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Ask HN: Do you think there will be a full replacement to Google?

28 points by source99 11y ago

Someone asked about a replacement for facebook. I think a much more interesting questions is what will be the next replacement for google?

bigiain 11y ago
What do you consider to be "Google"? The search engine? Google Maps? The advertising company? Google Ventures? Heroku? GoogleDocs? Or the whole crazy self-driving cars, automatically launched wind turbine kites, GoogleWave, Project Loon, and every other successful or spectacular failure they've been involved in? Will anybody ever "own" all the market slices Google currently plays in? I _very_ much doubt it. Will the Google Search engine remain an effective monopoly? I doubt that too - I remember when Alta Vista was world-changingly amazing! I suspect Google have deeply entrenched themselves in the employment market for people being very smart about making search better, and the bar is way higher so I doubt it's ever going to be a couple of compsci/linguistics phd students who topple the industry (the way Alta Vista fell), but things like DuckDuckGo and Blekko exist - and no doubt other more academic and less well know ones too, it not impossible (in my opinion) that someone will roll out a "instantly and obviously better than Google" search engine one day.
- biot 11y ago
  Small correction: Heroku is owned by Salesforce.com.
  - bigiain 11y ago
    Indeed - I was thinking "App Engine" but my fingers typed "Heroku"
- fenesiistvan 11y ago
  On the contrary, I feel the exact opposite: the entry bar for the search engine market is not high. Google delivered a good service from the first day, which was not improved so much since them. A newcomer have to reach only this quality and combine it with some spice, like P2P and it can reach a big market share. Although some revolutionary improvement in the search result offerings wouldn't hurt also but this has less chance (waiting for a better AI).
  - mahouse 11y ago
    >the entry bar for the search engine market is not high You just need millions of computers, millions of petabytes of net traffic and a lot of time to have the same index as Google. Easy. For example, look at how useless Bing is. And that's Microsoft!
    - kzhahou 11y ago
      I bet if you forced yourself to use Bing, and weren't turned off by its look and feel, you'd find it to be an equal replacement. In fact, I don't have to bet: both companies have detailed metrics that consistently show them within a few percent of each other on precision, recall, etc.
      - bigiain 11y ago
        I suspect this in not only true, but a highly likely factor in whatever "replaces" both Google and Bing. Prediction: some near-future Snowden document release will catapult DuckDuckGo or some other privacy-oriented search alternative into the limelight in a hockeystick curve growth kind of way. Maybe something that proves the NSA is firehose sharing de-anonymised Google/Bing search data with HealthCare Companies or the Insurance Industry or the IRS, and that there's widespread punitive action going on based on simplistic or poorly thought out responses to people's search history (people being denied health insurance because they did a few too many Google searches when their mother was diagnosed with cancer, or car insurance rates being raised across the board for people who search wine labels online...) All of a sudden someone who's "good enough" at search, but has TOR hidden service endpoints and nothing associated with them that comes under Five Eyes legal jurisdictions is going to look worthwhile switching to.
        icebraining 11y ago
        I'm willing to bet that no significant (say, 10%) portion of the Google/Bing userbase will switch to an alternative engine in the next five years, regardless of whatever documents may be released. If some revelation like that were to happen, people would be outraged, they'd demand regulation, and meanwhile they'd continue to use Google/Bing; maybe some would switch to Incognito windows, but that's about it, in my opinion.
- Xophmeister 11y ago
  Isn't Heroku a subsidiary of SalesForce? Google's equivalent is Google App Engine.
- staunch 11y ago
  When Google Search is superseded Google will have no money and necessarily implode. Their services will be sold or spun off. The entire empire is built on a single point of failure.
  - rbinv 11y ago
    You're forgetting about Google's huge display advertising network. Even if no one used Google search anymore, Google would still be making a lot of money through display ads.
    - staunch 11y ago
      Few companies can take 70%+ revenue hit.
amirouche 11y ago
The way I see Google loosing steam is a massive change in the way people are consuming IT products. I'm thinking about P2P maybe they are others. I can't think about a big IT company that disappeared the last 50 years.
