4 ms·

Microsoft has invested billions into Internet Explorer and it is nearly impossible for a small startup to invade the browser business. IE

by snaky 8y ago

Microsoft has invested billions into Internet Explorer and it is nearly impossible for a small startup to invade the browser business. IE Firefox 2009 Q4 66.42% 21.13% 2003 Q2 94.43% 2.22% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#TheCounter.com_%282000_to_2009%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Th...

saurik 8y ago
Remember that we, the people, sued Microsoft and forced a settlement -- a scenario which also led to the CEO of Microsoft stepping down.
olliej 8y ago
Firefox and Mozilla were not a small startup - they had (comparatively) boatloads of money (now they have even more) and a huge number of free developers :)
- snaky 8y ago
  > and a huge number of free developers Why do you think the search engine is unable to build a model leveraging a huge number of free developers?
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    Well, for one thing, search is a tightly-coupled problem that revolves around a big and expensive data store. That's quite different from a browser. Blekko did get volunteers to help edit our slashtags, and duckduckgo used to have volunteers help out with their duckduckhacks.
    - snaky 8y ago
      I think the main point is to not try to copy Google. DDG is power users' search engine for now, and that's OK. You may leverage power users help in tags, and other features, that would minimize the overhead in hardware platform. To make an extreme example - imagine how many data about the particular user would you need to have and how many resources would you need to spend on AI models training to give the same result by guessing and AI that user would get from SQLite, having formulated simple request in SQL.
      - greglindahl 8y ago
        Thanks the the advice! I guess you don't remember the search engine blekko. I was the CTO.
  - toast0 8y ago
    A web search engine requires a huge amount of computing resources to crawl the web, make sense of the connections, and to serve the resulting indexes. You'll need some people too probably.
    - snaky 8y ago
      Yes, it's not so easy. But using Google web search only would not be particularly harmful, especially through the Tor.
      - toast0 8y ago
        I'm really confused here. Earlier you were asking why open source couldn't build web search, like it built Firefox (sort of); and now you're saying just use Google? Open source can build a page that just uses Google, but that doesn't get you off a dependence on Google.
scarface74 8y ago
The popular narrative was that Microsoft wasn’t investing too much of anything in IE after around IE6 when they didn’t have any competition and didn’t start reinvesting until later. But there is a huge difference now with search. Google owns one of the mobile platforms and pays the other dominant platform over $2 billion a year to be the primary search engine.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
That did rather depend on Netscape creating and open sourcing the first versions of Phoenix in 2002.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

by snaky 8y ago

saurik 8y ago

Remember that we, the people, sued Microsoft and forced a settlement -- a scenario which also led to the CEO of Microsoft stepping down.

olliej 8y ago

Firefox and Mozilla were not a small startup - they had (comparatively) boatloads of money (now they have even more) and a huge number of free developers :)

snaky 8y ago
> and a huge number of free developers Why do you think the search engine is unable to build a model leveraging a huge number of free developers?
- greglindahl 8y ago
  Well, for one thing, search is a tightly-coupled problem that revolves around a big and expensive data store. That's quite different from a browser. Blekko did get volunteers to help edit our slashtags, and duckduckgo used to have volunteers help out with their duckduckhacks.
  - snaky 8y ago
    I think the main point is to not try to copy Google. DDG is power users' search engine for now, and that's OK. You may leverage power users help in tags, and other features, that would minimize the overhead in hardware platform. To make an extreme example - imagine how many data about the particular user would you need to have and how many resources would you need to spend on AI models training to give the same result by guessing and AI that user would get from SQLite, having formulated simple request in SQL.
    - greglindahl 8y ago
      Thanks the the advice! I guess you don't remember the search engine blekko. I was the CTO.
- toast0 8y ago
  A web search engine requires a huge amount of computing resources to crawl the web, make sense of the connections, and to serve the resulting indexes. You'll need some people too probably.
  - snaky 8y ago
    Yes, it's not so easy. But using Google web search only would not be particularly harmful, especially through the Tor.
    - toast0 8y ago
      I'm really confused here. Earlier you were asking why open source couldn't build web search, like it built Firefox (sort of); and now you're saying just use Google? Open source can build a page that just uses Google, but that doesn't get you off a dependence on Google.

scarface74 8y ago

The popular narrative was that Microsoft wasn’t investing too much of anything in IE after around IE6 when they didn’t have any competition and didn’t start reinvesting until later. But there is a huge difference now with search. Google owns one of the mobile platforms and pays the other dominant platform over $2 billion a year to be the primary search engine.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

That did rather depend on Netscape creating and open sourcing the first versions of Phoenix in 2002.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]