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How did Google get so big?
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago"Bing, their competition, has 2% of the market. They have 90%." Who has the other 8%?
- yaks_hairbrush 8y agoOff the top of my head: Yahoo! and DuckDuck Go might be ahead of Bing.
- fvrghl 8y agoAccording to [this](https://netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx?options=%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%22%24and%22%3A%5B%7B%22deviceType%22%3A%7B%22%24in%22%3A%5B%22Desktop%2Flaptop%22%5D%7D%7D%5D%7D%2C%22dateLabel%22%3A%22Trend%22%2C%22attributes%22%3A%22share%22%2C%22group%22%3A%22searchEngine%22%2C%22sort%22%3A%7B%22share%22%3A-1%7D%2C%22id%22%3A%22searchEnginesDesktop%22%2C%22dateInterval%22%3A%22Monthly%22%2C%22dateStart%22%3A%222017-07%22%2C%22dateEnd%22%3A%222018-06%22%2C%22segments%22%3A%22-1000%22%7D https://netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx?o...), Baidu and others.
- amerine 8y agohttp://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share Has some interesting numbers. Claims 3.9% bing, 2% yahoo/Verizon, 2% baidu, .6% yandex, .5% shenma
- solotronics 8y agoBecause of having 90% of the search engine market they have a uniquely comprehensive view into the human mind. I would not be suprised if these huge data aggregation companies lead the race into sentient AI.
- refurb 8y agoI'm not sure their view into the human mind goes much beyond insights gleamed from searches like "cat videos" and "good restaurants".
- zeroxfe 8y agoIf you've got your history enabled (which it is by default -- https://myactivity.google.com https://myactivity.google.com), you'll discover how much insight it actually has into your mind. "Cat videos" and "good restaurants" is not all that people search for.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y agoI feel like by now Google has enough dirt on anyone to personally ruin them. "Well, why did you look up 'Can you die from eating too much hair?' in 2012?"
- Keyframe 8y agoCuil. On a serious note, it seems to me that barrier to entry for search is now exponentially higher than it was when they started. I'm not sure if it's even doable with small resources (in proverbial garage) anymore.
- oscargrouch 8y agoI dont know how much money MS do with Bing, but if i were they, i would open source everything to see a lot of Google competitors pop here and there based on their tech, and later buy the most proeminent contenders. They are locked in to the 2% position, and thats the only alternative i can see to shake things up and have a change to grab more. They could also provide the pure search index for other companies by using their cloud infra, and charge for the cloud use instead where Bing would be only one of the clients of this open search index. It was basically the strategy the open source world with the lead of Linux did to them, and were able to take down their dominant monopolistic position over software.
- fixermark 8y agoProbably not in the sense of the standard Google plays in now being very close to natural-language awareness. You can probably garage up a Webcrawler or a Lycos relatively cheaply, but it's going to feel clunky and complicated relative to the queries Google and Bing can support. I keep mentioning "restaurants near me" in this thread because it's absolutely killer that's possible now.
- wilsonnb2 8y agoSo if Google is a monopoly, what should be done about it? Split it up into separate, competing mini-Googles? Keep fining them more and more money until they stop anti-competitive practices? Split off Maps/Android/Drive/etc into separate companies so that Google can't use their search monopoly to dominate those fields? I'm genuinely not sure what the best way to go about this would be.
- amerine 8y agoIgnoring the cynic in me that tells me that nothing will change, makes me think that the right answer is probably less to do with breaking apart or changing google but more likely the establishment of personal data privacy rights in the US. Once it’s more expensive to collect everything about us, companies like google will have a hard time. I don’t think we’d realistically introduce laws like this until the citizens united decision is overturned. Until then the US political system is owned by the rich.
- paulpauper 8y agoI don't see what the problem with google collecting my information is. You are more likely to have your data leaked by a careless or vengeful webmaster after visiting a small personal website than a massive corporate website like google.com. If you visit any website , your IP can be logged.
