4 ms·
Google's original infrastructure was their main advantage, this is quickly being eroded. Ten years down the rode its not unreasonable to think that the costs to
by thwy12321 8y ago
Google's original infrastructure was their main advantage, this is quickly being eroded. Ten years down the rode its not unreasonable to think that the costs to join the search business as a new competitor have gone way down.
- philipkglass 8y agoI upvoted you because that is a good point about computing infrastructure. But I also feel that diminished costs from the now-widespread use of cheap commodity hardware with horizontal scaling may be countered by the changing nature of the web. A lot of news and shopping sites try to exclude crawling by bots with sometimes-exceptions for the agents of large, established businesses like Google. Spammers have been engaged in a furious arms race with existing search engines, and if your new search engine doesn't invest a lot of effort against sophisticated spammers, the user experience will be poor. I suspect that my increasing dissatisfaction with Google as a search engine may be a byproduct of the arms race against spammers; maybe it doesn't easily find good niche content the way I remember it doing 10 years ago because the signals of 10 years ago are too easily gamed. If that's true, then no new search engine is ever going to be as impressive as Google was when it first arrived. Similar to how no new antibiotic is going to be as impressive as penicillin originally was. The pathogenic elements have evolved too much resistance to permit the same "miracle product" experience again.