- robin_reala 11y ago
  What? DEC for one was gigantic.
- mattkevan 11y ago
  The web will change paradigm, in the same way tech platforms always have. E.g. Mainframes > Minicomputers > Desktops > Mobile. Companies dominant in one paradigm are rarely able to remain relevant on the next. IBM while still huge, has little relevance to desktop or mobile computing. As has been pointed out, DEC and other huge mainframe and minicomputer companies are dead. Microsoft and Intel, while also still huge, are not doing well in mobile. Unless Google are very careful, lucky or both, they will be unwilling or unable to make the painful change necessary to remain dominant in whatever the web and mobile becomes next.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
flyfast 11y ago
The Search Engine? Maybe not in the sense of "A site where you enter text and find pages containing that text". Just like Microsoft Windows might never be replaced as the most popular Desktop OS. Desktop OS just become less and less important. But certainly in the sense of "A way to get answers to your questions". I expect computers to learn about the world and give answers directly. Just like image recognition software can tell you the answer to "Does this image has tomatoes?". Software will be able to answer "Do tomatoes grow in China?". Or answer "Paint me an image of tomatoes in China" the way Googles deep dream net can already "paint" lots of things [1]. It will be interesting how this turns out for "content creators". When computers learn and become creative, there will be no more SEO :) Because your site will just be read and ingested by a bot and make it better to answer questions. No more clickt-hroughs to your website. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream http://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream
kluck 11y ago
Yes. I bet it is a search engine that is based on a distributed search index, hosted by individuals not by a giant corporation. At least I would hope so.
- chei0aiV 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy
kdani 11y ago
Check out Searx: https://github.com/asciimoo/searx https://github.com/asciimoo/searx
Dorian-Marie 11y ago
The companies that are the most similar to Google are Microsoft and Yahoo, both far behind.
- anc84 11y ago
  I'd rather say Baidu and Yandex. Not sure if a similar engine exists in India. If those expanded to the western market, they could cause quite the hurly-burly.
learnstats2 11y ago
Google as a general search engine, do you mean? I think Google will remain the primary general search engine for 10+ years. They're embedded. Direct competitors universally follow the pattern of "Copy Google's ideas about search, but with less economic resources". However, I expect more specific, targeted search engines will eat into Google's market. Possibilities are endless and unimaginable: but a current example is Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha searches displace Google searches.
Sven7 11y ago
Yes. From China or India or both.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
reilly3000 11y ago
Only when we have a different internet.
amelius 11y ago
Apple's "Finder" will replace Google.
amelius 11y ago
The European government will replace Google, if they think they are interfering with the market too much, or if they don't comply to EU privacy rules, or if they simply don't like idea of European data in the hands of a US based company.
- maelito 11y ago
  https://www.qwant.com https://www.qwant.com ?
Osmium 11y ago
It seems likely to me that the search engine will be replaced by personal assistant type services: you ask a question, and you get direct access to that knowledge. Whether Google will replace the search engine itself, or whether it'll be another company, who knows. I'm being very speculative, of course, but the way I look at it: we initially had web directories, where we'd look up categories to find websites we wanted. That wasn't because we wanted directories, but because there wasn't sufficient technology for a search engine. Now, we have search engines, but is that what we really want? In some cases, yes, but in most cases we often just want the first result, or even just some information that's on that page. So why do we still use search engines? Because there isn't sufficient technology for something better...at least not yet, but Siri and Cortana and Google Now are getting there. Eventually these conversational interfaces and the metadata behind them will become so good that the direct use of a search engine will become an edge case. I think a better question might be how many years until Google replaces its homepage with Google Now (or something similar) instead of a search box?
pantulis 11y ago