- binomialxenon 8y agoIf I visit a "small personal website" such as a blog, they're not going to know much more about me than my IP address, which pages I viewed, and possibly an inbound link ID. One of the big things I find scary about Google is the sheer centralization of data. For a typical user of Google services, Google will have their complete browsing and search history, including "incognito", 24/7/365 location history, hundreds of voice recordings (perhaps some taken without user intent), advertisement tracking data, the complete email inbox and outbox, IM history, Android application history, documents and other files stored on Drive, contacts, possibly call and text history, and thousands of photographs (including ones intended to be private). There's a lot of harm one could do against a person with that kind of information.
- css 8y ago> Steve Kroft: Were any of those acquisitions questioned by the antitrust division of the Justice Department? > Gary Reback: Some were investigated, but only superficially, the government just really isn't enforcing our antitrust laws. And that's what's happened. None of these acquisitions have been challenged Granted, most of Google's 200+ acquisitions would not trigger any scrutiny, but this line is mind boggling.
- paulpauper 8y agoI think only 2 acquisitions have had a impact. the one for adwords/adsense patent and one other. The rest have been to poach talent and other stuff or were duds.
- fipple 8y agoThere's Android, YouTube, 510 Systems, and the constellation of acquisitions made to create Google Apps, at a minimum.
- nouveaux 8y agoWhen YouTube and Android was first launched, Google was not nearly as big as it is today. There were even questions about Google's viability back then given that most of their revenue came from online advertising. It would be interesting to see how many of these acquisitions are still around. I think survivorship bias is strong here.
- ghein 8y agoThere's just no way Android's acquisition would or could have been stopped. Google bought it in July 05, one year after IPO. The smartest phones available were the Blackberry 7750, Motorola Q, and Palm Treo. Google had $3B in revenue in 04 and was on its way to $6B in revenue in 05 when it spent $50MM on Android. There was no way this acquisition would have been blocked without clairvoyance. Even then "stop this $3B company from buying a startup because it's going to destroy a $35B company in 9 years" is not exactly a compelling argument. The argument is even more nonsensical than that against Facebook's Instagram acquisition, which is saying something. People argue that DOJ or FTC should have stopped a company that hadn't yet IPOd from buying a company that had raised $7MM (and would raise $50MM a few days before the facebook acquisition). Sure they're obviously huge in retrospect but they really weren't at the time. Interesting and hot companies die all the time: YikYak and Secret looked like they were going to take over the world at one point.
- wallflower 8y agoIf I could give a six word response for the technical side: "Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat and team". To paraphrase some Cal/UC Berkeley professor that I cannot remember, he said that the problem with scaling is that when you go up a magnitude or more, you may need a qualitatively different solution for the same problem. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and their team have time and time again managed to design and build state-of-the-art, qualitatively different solutions (MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner). And now their team's attention is on AI... 2016 (might be more recent ones) update on AI at Google http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/3/16/jeff-dean-on-large-scale-deep-learning-at-google.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/3/16/jeff-dean-on-large... Video of full lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSaZGT4-6EY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSaZGT4-6EY EDIT: Sanjay Ghemawat and Jeff are like the dynamic duo of large scale systems engineering.
- snikeris 8y agoAlso, the Google SRE book makes the point that they couldn't have achieved their scale w/out approaching ops from an engineering perspective. Linearly hiring ops people as services scale would have been too expensive.
- 0xEFF 8y agoApproaching operations from a software development perspective wasn’t unique to Google. Also ops is engineering and has been since before Google existed.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoOps is probably more reasonably called engineering than most so-called “software engineering”.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- y4mi 8y ago
- tinbad 8y ago"Some were investigated, but only superficially, the government just really isn't enforcing our antitrust laws. And that's what's happened. None of these acquisitions have been challenged." Behemoths like Google emerge every time new inventions lead to the creation of new markets followed by mass adoption during a relatively short timeframe, when regulations don't exist yet. It has happened in history time and time again (Standard Oil, Detroit Big 3, etc.) It's not entirely preventable, but it requires awareness foremost and then the (political/societal) will to deal with it.
- izzydata 8y agoThat seems to be implying it is inherently a bad thing. Is trying to stop innovative companies also a hindrance to technological progress?
- sincerely 8y agoI mean, you're implying that "technological progress" is inherently a good thing.
