1. Ongoing investment -- for all that HN harps on Google being an "ads company", they still employ XX's of engineers to work on search continually. For every

1. Ongoing investment -- for all that HN harps on Google being an "ads company", they still employ XX's of engineers to work on search continually. For every thousand engineers, you're looking at nearly a billion dollars of continual spend to continue employing them. 2. SEO -- for every engineer working to make Google better, there are probably ten engineers outside working to make the web worse. Sorting wheat from chaff is actually easy -- you just drop it and let the chaff blow away -- so I'm not actually sure what the appropriate analogy is here, but it gets harder and harder is the point.