I think no one is going to beat Google, just the same as no one could beat Microsoft in desktop computing --at least in the enterprise. What may -or may not- happen is that the web indexing business become less relevant that is today. You see, a lot of people think "the internet" is Facebook, or Whatsapp. Apple is trying to move publishers to its own garden. These movements all threaten Google's web advertising business in some way or another.
- jcfrei 11y ago
  I agree. Only speaking about the search engine I could imagine that in the future Google will still remain the dominant search engine. But search engines will be used less and less. Instead most people will use native apps and their respective search engines (facebook to search people, instagram to search pictures, netflix to search movies, yelp to search restaurants, etc.). It's a bit ironic that the biggest threat to Google's core business is a mobile operating system that was developed and pushed by itself. I'm still waiting for ads to appear in my native Google apps...
Rambunctious 11y ago
Well, one threat for Google's search business is possibly Apple. By controlling the device, browser and the platform - they have an option to integrate their own search offering instead of relying on third parties. Not sure what the Topsy acquisition was about - but perhaps there is some sort of a social search integration in the works. And then there's Facebook. The key for them is to figure out a viable business out of head search queries i.e. instead of going after all possible searches. Perhaps mainly target shopping oriented search queries via recommendations from friends? Of course, this is all easier said than done. Apple has seen its struggles with Maps and even Google couldn't do much with Google+.
chx 11y ago
Is it necessary that Google get replaced? Consider http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm
simonh 11y ago
Google is really good at being Google. A drop-in replacement for Google would need to be better at being Google than Google is, and I don't see that happening. The way to compete with them is through asymmetric warfare. Compete in such a way that they can't effectively fight back. For example pick off one (or a few) of their products and differentiate like crazy. Apple got stuck in a situation where they neede their own maps service. That's cost the badly because they're goign head-to-head, but at least they have the advantage of leveraging their ownership of the iOS platform. Meanwhile they're trying to differentiate by using an aerial 3D view instead of streetview, and now coming out with a competing local search service to streetview without it being just a clone. Duck-Duck-go competes with Google Search on privacy. Facebook competed by being completely unlike anything Google produced at the time. Trying to beat Google at their own game is a failing strategy. Microsoft tried it with Bing search and Bing Maps, but just can't differentiate effectively. Look at how Apple competes with Microsoft. Received wisdom for decades was that Apple should make itself more like Microsoft to compete with them, but in the end their success has been based on what they do differently, not on what they do that's the same.
- feelix 11y ago
  With google's recent bias towards becoming more and more product oriented in their first page of results (which is good for their bottom line), alongside their tendency to become worse for academic purposes over time (for example making it so that searching for things in quotes doesn't actually return only exact results), they have left a gap for an unbiased and exact search engine for power users and geeks to come in. Google are not perfect. It's hard to compete with their sheer processing power and the size of their databases, however storage is getting cheaper and processing power is getting more abundant. It may not be feasible to compete with them head on at present, but during the coming years the likelihood of them maintaining their dominant position decreases with time, it doesn't increase. Since the question is "whether there WILL be a full replacement for google" in short I would say most certainly - the question is how long it will take. I would be astonished if google were still the dominant search engine 20 years from now. 10 years? Even that would be a surprise.
  - 11y ago
jacquesm 11y ago
That's a bit like asking if there will be a full replacement for Hyundai, Samsung or Sony. What those companies have in common with Google is that they have fingers in a great many pies. Each of those fingers will have serious competition but for some company to compete on all fronts with Google at the same time is very unlikely and most definitely won't lead to a win. The biggest and baddest are not taken down by other biggest and baddest, they're taken down by packs of hungry hyenas that don't care for their own personal survival.
stephenr 11y ago