- TomMarius 8y agoIsn't it? Can you support your statement? Edit: am I really being downvoted for asking for evidence that technological progress (the driving force that made all people on Earth extraordinaly more rich) is bad? What is wrong with you, people?
- frgtpsswrdlame 8y agoSome technological progress is good and some of it bad.
- TomMarius 8y agoNo technological progress is bad. Sometimes this progress is used badly, but knowledge is definitely not bad.
- ur-whale 8y agoWhy is Google being big a problem? Who are they hurting by being big at this time? [edit]: to elaborate, I was under the impression that the whole point of anti-monopoly regulations was to protect consumers from monopolistic predatory practices, not to prevent monopolies from actually existing per se. Hence my question: is there anyone actually being hurt by the currently limited choice of search engines or phone operating systems? Also, what prevents someone from trying to build a much better one? If Google starts to misbehave as a monopoly, fine, let the USG (themselves a monopoly, btw) do their thing go after them. But as long as they provide a superior service for free (yeah, I know, you're the product, blah, blah), I'm not sure I'm seeing the problem.
- adrianN 8y agoTheir competitors?
- ebikelaw 8y agoThis is irrelevant to American anti-trust law. Europe will move to protect competitors, but America will only act to protect the consumer.
- stuckinarut 8y agoAmerica only moves to protect the money.
- ionised 8y agoWhen does the US act in the interest of the consumer?
- aglavine 8y agoIt is already happening that some (old) sites or blogs aren't popping up in their search results.
- hellllllllooo 8y agoOne example: By preventing phone manufacturers who use Android and Google services from also selling phones with other operating systems they are killing the opportunity for another phone OS from gaining traction. We could have missed out on the opportunity for something better than Android being developed and we'll never know. It's called dumping; flooding the market with something free to kill competition and make sure Google is in the majority of hands in Europe.
- microdrum 8y agoGoogle got so big by causing its server-side adtech businesses to collude in such a way as to restrain trade and forestall competitors.
- tomcam 8y agoIt's their own business. That's like saying your sales team is colluding with your engineering team. Also, no one forces anyone to use Google. And am I to assume that you do everything you can to help your competitors?* * I say these things as someone who has many problems with Google--and as someone who does in fact assist his competitors :O
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fixermark 8y agoCollude with whom?
- microdrum 8y agoBy 'collude' I just meant worked together. The operative legal word is 'restraint of trade.'
- hkmurakami 8y agoThey attracted (some of) the best talent.
- jorblumesea 8y agoThe government allowed it, just like any monopoly or pseudo-monopoly. Anti-trust laws apparently are not in vogue.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jhabdas 8y agoWho cares
- TimJYoung 8y agoI've been trying to reconcile the libertarian perspective on this topic with my more-liberal leanings, and I've got to say that I'm perplexed. Can any libertarians here share their thoughts on the role of government in producing tech monopolies ? Is there any role at all ? IOW, would we see the same problem if there were still private AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy networks instead of just the one Internet ? And yes, I'm putting aside the question of whether the absence of the public internet would be good or bad for society. I can't see how you wouldn't just end up with one company buying out the others and becoming a monopoly, anyway, but I'm open to ideas as to how that would be mitigated by competition. There's also the issue of companies with deep pockets, or investors with deep pockets, just doing "free" until everyone else is gone, which, for some reason, seems to be in vogue now. But, I suspect that private networks would be very careful about letting any one participant acquire too much network power in one area.
- ghein 8y agoDo you believe in free speech? Do you believe in free choice? Do you think that individuals in a city/state/country should be able to talk to others in a different city/state/country? Is the Great Firewall of China a good thing or deeply evil? Anyone is free (outside China and a few other places) can install their favorite version of Linux, use Opera/Firefox/whatever, use protonmail, search on duckduckgo. Why should the government FORCE people to use a different source of information than the one that they prefer? Advertisers are leaving local monopolists/oligopolists (local TV stations, newspapers, cable, yellow pages) and choosing a different, cheaper, more effective, and more flexible option to reach customers. Producers and consumers were very badly served by these old incumbents, why should the government step in to protect those old and malevolent businesses? It's the same thing as Uber vs Taxis. Taxis are racist, expensive, government enforced oligopolies that exploit the drivers, have bad service, don't want to take credit cards (don't even mention Apple/Google/Samsung/AliPay), and aren't available when you really need one. Do you prefer app enabled car service or the old style Taxi, like the ones using terrorism in Barcelona to protect their monopoly? We have an information commons with infinite choice and network effects. Same as with language. If you're comfortable using criminal law to require individuals to speak a certain language in private, then sure government should control what companies and products people can choose to engage with. The New York Times, Cox, Bertelsmann, and Reed-Elsevier would love that, along with Xi Jinping. Just realize that you are consciously strengthening old corrupt oligopolies and annihilating free speech and freedom of choice.
