> Imagine if someone comes along and takes away Google's search business? At this point, their results are such a trash fire it can't be that hard. And if that

> Imagine if someone comes along and takes away Google's search business? At this point, their results are such a trash fire it can't be that hard. And if that happens, they've got nothing, because they've been lazy and arrogant (or at least appear that way to an outside observer). How do you imagine that happening in practice? Say that someone comes with a competitor search that is overall better than Google search is right now. It won't be hugely better because Google search is pretty decent but even if it's significantly better it would have to so good that almost everyone cares enough to change their default search AND it would require that Google doesn't react to the new competition. With >100 billions of dollars in the treasure chest it seems extremely unlikely that Google wouldn't have the time and resources to react and improve their search engine in the face of true competition and they wouldn't even need to make it better than the competition, just make it good enough that's not worth for most people to switch. Also, creating a competing search engine isn't just a matter of secret juice and algorithms, it's mostly a matter of tons of network bandwidth, CPU, memory and storage. While I'm sure there are plenty of people outside of Google that can come up with brilliant new searching algorithms to actually make that into a successful product that matches the scale of Google's web products you'd need a lot of money and time.