It depends what you mean by "Google"? The primary thing non-tech people think about Google is search, but Google's primary (by a large margin) revenue is from it's ad network. So if we discount the other sectors of the company which are currently rounding errors in terms of general mind-share and revenue, we come down to search and ads. Search I believe will become less dominated - I'm really happy to see the rise in popularity of things like DuckDuckGo, but I wouldn't be surprised if as others have said, device-linked services such as "Search" on iOS/OSX or Microsoft powered devices, where they hook into a variety of services directly to provide common answers. I'd love to see a result where we have less of these huge data-hungry monster companies like Google, Facebook, etc and more services/products focused on user privacy and control.
fractalb 11y ago
It mostly depends on the time-frame you consider. If you think of next 10 to 20 years, it looks highly unlikely. But if you think beyond that, it will largely depend on how the search landscape evolves. In any case there will be no Google that is as powerful as today's.
harel 11y ago
I doubt it. To become Google you need a good few years of building up your IP and infrastructure. Google were very good at getting to be that big (biggest?) in a relatively short time and because they are so far ahead, anyone else will need not only to have better search, products (Android, Docs, Gmail, Self driving cars etc.) but also the infrastructure to match and exceed that of Google. By the time they get there, Google will be further ahead still. Perhaps in 20 years or so, the computing landscape would have changed so much that you'll have the entire Google infra in your brain implant or something like that but with all that progress moving forward, so will Google. I'm pretty certain they are here to stay.
1arity 11y ago
Of course. You really think we're going to be searching for "one version of truth" forever? Everyone thinks different, and a full replacement of Google will be a personalized search engine, matched to how you think, not how the "average human" (or the average AI) thinks. The web is going to become what people make it, not what these companies tell us is their single authority version of the best user interface for everyone, or the best answer for everyone. The future of the internet is not wikipedia, it's augmenting our own biases enough that our egos aren't catastrophically challenged every day while feeding ourselves just the right of to-each-of-us contrarian opinions to grow. The internet is a giant exercise in expanding the collective human mind, so the idea that there will be these gigantic portals that serve "answers" based on a "golden algorithm" is at best, inappropriate for anyone but the hypothetical "middle of the bell curve human" and at worst, it's a spiral of awful that converges on something really wrong. Oh, hey! That's what we already see with the internet. Millions of human minds connected for the first time in an elaborate feedback loop -- we get these non-adaptive non-linear emergent effects, these harmonics, like "flame wars", hatred, and all kinds of weird new forms of harassment. People are just getting used to this huge mesh their brains now exist in, and they are still dysfunctional at it. "Single versions of truth" ( single UI, single UX, single algorithms ) for everybody don't help this, they reinforce the feedback loops and amplify these harmonics. They don't mitigate and create diversity, they create, "a cacophony of homogeneity". The future of the internet is people writing the algorithms that curate the content for them. Then the gap between the human and the computer ( today, by computer we mean, the web ), will be as small as we like to make it. That's when we get the real benefits of extending our minds into this digital medium.
sidcool 11y ago
Google is bad at many things, but so good at a handful that it will suffice it's market share for years to come. A full replacement to Google (as a search engine and mobile operating system company), in my estimation, is a full decade away.
V-2 11y ago
Everyone seems to assume that Google's dominant position could only be undermined via free market competition. In America, perhaps, but in whole-world perspective, not necessarily. Google is having some anti-monopoly issues in European Union (not unlike Microsoft in the past), and Russia threatened to ban Google altogether. They always had a hard time in China, too - their services being suspended or blocked from time to time, their market share decreased several times over the years. So if we're talking about "what can happen in 10-20 years", then absolutely there is a possibility that Google's world dominance gets crushed by governments which gang up against it at some point rather than by competitors. And replacements will just fill the void.