- lern_too_spel 8y agoStoppelman's Yelp is a bad example. I don't want to visit a page that pesters me to install their app instead of showing me the reviews I came to read. If Yelp's ranking has been lowered, good riddance.
- nialv7 8y agoI don't really want to defend behaviors similar to Yelp's. Because it's indeed annoying. But let's play devil's advocate here. Part of the reason why Google can have a clear and good user experience, is because they can afford it. On the other hand, for smaller company, not meeting user count goals could mean not getting funding and die. This will force them to nag the users to get them to install the app, even if doing that could annoy some of the users. And this is pretty much a classic example of why monopoly is bad.
- tylerhou 8y agoMonopolies are bad because more capital means that you can create a better product? If beating Google was as simple as needing more money to build a better product, then why couldn't startups just pitch that to investors and raise more funding? Probably because beating Google is harder than throwing money at a random startup's app. At that rate you might as well outlaw venture capital funds because they disadvantage people trying to bootstrap their own startup. There are certainly many reasons why monopolies are bad, but having capital is not one of them.
- pm90 8y ago> I don't really want to defend behaviors similar to Yelp's. Because it's indeed annoying. But let's play devil's advocate here. > Part of the reason why Google can have a clear and good user experience, is because they can afford it. On the other hand, for smaller company, not meeting user count goals could mean not getting funding and die. This will force them to nag the users to get them to install the app, even if doing that could annoy some of the users. They don't have to do that. They can use the same tracking resources that other online companies use to show increased usage. I'm not saying that I have a better solution. But their current solution is sub-optimal. Their website is crap, looks outdated. What are they even working on?
- observering 8y agoDue to the salacious appetite of millions of people for gossip and related info, and for candid camera-style videos on youtube. This isn't rocket science but a keen understand of human action and reaction.
- skadamat 8y agoBen Thompson from Stratechery has some good thoughts on what makes Google tricky to regulate: - Google: https://stratechery.com/company/google/ https://stratechery.com/company/google/ - Regulation: https://stratechery.com/topic/regulation/ https://stratechery.com/topic/regulation/ His vastly oversimplified point is that most anti-trust regulation focuses on supply. Owning all of the printing equipment and distribution networks in newspapers gave you leverage. Google is instead a demand-side aggregator (they don't own the content on their product, but own the choke point, which is the consumer facing user experience of having a single, simple, easy to use search engine).
- mirimir 8y agoOK, so I watched it all happen. Back in the day, I loved AltaVista. And then I dicovered Google. And found that it consistently gave me better results. At least at first, Google grew because its stuff worked better than the competition's. Still, it is pretty clear that Google now excludes competitors through discrimination in search results. But it's hard to prove, because search algorithms are so bloody complicated. And because SEO warfare is so intense. Google can just claim that any discrimination is just collateral damage. > Google is the gatekeeper for-- for the World Wide Web, for the internet as we know it.' Sad but true. So other than DDG, are there any good privacy-friendly search services? Startpage seems to just repackage Google. Also, are there any search services that are less censored than Google? > [Google] denied it was a monopoly in search or search advertising, citing many competitors including Amazon and Facebook. That's a joke, right?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ChristianBundy 8y agoI use (and love) Searx. It has two features: - many search engines are used at once - searches are proxied through a third-party provider For example, if you type "ipv6" into searx.me you'll get results from Google, Bing, Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and dozens of other sites. It's not perfect privacy, but I generally get better results than using only one search engine and there's a small boost to privacy. The only thing you have to look out for is the "images" tab. It's usually fine, but unless you turn on the adult content filter there's almost always and least one pornographic image somewhere in the results. I'm not sure which search engine is responsible for those results, but I should probably just disable that search engine for my queries.
