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The interesting thing is that neither YouTube nor Google search have much user lock-in. YouTube has content producer lock-in, which is tremendously helpful. An

The interesting thing is that neither YouTube nor Google search have much user lock-in. YouTube has content producer lock-in, which is tremendously helpful. And it may be that there's just no room for improvement massive enough to pull people away, that video delivery is close enough to its peak to not leave any room for real competition. But if content was elsewhere, YouTube revenue would vanish very quickly indeed. Search, on the other hand, still has massive room for improvement. Someone, somewhere will eventually do it. And there's nothing that would keep users on Google search when they do. It's not like Facebook where's there's a huge network effect. Once there's a notably better search option, it wins very very quickly.

Igglyboo 12y ago
Exactly this, I use youtube because everything I want to watch is only on youtube, I use facebook because everyone I want to keep in touch with is only on facebook, I use search because because it's a good product and not because something external is forcing me to use it. If a better search comes along I'm gone in a second.
jeffreyrogers 12y ago
> Search, on the other hand, still has massive room for improvement. This is true, but it's also a really hard problem and most likely any improvements will require enormous scale to implement (because they'll be based on statistical analysis of prior search queries), which only Google and a handful of others have. So no network effects, but huge economies of scale. Plus, having used some other search engines (DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Bing, etc.), I feel that Google still has a comfortable lead than the competition.
- Retric 12y ago
  I suspect you could go a rediculusly long way with crated searches. Basically page rank with ~10-100x the hand tuning to more or less kill off SEO.
  - mehwoot 12y ago
    http://searchengineland.com/google-25-of-queries-are-new-adding-question-engine-11535 http://searchengineland.com/google-25-of-queries-are-new-add... 25% of google searches are unique. I bet another 25% would be so rare and numerous you couldn't possibly have time to tune them. In fact, when you think about how much revenue a single search brings, a search is going to have to happen on the order of 1,000 times (at least?) before you can have a human hand tuning them.
    - zaroth 12y ago
      That's from 2007. I wonder how much Google's autocomplete has changed that statistic. Even still, 25% of searches may be unique strings, but I doubt 25% of searches are meaningfully/semantically unique.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
marrone12 12y ago
If you're locked into the google ecosystem, switching is that much harder. Searching from Chrome, Android, Gmail... Google Search would have a continuity savings.
graycat 12y ago
> Search, on the other hand, still has massive room for improvement. Broadly agree. For what Google does in search, say, first-cut, keywords/phrases and results sorted by a measure of gross popularity, page rank, and date (but, for a second-cut, clearly now with a lot of refining tweaks), it seems to me that they are doing a terrific job. But as far as I can tell, Bing is doing about the same. So, if are looking for something, have a few keywords/phrases that fairly accurately characterize what want, then Google/Bing can work well. They can be just terrific. But that scenario does at best poorly on a significant fraction of ("safe for work") search. For this fraction, there are a lot of approaches, Web sites, etc. but nothing very good. For this fraction, I worked out some new techniques and wrote the corresponding software. For where Google/Bing work well, and often they are just terrific, my work will usually not be as good and only occasionally better. But for nearly all of the fraction of "at best poorly", my work should be quite good and much better than anything else. My work is different, very different, and I believe that being so different is necessary (clearly not sufficient) for success in the fraction I am attacking. Currently I'm loading some initial data. Then ..., maybe people will like it. Of course, with all the usual start-up advice, my work is doomed to fail because I'm a solo founder if don't count my kitty cats! And, I'm not a college dropout. I didn't even drop out of grad school and did get my Ph.D. And I'm past 30. So, right, doomed! But being successful at what I'm attempting would be exceptional; so we have to expect that much of my project is not the usual. So be it. I have some fairly good reasons to believe that my work should be successful; no way am I doing this just "on a wing and a prayer". What do you think? Announce a private beta test here on HN? Get feedback? Get it working well. Polish the UI/UX. Go live, get more publicity, run ads, grow?
dummyfellow 12y ago
content producr lock-in, is from some contract, technological issue or just ubiquity of Youtube? If Facebook starts its video service pushed heavily on Fb, it will get eyeballs, what is stopping it?
adventured 12y ago
One of the biggest lock-ins for Google search and YouTube, are the moats around the services (the moat being how hard and expensive it is to build a legitimate competitor). To compete with Google search you need... perhaps billions in funding to build the scale, speed, accuracy, redundancy, distribution, etc. To compete with YouTube, you need to spend incredible sums of money to host and stream 720 or 1080 videos; the volume of content uploads; and then to be able to afford all the lawsuits that come with the business regarding content. That's a billion dollars in financing just to get up to proper YouTube punching weight. The same is true of Facebook. One of its best shields, is the immense cost and scaling challenge to handle a billion users, regardless of if it's gradual. It's incredibly difficult to do well, and with the reliability that Facebook has always had.

