Most of the moat seems to be some combo of • Website today seem much more aware of how search would ultimately seek to summarize and off-site catalog their con

Most of the moat seems to be some combo of • Website today seem much more aware of how search would ultimately seek to summarize and off-site catalog their content to siphon away incoming users than when Google started, so you don’t have the benefit of naïve counter-parties anymore who will quietly welcome you scraping them. • The web’s way bigger and faster now than when Google started so keeping results up-to-date is Sisyphean • If you only have a search engine, you will have to pay for almost literally any other non-search data stream you’d want to use to augment search - locations and business info, traffic, routing, media names and metadata, stock prices, and so on. • While power users here often complain, it seems that whatever metrics google is using have found that human-curated results and normal non-ML approaches like basic keyword search are not preferred and ML-based approaches have been more successful, which likely cost a lot in compute to build and definitely comes with a hiring talent premium for being a niche skill The moat is money, and lots of it.