- mirimir 8y agoCool! And that reminds me. I had forgotten MetaCrawler. As I recall, that was my favorite between AltaVista and Google.
- decebalus1 8y ago
- sk_hazratali 8y agoI think that Google's dominance has almost nothing to do with technology and almost everything to do with customer lock-in. For me, duckduckgo.com is as good as Google but I still use Google because it's the default search engine for Chrome's address bar - And that's where I do all my searches from these days. If Duckduckgo made their own browser which was of the same quality as Chrome then I would definitely consider using it and switching to Duckduckgo for search as well. https://www.sherekhudahazratali.com/2018/07/ek-juma-se-dusre-jumma-tak-ke-gunah-maaf.html https://www.sherekhudahazratali.com/2018/07/ek-juma-se-dusre...
- nostrademons 8y agoOn the market end - Google got huge because they inserted themselves as a critical part of peoples' usage of a resource that got even huger. As late as 2013, my coworkers and I would mock the Wall Street analysts who covered Google because (you could tell from their questions on the earnings call) they assumed that the Internet was no longer growing. So all the focus was on CPCs and Google's ability to monetize, when the number of queries had quadrupled over the previous 4 years. You can hold monetization absolutely constant and if usage is growing 400%, your revenue will grow 400%. Just two days ago Google's earnings came out and people were wondering how they still managed 20% YoY growth. Some of that undoubtedly came from Cloud & other emerging businesses, but I'd bet that the Internet is still growing. CoinBase is trying to pull off the same thing with crypto - they're a critical onramp for people wanting to get started with a new, fast-growing technology. Regulators & the press always fight the last war, though - they're focused on Google and Facebook rather than on the next wave of giant monopolies. People always underestimate the potential size of consumer markets, because their perspective is human-centric. Before they & their friends adopt a new technology, it's a toy or a fad and will never catch on. Afterwards, everybody they know already uses it, so of course it's old news. Few people realize that "everybody they know" is less than one millionth of all of humanity, or that if you're in a developed country you will get innovations 10-20 years before the rest of the world does, or that if you're in a tech metropolis in a developed country you will get them ~5 years before the rest of the country. "The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed."
- btilly 8y agoThis was one of the points made in http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf about why people find Metcalfe's law compelling despite the numerical evidence against it. Our personal perception of the size of a network is directly proportional to the value that we get from it. Extrapolating from that we estimate a square law. However we are neither aware of nor directly value the long tail of people distant from us in the network. From multiple ways of estimating, the value of that tail works out to be O(log(N)), leading to a O(N log(N)) valuation for a network.
- 8y ago
- ProfBernardo 8y agoIf you don't like Google, then don't use Google's products.
- v7p1Qbt1im 8y agoHijacking this thread to share a very unpopular opinion: It requires an entity with the amount of resources, tech, talent and data they have to develop an AGI and eventually ASI. I personally would prefer them to develop it, than say Amazon. Or worse Tencent or Baidu i.e an authoritarian government. This has been Larry and Sergey's motivation from the get go. This is obviously naive but I believe the ad machine and the power and money that came of it is only a means to an end. A real AI has always been the target. Yes an open source consortium like OpenAI would be better but that is honestly not realistic. Who knows, it might go the way of Kubernetes and TensorFlow. Open source the framework and offer the best service to run it on. Unless there is a massive war on the horizon this development is inevitable. There are downsides, as with all powerful tech. But in 300 years humanity might live in post-scarcity society and finally be done with the fear and hate for each other that comes with inequality. Sorry for the emotional rant. This is blind optimism. I prefer to life like this. But we might of course also end up in a Blade Runner/Resident Evil/1984 type situation. Generally looking forward to your opinions.