28 points by source99 11y ago

Someone asked about a replacement for facebook. I think a much more interesting questions is what will be the next replacement for google?

bigiain 11y ago

What do you consider to be "Google"? The search engine? Google Maps? The advertising company? Google Ventures? Heroku? GoogleDocs? Or the whole crazy self-driving cars, automatically launched wind turbine kites, GoogleWave, Project Loon, and every other successful or spectacular failure they've been involved in? Will anybody ever "own" all the market slices Google currently plays in? I _very_ much doubt it. Will the Google Search engine remain an effective monopoly? I doubt that too - I remember when Alta Vista was world-changingly amazing! I suspect Google have deeply entrenched themselves in the employment market for people being very smart about making search better, and the bar is way higher so I doubt it's ever going to be a couple of compsci/linguistics phd students who topple the industry (the way Alta Vista fell), but things like DuckDuckGo and Blekko exist - and no doubt other more academic and less well know ones too, it not impossible (in my opinion) that someone will roll out a "instantly and obviously better than Google" search engine one day.

biot 11y ago
Small correction: Heroku is owned by Salesforce.com.
- bigiain 11y ago
  Indeed - I was thinking "App Engine" but my fingers typed "Heroku"
fenesiistvan 11y ago
On the contrary, I feel the exact opposite: the entry bar for the search engine market is not high. Google delivered a good service from the first day, which was not improved so much since them. A newcomer have to reach only this quality and combine it with some spice, like P2P and it can reach a big market share. Although some revolutionary improvement in the search result offerings wouldn't hurt also but this has less chance (waiting for a better AI).
- mahouse 11y ago
  >the entry bar for the search engine market is not high You just need millions of computers, millions of petabytes of net traffic and a lot of time to have the same index as Google. Easy. For example, look at how useless Bing is. And that's Microsoft!
  - kzhahou 11y ago
    I bet if you forced yourself to use Bing, and weren't turned off by its look and feel, you'd find it to be an equal replacement. In fact, I don't have to bet: both companies have detailed metrics that consistently show them within a few percent of each other on precision, recall, etc.
    - bigiain 11y ago
      I suspect this in not only true, but a highly likely factor in whatever "replaces" both Google and Bing. Prediction: some near-future Snowden document release will catapult DuckDuckGo or some other privacy-oriented search alternative into the limelight in a hockeystick curve growth kind of way. Maybe something that proves the NSA is firehose sharing de-anonymised Google/Bing search data with HealthCare Companies or the Insurance Industry or the IRS, and that there's widespread punitive action going on based on simplistic or poorly thought out responses to people's search history (people being denied health insurance because they did a few too many Google searches when their mother was diagnosed with cancer, or car insurance rates being raised across the board for people who search wine labels online...) All of a sudden someone who's "good enough" at search, but has TOR hidden service endpoints and nothing associated with them that comes under Five Eyes legal jurisdictions is going to look worthwhile switching to.
      - icebraining 11y ago
        I'm willing to bet that no significant (say, 10%) portion of the Google/Bing userbase will switch to an alternative engine in the next five years, regardless of whatever documents may be released. If some revelation like that were to happen, people would be outraged, they'd demand regulation, and meanwhile they'd continue to use Google/Bing; maybe some would switch to Incognito windows, but that's about it, in my opinion.
Xophmeister 11y ago
Isn't Heroku a subsidiary of SalesForce? Google's equivalent is Google App Engine.
staunch 11y ago
When Google Search is superseded Google will have no money and necessarily implode. Their services will be sold or spun off. The entire empire is built on a single point of failure.
- rbinv 11y ago
  You're forgetting about Google's huge display advertising network. Even if no one used Google search anymore, Google would still be making a lot of money through display ads.
  - staunch 11y ago
    Few companies can take 70%+ revenue hit.

amirouche 11y ago

The way I see Google loosing steam is a massive change in the way people are consuming IT products. I'm thinking about P2P maybe they are others. I can't think about a big IT company that disappeared the last 50 years.

robin_reala 11y ago
What? DEC for one was gigantic.
mattkevan 11y ago
The web will change paradigm, in the same way tech platforms always have. E.g. Mainframes > Minicomputers > Desktops > Mobile. Companies dominant in one paradigm are rarely able to remain relevant on the next. IBM while still huge, has little relevance to desktop or mobile computing. As has been pointed out, DEC and other huge mainframe and minicomputer companies are dead. Microsoft and Intel, while also still huge, are not doing well in mobile. Unless Google are very careful, lucky or both, they will be unwilling or unable to make the painful change necessary to remain dominant in whatever the web and mobile becomes next.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

flyfast 11y ago

The Search Engine? Maybe not in the sense of "A site where you enter text and find pages containing that text". Just like Microsoft Windows might never be replaced as the most popular Desktop OS. Desktop OS just become less and less important. But certainly in the sense of "A way to get answers to your questions". I expect computers to learn about the world and give answers directly. Just like image recognition software can tell you the answer to "Does this image has tomatoes?". Software will be able to answer "Do tomatoes grow in China?". Or answer "Paint me an image of tomatoes in China" the way Googles deep dream net can already "paint" lots of things [1]. It will be interesting how this turns out for "content creators". When computers learn and become creative, there will be no more SEO :) Because your site will just be read and ingested by a bot and make it better to answer questions. No more clickt-hroughs to your website. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream http://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream

kluck 11y ago

Yes. I bet it is a search engine that is based on a distributed search index, hosted by individuals not by a giant corporation. At least I would hope so.

chei0aiV 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy

kdani 11y ago

Check out Searx: https://github.com/asciimoo/searx https://github.com/asciimoo/searx

Dorian-Marie 11y ago

The companies that are the most similar to Google are Microsoft and Yahoo, both far behind.

anc84 11y ago
I'd rather say Baidu and Yandex. Not sure if a similar engine exists in India. If those expanded to the western market, they could cause quite the hurly-burly.

learnstats2 11y ago

Google as a general search engine, do you mean? I think Google will remain the primary general search engine for 10+ years. They're embedded. Direct competitors universally follow the pattern of "Copy Google's ideas about search, but with less economic resources". However, I expect more specific, targeted search engines will eat into Google's market. Possibilities are endless and unimaginable: but a current example is Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha searches displace Google searches.

