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I thing this article is missing a third type of hard: time-consuming/long-tail hard. Google solved a hard problem, but it's a technical problem and it could be

I thing this article is missing a third type of hard: time-consuming/long-tail hard. Google solved a hard problem, but it's a technical problem and it could be replicated by another company, particularly since there are probably a lot of developers who have experience working on Google's Search. But the problem is that there is an absurdly long tail of features (curated news sources, relevant social media results, answer boxes, etc) and being able to serve that long-tail is part of what makes Google so valuable. It would take years for even a well-funded team to catch up to Google in this regard and the high barrier-to-entry is absolutely a moat.

simonh 6y ago
I think that's just a type of bodybuilder hard. It just takes a lot of effort, discipline and time to do it.
- solidasparagus 6y ago
  I disagree. Bodybuilder hard at described in the article is just a matter of effort. High barrier-to-entry means that you need extreme resources to start competing. I think they are quite different.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    There is also social-hard in the network effects of incumbents and familiarity to overcome.
  - simonh 6y ago
    Having resources is just a different thing, they’re not a kind of work. Getting the resources is work, sure, but it takes either cleverness (maths hard) or effort (bodybuilder hard) to get them, or is not hard at all because you already have them. But actually building the things you cited is bodybuilder hard.
    - solidasparagus 6y ago
      That's really not true. You can try as hard as you want but you will not be able to spin up a search competitor right now because the funding literally doesn't exist.
      - Firehawke 6y ago
        Even suggesting you want to tackle Google's lead in search or ads as a startup will get you laughed out of the room. The amount of time, effort, and funding needed is well beyond what any investor wants to even consider.
        lumost 6y ago
        There are search competitors in non-US markets. The lack of funding begs the question of whether Google's search lead is simply due to no one trying to compete within the last 10 years. DDG doesn't really qualify here as they aggregate google/bing search results.
        simonh 6y ago
        How about Bing? Yes I know, they're easy to forget about, but....
        lumost 6y ago
        Bing started 15+ years ago as a feature for feature clone of Google. Historically they've simply crawled Google results and replicated whatever Google returns. It could be a data point that Google has made the perfect search system as of 15 years ago - or just a footnote of the balmer era of Microsoft like Windows phone.
        solidasparagus 6y ago
        DDDG has raised $13 million. Neeva has raised $37.5 million. Hulbee has raised $9 million.
      - 6y ago
foolmeonce 6y ago
I think DDG and Bing do all of that as well and in many cases better with low budgets.. The moat is that content creators do whatever Google wants and debug experience problems only coming from Google since it has the overwhelming number of users.
- solidasparagus 6y ago
  DDG definitely does none of those things. And yeah, Bing has funding and has been in development for over 11 years (and has a basis that goes even further back than that). But people don't really use it and that is partially due to the horrible reputation it developed when it came out. Bing is literally a joke and in many ways that is due to their struggles catching up to Google.
zippy5 6y ago
I think this only works out for google due to their business model and scale. Like if Google was a subscription service, would people pay 5x more for the long tail? I'm guessing not. I think the reason that the long tail is viable at google is that the higher value searches happen infrequently. You buy cars, houses, insurance, less often than furniture or toothbrushes and the ads are priced accordingly. So in essence you need a problem where the value and the frequency are inversely related.
Tainnor 6y ago
For an even more extreme example, think of something like Wolfram|Alpha.
jonny_eh 6y ago
Any sufficiently hard problem is indistinguishable from impossible.
AznHisoka 6y ago
There is also the fact that there’s only a finite number of pages you can crawl a day. So Google has a built-in data/time advantage. They started from 1999 and have 2 decades of data already. Anyone starting now needs to first build up that huge index and that is almost impossible if you start now.

simonh 6y ago

I think that's just a type of bodybuilder hard. It just takes a lot of effort, discipline and time to do it.

solidasparagus 6y ago
I disagree. Bodybuilder hard at described in the article is just a matter of effort. High barrier-to-entry means that you need extreme resources to start competing. I think they are quite different.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  There is also social-hard in the network effects of incumbents and familiarity to overcome.
- simonh 6y ago
  Having resources is just a different thing, they’re not a kind of work. Getting the resources is work, sure, but it takes either cleverness (maths hard) or effort (bodybuilder hard) to get them, or is not hard at all because you already have them. But actually building the things you cited is bodybuilder hard.
  - solidasparagus 6y ago
    That's really not true. You can try as hard as you want but you will not be able to spin up a search competitor right now because the funding literally doesn't exist.
    - Firehawke 6y ago
      Even suggesting you want to tackle Google's lead in search or ads as a startup will get you laughed out of the room. The amount of time, effort, and funding needed is well beyond what any investor wants to even consider.
      - lumost 6y ago
        There are search competitors in non-US markets. The lack of funding begs the question of whether Google's search lead is simply due to no one trying to compete within the last 10 years. DDG doesn't really qualify here as they aggregate google/bing search results.
        simonh 6y ago
        How about Bing? Yes I know, they're easy to forget about, but....
        lumost 6y ago
        Bing started 15+ years ago as a feature for feature clone of Google. Historically they've simply crawled Google results and replicated whatever Google returns. It could be a data point that Google has made the perfect search system as of 15 years ago - or just a footnote of the balmer era of Microsoft like Windows phone.
      - solidasparagus 6y ago
        DDDG has raised $13 million. Neeva has raised $37.5 million. Hulbee has raised $9 million.
    - 6y ago

foolmeonce 6y ago

I think DDG and Bing do all of that as well and in many cases better with low budgets.. The moat is that content creators do whatever Google wants and debug experience problems only coming from Google since it has the overwhelming number of users.

solidasparagus 6y ago
DDG definitely does none of those things. And yeah, Bing has funding and has been in development for over 11 years (and has a basis that goes even further back than that). But people don't really use it and that is partially due to the horrible reputation it developed when it came out. Bing is literally a joke and in many ways that is due to their struggles catching up to Google.

zippy5 6y ago

I think this only works out for google due to their business model and scale. Like if Google was a subscription service, would people pay 5x more for the long tail? I'm guessing not. I think the reason that the long tail is viable at google is that the higher value searches happen infrequently. You buy cars, houses, insurance, less often than furniture or toothbrushes and the ads are priced accordingly. So in essence you need a problem where the value and the frequency are inversely related.

Tainnor 6y ago

For an even more extreme example, think of something like Wolfram|Alpha.

jonny_eh 6y ago

Any sufficiently hard problem is indistinguishable from impossible.

AznHisoka 6y ago

There is also the fact that there’s only a finite number of pages you can crawl a day. So Google has a built-in data/time advantage. They started from 1999 and have 2 decades of data already. Anyone starting now needs to first build up that huge index and that is almost impossible if you start now.