- ransom1538 8y agoAds. Previously to buy ads you had to call someone, get dinner with some weird guy, make tons of calls, get crappy click rates, trust the other companies 'reporting', pay for impression ads (wtf). It was a mess. You also had to do this with 23 DIFFERENT companies, which were all different. Google wasn't the first, but they did follow through and make a great way to advertise with self serve. Selling ads is awesome. No overhead, no rotting inventory, no operations mess. It scales infinitely naturally. It is clean easy cash. Everything else they do is a huge side show to distract people.
- samstave 8y agoI recall one of the questions in my interview at google years ago: "Do you know what kind of company Google is?" "Sure, everyone thinks you're a tech company or a search company or whatever - but Google is an advertising company, and thats it. All the other stuff distracts from the fact that youre just the most profitable ad company."
- fjsolwmv 8y agoDid you get hired?
- samstave 8y agoI went through a three month-long interview process with them... then they said I did very well and they would be extending me an offer. THen next day, they called and said I would not receive an offer and would not give a reason. THey invited me to interview for that position multiple times over the next couple of years and I finally had to ask them to stop recruiting me for that position... they stopped. :-(
- gretch 8y agoMaybe there were additional reasons, but tbh the answer you gave was very bad and probably would have been grounds enough to not hire you. >"Sure, everyone thinks you're a tech company or a search company or whatever - but Google is an advertising company, and thats it. All the other stuff distracts from the fact that youre just the most profitable ad company." When given the opportunity to demonstrate nuanced thinking, you've boiled down a really complex and large thing into a simple platitude. "Google is an advertising company, and thats it". Really, is that the full story? You truly think that? I mean if that were the case and you wanted to be genuine you could at least dive to another level and explain why or how. And for reference it probably would have been okay to say 'No, I'm not sure what kind of company Google is. I know that you guys do X and Y, but I know there's some other stuff too, but I don't have any insight because I don't work here'
- ttul 8y agoIMHO Google should be regulated as a utility. Search is obviously as key to modern life as is electricity, water, highways, etc. Why do we leave this critical infrastructure completely under the control of one corporation, which is itself under the control of just a tiny handful of billionaires? Now, I mostly agree with Sergey and Larry’s investments, and I love the long term approach and big picture view they take. But Google is still too powerful. The democratic will of the people is being disregarded here, and that is simply wrong.
- samschooler 8y agoI agree that Google has a large control over the search market (and others), but it does not need to be regulated as a utility. Largely because you can just... switch. Really easily in fact. I've been using DuckDuckGo.com as my primary search engine for the past 3 years and have never looked back. The results are most of the time better (sometimes worse, but so it goes).
- nostrademons 8y agoHard to argue for this when ISPs themselves are not regulated as a utility, even though you must have an ISP to use Google, in many municipalities they are just as much of a monopoly as Google, and they have engaged in even more anticompetitive tactics than Google. If you want to regulate the whole Internet infrastructure - from device to ISP to web browser to search engine - as a utility you might have more of a case, but that gets a lot more complicated.
- ghein 8y agoWhat people? Google is a Delaware Corporation with substantial operations in California. Who runs it in your ideal world? The people of Delaware? US federal government? If you want a different Google for each jurisdiction, how small down do you give the control? A Google for France? A Google for each department? A Google for each Commune? How does this approach fit with WTO and EU rules, not to mention the US Constitution? What do you do if Google reacts against your move? Moves its employees/servers/incorporation? Do you run a Great Firewall of X to stop people in your area from using Google?
- 8y ago
- Yhippa 8y agoDoes anybody else here remember the late 90's when you had to try multiple search engines to get something close to what you were looking for? Google has largely solved that problem and are (IMO rightfully) rewarded for it. I really like Google and their products. They simply make my life easier. I will admit it would be interesting to see what would happen if search was split up: would that tech improve at a faster pace than it does now? Or would we end up back in the late 90's?
- grosjona 8y ago>> Jeremy Stoppelman: They will make you disappear. They will bury you. I love hearing rich people whine about the monopolies held by even richer people. So much hypocrisy. Without the Silicon Valley tech oligopoly, Jeremy Stoppelman would probably never have been able to raise so much money for Yelp in the first place.
- HillaryBriss 8y ago>Google is worth more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars right now and you don't get that big by accident. why did CBS News bother to say this? pretty much no one has ever believed a company gets that big by accident.
