3 ms·

Come to think of it, I don't understand how Google keeps its near-monopoly on search. It has the users because it can afford to invest more in search quality, b

Come to think of it, I don't understand how Google keeps its near-monopoly on search. It has the users because it can afford to invest more in search quality, because of a near-monopoly on search ads; and advertisers buy those ad clicks because Google has the users. So this loop might seem hard to break. But what stops an aggregator from offering to put your ad on multiple search engines, so you pay for clicks from Google and whatever other search engines people are using? There may not currently be a lot of extra clicks available that way, but it's more than nothing, and you'd benefit from whatever improved competition might come up, and incidentally give it more resources to improve with and to cut Google's margins to your further benefit. AFAIK this isn't happening, but why? Is there another moat I don't know of?

bemmu 8y ago
The aggregator might lack some targeting options of the native platform, the UI could be different, it would be a new point of failure and I would need to trust my money with the intermediary.
jldugger 8y ago
> AFAIK this isn't happening, but why? Is there another moat I don't know of? Well, Adsense / Analytics is another. Google can track you across the internet, and offer that information to search query bidders. If you don't want to bother spending money advertising to people who read HN, it's achievable. Less so for say, Bing or Yahoo. Being able to target better than other platforms alters your willingness to pay to advertise there vs elsewhere. I suspect they also have a better grasp of the value of traffic acquisition. They pay a lot of web related tech firms to use their search engine over competitor's. We know the only time they lost a bid for Firefox's search placement was when a former Google executive was working for a competitor. It's not clear whether Marissa brought Yahoo some better insight into the value, or if she just needed to accept a higher risk of overpaying for traffic.
- abecedarius 8y ago
  Good points. So, overall, I guess an effective competitor is quite possible (given enough tons of capital and patience), but that capital isn't on offer because it would only yield a "competitive" profit, not a monopoly profit, and these days competition is for losers. (To exaggerate some. And I'm really ignorant about this. Thanks.)

bemmu 8y ago

The aggregator might lack some targeting options of the native platform, the UI could be different, it would be a new point of failure and I would need to trust my money with the intermediary.

jldugger 8y ago

> AFAIK this isn't happening, but why? Is there another moat I don't know of? Well, Adsense / Analytics is another. Google can track you across the internet, and offer that information to search query bidders. If you don't want to bother spending money advertising to people who read HN, it's achievable. Less so for say, Bing or Yahoo. Being able to target better than other platforms alters your willingness to pay to advertise there vs elsewhere. I suspect they also have a better grasp of the value of traffic acquisition. They pay a lot of web related tech firms to use their search engine over competitor's. We know the only time they lost a bid for Firefox's search placement was when a former Google executive was working for a competitor. It's not clear whether Marissa brought Yahoo some better insight into the value, or if she just needed to accept a higher risk of overpaying for traffic.

abecedarius 8y ago
Good points. So, overall, I guess an effective competitor is quite possible (given enough tons of capital and patience), but that capital isn't on offer because it would only yield a "competitive" profit, not a monopoly profit, and these days competition is for losers. (To exaggerate some. And I'm really ignorant about this. Thanks.)