Igglyboo 12y ago

Exactly this, I use youtube because everything I want to watch is only on youtube, I use facebook because everyone I want to keep in touch with is only on facebook, I use search because because it's a good product and not because something external is forcing me to use it. If a better search comes along I'm gone in a second.

jeffreyrogers 12y ago

> Search, on the other hand, still has massive room for improvement. This is true, but it's also a really hard problem and most likely any improvements will require enormous scale to implement (because they'll be based on statistical analysis of prior search queries), which only Google and a handful of others have. So no network effects, but huge economies of scale. Plus, having used some other search engines (DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Bing, etc.), I feel that Google still has a comfortable lead than the competition.

Retric 12y ago
I suspect you could go a rediculusly long way with crated searches. Basically page rank with ~10-100x the hand tuning to more or less kill off SEO.
- mehwoot 12y ago
  http://searchengineland.com/google-25-of-queries-are-new-adding-question-engine-11535 http://searchengineland.com/google-25-of-queries-are-new-add... 25% of google searches are unique. I bet another 25% would be so rare and numerous you couldn't possibly have time to tune them. In fact, when you think about how much revenue a single search brings, a search is going to have to happen on the order of 1,000 times (at least?) before you can have a human hand tuning them.
  - zaroth 12y ago
    That's from 2007. I wonder how much Google's autocomplete has changed that statistic. Even still, 25% of searches may be unique strings, but I doubt 25% of searches are meaningfully/semantically unique.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

marrone12 12y ago

If you're locked into the google ecosystem, switching is that much harder. Searching from Chrome, Android, Gmail... Google Search would have a continuity savings.

graycat 12y ago

> Search, on the other hand, still has massive room for improvement. Broadly agree. For what Google does in search, say, first-cut, keywords/phrases and results sorted by a measure of gross popularity, page rank, and date (but, for a second-cut, clearly now with a lot of refining tweaks), it seems to me that they are doing a terrific job. But as far as I can tell, Bing is doing about the same. So, if are looking for something, have a few keywords/phrases that fairly accurately characterize what want, then Google/Bing can work well. They can be just terrific. But that scenario does at best poorly on a significant fraction of ("safe for work") search. For this fraction, there are a lot of approaches, Web sites, etc. but nothing very good. For this fraction, I worked out some new techniques and wrote the corresponding software. For where Google/Bing work well, and often they are just terrific, my work will usually not be as good and only occasionally better. But for nearly all of the fraction of "at best poorly", my work should be quite good and much better than anything else. My work is different, very different, and I believe that being so different is necessary (clearly not sufficient) for success in the fraction I am attacking. Currently I'm loading some initial data. Then ..., maybe people will like it. Of course, with all the usual start-up advice, my work is doomed to fail because I'm a solo founder if don't count my kitty cats! And, I'm not a college dropout. I didn't even drop out of grad school and did get my Ph.D. And I'm past 30. So, right, doomed! But being successful at what I'm attempting would be exceptional; so we have to expect that much of my project is not the usual. So be it. I have some fairly good reasons to believe that my work should be successful; no way am I doing this just "on a wing and a prayer". What do you think? Announce a private beta test here on HN? Get feedback? Get it working well. Polish the UI/UX. Go live, get more publicity, run ads, grow?

dummyfellow 12y ago

content producr lock-in, is from some contract, technological issue or just ubiquity of Youtube? If Facebook starts its video service pushed heavily on Fb, it will get eyeballs, what is stopping it?

adventured 12y ago

One of the biggest lock-ins for Google search and YouTube, are the moats around the services (the moat being how hard and expensive it is to build a legitimate competitor). To compete with Google search you need... perhaps billions in funding to build the scale, speed, accuracy, redundancy, distribution, etc. To compete with YouTube, you need to spend incredible sums of money to host and stream 720 or 1080 videos; the volume of content uploads; and then to be able to afford all the lawsuits that come with the business regarding content. That's a billion dollars in financing just to get up to proper YouTube punching weight. The same is true of Facebook. One of its best shields, is the immense cost and scaling challenge to handle a billion users, regardless of if it's gradual. It's incredibly difficult to do well, and with the reliability that Facebook has always had.