- pkamb 8y ago"google" became a verb
- pimmen 8y agoA good investor gave me this little nugget; You can tell how mature a company is by how much they talk about their competitors. Startups and players who are really struggling never talk about competitors and try to steer the subject away from them, lest the customer finds another deal. Monopolies often talk about their competitors, because it hides that they're monopolies. Google likes to say that they compete with Microsoft with their Docs suite, with Apple in mobile OS and with Tom Tom on the navigation market. If they were anything like your local startup the only thing they would say is "we're a digital advertising company focusing on search ads, we have 90% of the market and are among the oldest still in the industry".
- cromwellian 8y agoThere's an implicit assumption in most of these discussions that beating Google Search is a matter of money and scale, and while there are some evidence for that (e.g. unreasonable effectiveness of having lots of data), it is not a certain conclusion, it is only a conclusion if your goal is to beat Google by making an incrementally better classical search engine. It is indeed hard to beat something by offering something "about the same", when the cost for the consumer is already effectively zero from a monetary perspective. But this doesn't rule out someone coming up with a disruptive, radically better search. Take this as a thought experiment, somewhere out there, is another Albert Einstein, working on his magnum opus, an AGI based search engine. He has a mind blowing advancement in AGI, like GR was in Physics, that will completely eclipse classical search AND deep learning approaches AND he knows it. Demos shown to investors are mind blowing, and he quickly raises enough funds to launch a competitor. There is whisper and talk all around the valley. Google tries to make an acquisition, but he and his investors turn it down, because they can see how valuable the tech is. By the time Google realizes their offer should have been much bigger, it's getting traction and taking off like a rocket ship. Now Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Amazon, Microsoft, are all looking to acquire it. Yes, there are arguments that being the "default" is hard to dislodge. But Chrome dislodged IE. Google Search dislodged AltaVista and Yahoo. iOS and Android dislodged Windows. But better technology if it is better enough and marketed correctly can convince consumers to switch. Remember, Chrome was fighting a common refrain that "browsers are done, and who needs another browser?" Efforts like the Chrome Comic Book (https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html) and eye-catching early Chrome ads (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0) was able to overcome consumer inertia of having IE pre-installed. When the iPod, and a rumored Apple Phone was proposed (but before it was first demoed), we had the same naysayers claiming that a new upstart in a space they had never been in before couldn't possibly defeat the established players like Blackberry or Nokia. But if you create a sufficiently, radically better product, you in effect, create an entirely new platform or market, NOT simply a competitor within the existing market. This is what any hypothetical competitor to Google Search has to do. They need to change what Search means. It can't mean SERP and PageRank, there are marginal gains to be had. It has to be a radically different kind of search experience.
- gnusci 8y agoI believe they are selling the metadata which is a very hard to define information about all machine processed information of every human that use their systems. Now-a-days it is a mine for several large scale social objectives, and so very precious. The way and form they sell it may differ depending of the end-front application. Nevertheless, interesting how they did figure out that people information is a mine of money. So we are their product :)
- wdr1 8y ago> Last year, Google conducted 90% of the world's internet searches. Does that mean all of China is <10%? That seems surprising.
