try to limit its concentration as well. But it doesn't mean nobody goes into politics.

eloff 10y ago

Maybe, maybe not. I'm sure nobody saw Larry and Sergey coming either. Just because you don't see how it can be done, doesn't mean it can't be. But either way, that's not causing Google to break any anti-trust laws. They don't have to make it easy for competitors, just not unfairly use their power to stomp on them. One could even make the argument that the reason Google has done such a good job at search over the years is because Larry and Sergey are very afraid of being disrupted by another Larry and Sergey. They have to stay on their toes and they know it.

vertex-four 10y ago
> But either way, that's not causing Google to break any anti-trust laws. Sure, I'll agree that they're not breaking any laws.
bahmboo 10y ago
I worked in search in late 98. When our team saw the first google search page results we talked for an hour and we all agreed that our company should purchase them for $10 million. We talked some more and decided $100 million would still be cheap and would absolutely seal the deal (who knows?). But not invented here prevailed of course. It's better it went the way it did.
JackFr 10y ago
If you consider that the product is not search, but rather eyeballs for advertisers (for which they give away the search for free), Facebook has already disrupted the heck out of them.
- TulliusCicero 10y ago
  From a consumer perspective, the product is search. If tomorrow, Safeway stopped charging money for groceries and instead had extremely intrusive ads all throughout its stores, their product would still be groceries.
  - steego 10y ago

gregw134 10y ago

>The only way to outcompete it would be to come up with a better system for finding information than full-text search. I think you're spot on. What features could a better system have? One limitation of Google is that you can't group search results...perhaps a better system would cluster results by topic or demographic that views the content, so that you can focus on different perspectives on a search result.

vertex-four 10y ago
My politics lead me down the path of thinking about how one's social graph could help them find things, either in an automated fashion, an explicit "hey, help me figure this thing out" fashion, or something inbetween.
qbrass 10y ago
Yippy.com (formerly clusty.com) is based on that.

jondiggsit 10y ago

I think it's important to take a longer term look. Google has been a real force to be reckoned with, for what, >15 years?

shrugger 10y ago

All the sweeter it'll be for someone to come along and stomp them. Considering how high the bar is, there's all the incentive in the world to try and be Google better than Google, at least the way I look at things. I mean, the company that comes along and figures out how to do search better than Google is going to take practically the entire internet by storm. Maybe some sort of computational knowledge, data-driven AI will find its way into being, or something. I'm quite excited about it though. I don't think it's impossible at all. I don't think Google really can be split apart either, since Alphabet sort of already did that. Google isn't forcing anybody out of business, and by their own methodology, that would be counterproductive. I mean, putting optic lines down only forces Comcast and the like to step their game up a bit, they are more than welcome to continue doing business, and customers are more than welcome to tell Google to fuck off if they'd prefer their competitors. There are currently other search engines that still exist, like YaCy and DuckDuckGo, ixquick, and others. They wouldn't be around if they didn't think that there's something they can do better than Google.

mgkimsal 10y ago
> Considering how high the bar is, there's all the incentive in the world to try and be Google better than Google, at least the way I look at things. Goog has ~20 years of patents behind them, and anyone coming up now will have to figure out a way of being 'better' while not infringing on any patent. And/or, they'll need to have enough deep pockets behind them to weather patent infringement suits.
- shrugger 10y ago
  Patents have a shorter shelf-life than Google. I think eventually we'll come to the conclusion that software and hardware patents are counter-productive and abolish them.

pkaeding 10y ago

Google took over because PageRank was a revolutionary change over the evolutionary changes that came before (think Lycos -> Altavista). All anyone needs to do is to come up with the next revolutionary thing. Just do that, and you will overturn Google and take over the world. Keep in mind that Google hasn't been a superpower for very long. All of this 'no one can ever disrupt Google' talk is nonsense.

ap22213 10y ago
I know all the history books say it was PageRank, but that wasn't the only reason. As I remember things, Google gained adopters as much from its interface being super fast, dead simple, and easily shareable.
- tracker1 10y ago
  I have to agree.. I remember the first time I saw google search... I was still using yahoo as it was my home page at the time. I found the yahoo version much more useful, that it outweighed google's better results. Over the course of that year, I saw things get so bad with Y!, that you could sign up for a new email address, and before you could change your opt-out settings, it was too late, the address was sold, and you already had spam in your inbox. That's when Yahoo lost me as a user... To this day, I have seen decisions of Google that I may not agree with... and others that make me leery in terms of depending on their products/applications. But nothing so sleazy that they've lost me as a user/customer. I know what their business model is... but afaik, they aren't directly selling my information to third parties. This is a pretty big deal.
- rdancer 10y ago
  You remember your searches on Altavista, Yahoo, or Hotbot having the same quality as Google???

pessimizer 10y ago

The impression people have of Google's search engine is impossible to beat, similar to the impression people have of the usability and stability of Apple's products. Google search is no better than its only competitor, and in ways (especially the image search) it's regressing. A web grep would be 10x as useful as the modern google search for me. At this point, Google is not the leading search engine due to its quality, any more than the reason Facebook is the leading social network is because someone couldn't build one just as good in a month. Google is the leading search engine because it used to be the leading search engine, and because your phone defaults to it, and because that's what you remember. If Myspace had put a minimal amount of resources into the coding of its platform instead of pocketing the maximal amount of cash, Facebook wouldn't exist. If Altavista had kept a clean page, and maybe showed a bit more personality and interest in algorithms, Google wouldn't exist.