There are more than enough users aware of search to support a fledgling competitor that managed to deliver higher quality results.
That competitor simply doesn’t exist yet, and I think that’s because no one has figured out how to beat Google at search (which is why I think real ingenuity is required).
I for one am just glad there are more competitors entering this space. Google search has been getting worse over the last several years to the point where I can't find what I'm looking for with non-technical searches. Google always tries to figure out my intent, and in doing so, fails miserably 1/2 the time.
Sure, there's that, but Google really need competition for their own sake.
The US would not have put a man on the moon if it wasn't for the Soviet Union trying to do the same. Not having credible competition is bad from a purely professional point of view because you need someone to spur you on.
Since about 2003-2004 search has not really been a real competition in the west. Google has had an unhealthy dominance. I have worked for three search engine companies (Fast, Yahoo and Google) and I can remember how inspiring the early days were when there was half a dozen search engines to compete against.
I particularly enjoyed trying to figure out how the competition did things. At the time you had narrow problems people worked on that perhaps only a dozen other people in the world cared deeply about. Published research hadn't always caught up with what was happening so you spent some amount of time trying to read between the lines and measure things to figure out what the competition was up to.
One of my fondest memories is a lunch I had with Jeff Dean when I slid a napkin over the table with a graph on it. He took one look at it, smiled and said "did you figure it out?". I said "no, did you?". And he said "I have no idea".
Today search just exists and I no longer give a shit about it. It doesn't strike me as fun anymore. Because there is no real competition. I'm pretty sure that at least the engineers at Google would soil themselves with joy if they got a real competitor.
That's not hindering anybody. It especially is not hindering their competitors Apple, Facebook and Microsoft from competing. Google Search has grown into its size and popularity due to its own merits, and can as easily be replaced.
From the lawyers in that case:
“There are no reasonable substitutes for general search services, and a general search service monopolist would be able to maintain quality below the level that would prevail in a competitive market”
I've been using a much better search engine than Google for months now. The free market of the internet and human ingenuity has delivered.
Yes the Internet needs several viable search competitors but since the cost of maintaining all the data and creating a good algorithm are so high the barrier to entry seems almost insurmountable without some really clever innovations.
It's not there because at this point, it's self-evident. There may be a path to profitability for niche engines, or engines which do something quite different from the big players, but it seems ever more unlikely that a new direct rival to Google/Microsoft/Yahoo will arise.
I mean, I get your point. But there's a difference between the pre-Google world and now: before Google, search sucked, and everyone knew it. Now, search is awesome. It's not really a pain point.
I think that because there is very little competition in search in particular that they are able to rest on that -- I think if you saw real competition in the space for users that it would at least get better.
I'd love to see more competition in search. Feels like everyone right now gets tripped up on trying to emulate Google, which is a trap even if you succeed. Nobody is going to out-Google Google.
ChatGPT's recent huge success in performing a specific tasks previously within the domain of Google by doing something other than they are is a good example of this.
Yea I really wonder why they don't have competition. You'd think a search engine built with java in the mid 90s would be easy to replicate at least to it's 2005 era standard using modern tech.
All the posts here suggesting that the thing that is needed is some technical advantage, or a business model, or a niche, are all true, but miss the point; a competitor that actually beat Google due to one or more of those "ingredients" would simply be acquired by Google, or crushed in the marketplace with due application (mostly fairly, prima facie) of Google's warchest (which may be inherently unfair).
Managing to grow enough in an unappreciated search niche while staying under the radar in order to better withstand that kind of eventual attention seems unlikely. Targeting a segment that Google has been burned on (like social search) may help, but that probably just draws attention from a different MANGAM.
Eventually, someone will be both smart and lucky enough to carve out some of the search space, but don't hold your breath, it is going to take so much luck it won't be soon, and may look accidental.
That's a shortsighted view because it would imply that the quality of search doesn't have any bearing on their success. I highly doubt any Googler would agree with that. Especially not the ones who have been working on search specifically.
Because right now there are only 2 companies in the world with sufficient technical chops to build a competent end-to-end modern search engine. It's a HARD problem. No startup can do it.
There's a very high minimum technical bar for successfully competing with Google in search, and then a mountain of brand awareness and user inertia on top of that.
Google themselves have identified ways to make search better. Why text based search? Why not explore searches in a more interactive way? How about searching based on your existing thoughts and ideas? How can we make search work if you don't have a browser?
You don't need to compete with all of Google to succeed in the search arena. It is sufficient to capture 0.01% of their market to make a couple of startup founders successful.
And google wasn't the first to invent search. The "First Mover" advantage is overrated in many cases.
Frankly, I'd be worried if there wasn't competition in your particular niche. Either you have stumbled on something truly revolutionary (unlikely) or the niche is just too small to support more than a one-man company. So, competition is good.
There are still other search engines and were many more prior to "google" becoming a verb. They won over those because their search results were faster/better. Yet there is no barrier to entry in websearch. As seen with DDG, some people value privacy higher so they have a niche.
I think the real reason why nobody really tries to compete is not upfront money or techinical issues, but that nobody can think of a way to monetize successfully while attractively differentiating themselves from google search.
That competitor simply doesn’t exist yet, and I think that’s because no one has figured out how to beat Google at search (which is why I think real ingenuity is required).
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