- Goosey 8y agoDisclaimer, I work for Yelp (a backend infra team) TFA includes, although not clearly enough, at least one example of exactly this behavior (Google being big hurting consumer's) in their scheme to squash Yelp by inserting their own local results (with big ui) on the front page. There have been multiple studies showing the content on Yelp is far more evolved than Google's content (in # of ratings, # of reviews, average quality of reviews, # and quality of photos). This is even with Google leveraging it's dominant market share in the mobile space to proactively push users to rate business simply by an AI connecting the dots on location. These nag alerts are not even something that can be disabled without also disabling all of Android location-tracking! Which is very irritating for me as I find many such features (for example, location history has saved my rear several times when I lost items.) This isn't a fanboy battle like Sega vs Nintendo. I'm not anti-google, hell I'm totally bought into their ecosystem (have had an Android since the g1, use a Google home, Google WiFi, Android TV, use all Google's office suit, Gmail, etc). But even if you personally dislike Yelp (that's fine), it is simply a fact that Yelp has superior content in the local niche. Google is intentionally burying a competitor which has a verifiably huge quality advantage in the local review niche rather than improving their product/content enough for it to compete naturally. This IS anti-competitive behavior which IS hurting consumer's. It even has downstream impacts on consumer's experiences within Yelp itself! Another comment complains about Yelp bugging you to install the mobile client rather than just show the result - this is absolutely a response to the existential threat of Google continuing to use their search monopoly to prevent fair competition. For better or worse it's the best shelter from the Google: at least until they start doing the same thing with Play Store... This isn't even only a Yelp problem. Why does Expedia, for example, push users so hard to get the mobile app? Because Google has inserted their own travel booking widgets at the top of the results as well! Why is venmo killing off the website version in favor of mobile only? Maybe it has something to do with what you see at the top of a Google search for 'send money'. The thing that is SO important to stress is that even if you are a Google fan (as I am), or perhaps ESPECIALLY if you are, anti-competitive behavior like this only results in hurting consumers by killing off competition. Turns out competition results in improvements for consumers. And it's actually a big deal.
- YZF 8y agoLet's not underestimate timing and luck. Google was there at the right time during the history of the Internet with the right technical solution and the right people. There are lots of very smart people who can do great things but if they're not at the right intersection of time, technology and business, and if they don't get lucky, nothing happens. The company has been steered reasonably well but without that initial trajectory they wouldn't be where they are today.
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- sseth 8y agoLet's ask a question : How did Google defeat another giant - Microsoft - in 2 major markets where Microsoft had a head start and deep pockets? How did Chrome beat IE, and how did Android beat the several generations of Windows Mobile and Windows Phone? Clearly Microsoft had no dearth of talent or money. So how come it could not keep Google at bay? In my view the answer lies in the fact that Google's engineering led culture meant they could follow a release cadence that is unheard of for such large systems. Chrome was releasing every 6 weeks, and Android every 3-6 months or so in the early days. Meanwhile we had 1.5 - 2 years between each Windows Phone release. When Chrome started, IE had nearly 70% market share and the benefit of being deployed on nearly every computer on earth. Microsoft was in the mobile phone market from 2000. In 2011, IDC predicted Windows Phone would overtake the iPhone. Both Google and Microsoft were taken aback by the iPhone, but Google was able to turn on a dime, Microsoft was not. Google achievement has been to stay agile even as it grew big - in my view this remains the secret to their success.
- starchild_3001 8y agoGood points. I still find Google pretty agile and aggressive.
- sseth 8y agoIt is also good to ask why Google could not succeed at social media. Perhaps network effects and an equally agile competitor were a big enough moat for Facebook to fight off Google successfully. To say that abuse of monopoly is what has enabled Google to grow big is too simplistic. They have succeeded brilliantly in areas where they had equally big competitors, and failed spectacularly as well in others - social media being the most prominent. But more tech focused readers will recall Wave, or NaCl. Then are cases where we have a stalemate for example G Suite, where Microsoft still holds it own with Office. Google Cloud is a strange case where one can argue that Google has failed to leverage many of its own innovations in containers and other data center infrastructure to achieve a dominant position. I would argue this is a case where Google should have been a market leader and much like Microsoft in the 2000's has frittered away a natural advantage.
- 8y ago
- 84axa 8y agoCIA
- ElectronShak 8y ago>And so if I'm an advertiser and I say, "I want 24-year-old women in Nashville, Tennessee who drive trucks and drink bourbon," I can do that on Google I think facebook would do a better job for the advertiser in this case.
- cncrnd 8y agoHere is my 2 cents. On HN people are always complaining that google services are unreliable because google shuts down a lot of stuff. Well I think that's because they try a lot of things too. It's really amazing how they have managed to excel in lots of places. Maps, Office/GSuite, Email, Cloud, Chrome, Android, Waymo, Search...all of these are companies on their own. Google manages to innovate by trying a lot of things and shutting down what doesn't work. It's like a startup incubator, and perhaps it motivates employees with the potential for big bonuses upon success just like a startup does.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pnloyd 8y agoGoogle not so much big as there are dominant and overvalued.