Sven7 11y ago

Yes. From China or India or both.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

reilly3000 11y ago

Only when we have a different internet.

amelius 11y ago

Apple's "Finder" will replace Google.

amelius 11y ago

The European government will replace Google, if they think they are interfering with the market too much, or if they don't comply to EU privacy rules, or if they simply don't like idea of European data in the hands of a US based company.

maelito 11y ago
https://www.qwant.com https://www.qwant.com ?

Osmium 11y ago

It seems likely to me that the search engine will be replaced by personal assistant type services: you ask a question, and you get direct access to that knowledge. Whether Google will replace the search engine itself, or whether it'll be another company, who knows. I'm being very speculative, of course, but the way I look at it: we initially had web directories, where we'd look up categories to find websites we wanted. That wasn't because we wanted directories, but because there wasn't sufficient technology for a search engine. Now, we have search engines, but is that what we really want? In some cases, yes, but in most cases we often just want the first result, or even just some information that's on that page. So why do we still use search engines? Because there isn't sufficient technology for something better...at least not yet, but Siri and Cortana and Google Now are getting there. Eventually these conversational interfaces and the metadata behind them will become so good that the direct use of a search engine will become an edge case. I think a better question might be how many years until Google replaces its homepage with Google Now (or something similar) instead of a search box?

pantulis 11y ago

I think no one is going to beat Google, just the same as no one could beat Microsoft in desktop computing --at least in the enterprise. What may -or may not- happen is that the web indexing business become less relevant that is today. You see, a lot of people think "the internet" is Facebook, or Whatsapp. Apple is trying to move publishers to its own garden. These movements all threaten Google's web advertising business in some way or another.

jcfrei 11y ago
I agree. Only speaking about the search engine I could imagine that in the future Google will still remain the dominant search engine. But search engines will be used less and less. Instead most people will use native apps and their respective search engines (facebook to search people, instagram to search pictures, netflix to search movies, yelp to search restaurants, etc.). It's a bit ironic that the biggest threat to Google's core business is a mobile operating system that was developed and pushed by itself. I'm still waiting for ads to appear in my native Google apps...

Rambunctious 11y ago

Well, one threat for Google's search business is possibly Apple. By controlling the device, browser and the platform - they have an option to integrate their own search offering instead of relying on third parties. Not sure what the Topsy acquisition was about - but perhaps there is some sort of a social search integration in the works. And then there's Facebook. The key for them is to figure out a viable business out of head search queries i.e. instead of going after all possible searches. Perhaps mainly target shopping oriented search queries via recommendations from friends? Of course, this is all easier said than done. Apple has seen its struggles with Maps and even Google couldn't do much with Google+.

chx 11y ago

Is it necessary that Google get replaced? Consider http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm

simonh 11y ago

Google is really good at being Google. A drop-in replacement for Google would need to be better at being Google than Google is, and I don't see that happening. The way to compete with them is through asymmetric warfare. Compete in such a way that they can't effectively fight back. For example pick off one (or a few) of their products and differentiate like crazy. Apple got stuck in a situation where they neede their own maps service. That's cost the badly because they're goign head-to-head, but at least they have the advantage of leveraging their ownership of the iOS platform. Meanwhile they're trying to differentiate by using an aerial 3D view instead of streetview, and now coming out with a competing local search service to streetview without it being just a clone. Duck-Duck-go competes with Google Search on privacy. Facebook competed by being completely unlike anything Google produced at the time. Trying to beat Google at their own game is a failing strategy. Microsoft tried it with Bing search and Bing Maps, but just can't differentiate effectively. Look at how Apple competes with Microsoft. Received wisdom for decades was that Apple should make itself more like Microsoft to compete with them, but in the end their success has been based on what they do differently, not on what they do that's the same.

feelix 11y ago
With google's recent bias towards becoming more and more product oriented in their first page of results (which is good for their bottom line), alongside their tendency to become worse for academic purposes over time (for example making it so that searching for things in quotes doesn't actually return only exact results), they have left a gap for an unbiased and exact search engine for power users and geeks to come in. Google are not perfect. It's hard to compete with their sheer processing power and the size of their databases, however storage is getting cheaper and processing power is getting more abundant. It may not be feasible to compete with them head on at present, but during the coming years the likelihood of them maintaining their dominant position decreases with time, it doesn't increase. Since the question is "whether there WILL be a full replacement for google" in short I would say most certainly - the question is how long it will take. I would be astonished if google were still the dominant search engine 20 years from now. 10 years? Even that would be a surprise.
- 11y ago

jacquesm 11y ago

That's a bit like asking if there will be a full replacement for Hyundai, Samsung or Sony. What those companies have in common with Google is that they have fingers in a great many pies. Each of those fingers will have serious competition but for some company to compete on all fronts with Google at the same time is very unlikely and most definitely won't lead to a win. The biggest and baddest are not taken down by other biggest and baddest, they're taken down by packs of hungry hyenas that don't care for their own personal survival.

stephenr 11y ago

It depends what you mean by "Google"? The primary thing non-tech people think about Google is search, but Google's primary (by a large margin) revenue is from it's ad network. So if we discount the other sectors of the company which are currently rounding errors in terms of general mind-share and revenue, we come down to search and ads. Search I believe will become less dominated - I'm really happy to see the rise in popularity of things like DuckDuckGo, but I wouldn't be surprised if as others have said, device-linked services such as "Search" on iOS/OSX or Microsoft powered devices, where they hook into a variety of services directly to provide common answers. I'd love to see a result where we have less of these huge data-hungry monster companies like Google, Facebook, etc and more services/products focused on user privacy and control.

fractalb 11y ago

It mostly depends on the time-frame you consider. If you think of next 10 to 20 years, it looks highly unlikely. But if you think beyond that, it will largely depend on how the search landscape evolves. In any case there will be no Google that is as powerful as today's.

harel 11y ago

I doubt it. To become Google you need a good few years of building up your IP and infrastructure. Google were very good at getting to be that big (biggest?) in a relatively short time and because they are so far ahead, anyone else will need not only to have better search, products (Android, Docs, Gmail, Self driving cars etc.) but also the infrastructure to match and exceed that of Google. By the time they get there, Google will be further ahead still. Perhaps in 20 years or so, the computing landscape would have changed so much that you'll have the entire Google infra in your brain implant or something like that but with all that progress moving forward, so will Google. I'm pretty certain they are here to stay.

1arity 11y ago

Of course. You really think we're going to be searching for "one version of truth" forever? Everyone thinks different, and a full replacement of Google will be a personalized search engine, matched to how you think, not how the "average human" (or the average AI) thinks. The web is going to become what people make it, not what these companies tell us is their single authority version of the best user interface for everyone, or the best answer for everyone. The future of the internet is not wikipedia, it's augmenting our own biases enough that our egos aren't catastrophically challenged every day while feeding ourselves just the right of to-each-of-us contrarian opinions to grow. The internet is a giant exercise in expanding the collective human mind, so the idea that there will be these gigantic portals that serve "answers" based on a "golden algorithm" is at best, inappropriate for anyone but the hypothetical "middle of the bell curve human" and at worst, it's a spiral of awful that converges on something really wrong. Oh, hey! That's what we already see with the internet. Millions of human minds connected for the first time in an elaborate feedback loop -- we get these non-adaptive non-linear emergent effects, these harmonics, like "flame wars", hatred, and all kinds of weird new forms of harassment. People are just getting used to this huge mesh their brains now exist in, and they are still dysfunctional at it. "Single versions of truth" ( single UI, single UX, single algorithms ) for everybody don't help this, they reinforce the feedback loops and amplify these harmonics. They don't mitigate and create diversity, they create, "a cacophony of homogeneity". The future of the internet is people writing the algorithms that curate the content for them. Then the gap between the human and the computer ( today, by computer we mean, the web ), will be as small as we like to make it. That's when we get the real benefits of extending our minds into this digital medium.

sidcool 11y ago

Google is bad at many things, but so good at a handful that it will suffice it's market share for years to come. A full replacement to Google (as a search engine and mobile operating system company), in my estimation, is a full decade away.

V-2 11y ago

Everyone seems to assume that Google's dominant position could only be undermined via free market competition. In America, perhaps, but in whole-world perspective, not necessarily. Google is having some anti-monopoly issues in European Union (not unlike Microsoft in the past), and Russia threatened to ban Google altogether. They always had a hard time in China, too - their services being suspended or blocked from time to time, their market share decreased several times over the years. So if we're talking about "what can happen in 10-20 years", then absolutely there is a possibility that Google's world dominance gets crushed by governments which gang up against it at some point rather than by competitors. And replacements will just fill the void.