I made a bet with a friend 5 years ago that by 2015, Google will be a public utility.
(This is also the worst thing that could happen to Google)
Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?
31–40 of 103 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?
#32A scandal related to personal data large enough to spook your average consumer. We're talking serious stuff, like records being sold to criminals or given to the government without a warrant. The only thing that could cause a user to get over the large cost of migration is a massive breach of trust. It doesn't even have to be related to search. A scandal involving Gmail or Google Voice would have a large impact on se…
> given to the government without a warrant.
It only barely registered with the general public when the telcos did it - why should Google be any different?
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?
#33It just seems vulnerable that despite the diversity of Google's products and services, they make basically all their profit from displaying [very relevant] ads.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?
#34They could bring Brad Lidge in to save the company.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?
#35Legal crackdown on monopoly claims.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?
#36The Semantic Web blossoms beyond the need to infer meaning from bodies of text. If the information on the web becomes more structured, structured beyond the need for Google. If web pages and web services were to all completely expose their information as RDF and embed rich metadata inside bodies of text the need for Google's fancy AI and Entity extraction would be none. Google's bread and butter is advertising. That…
Surely a company like Google, filled with a ton of smart people who deal with the web every day and have a little bit of free rein to go crazy with it, will have some idea of what to do when - or if - the Semantic Web ever takes off.
Sure, their immediate ad-driven revenue model might break, but I very much doubt this would be an overnight change, nor one Google is not already thinking about.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?
#37A scandal related to personal data large enough to spook your average consumer. We're talking serious stuff, like records being sold to criminals or given to the government without a warrant. The only thing that could cause a user to get over the large cost of migration is a massive breach of trust. It doesn't even have to be related to search. A scandal involving Gmail or Google Voice would have a large impact on se…
> given to the government without a warrant. It only barely registered with the general public when the telcos did it - why should Google be any different?
because google's brand is all about google being different.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?
#38The Affero GPL.
If it becomes popular, it closes the server side loophole and Goog would have to either give up on using new open source software or else open source their codebase.
That's why Chris DiBona at Google Code won't let it on their servers. Search "Affero GPL" for more stuff around that.
Ps: if I worked at MS and wanted to destroy Goog, I would go around offering hackers $100k or $1M to switch their licenses to Affero GPL. Basically the size of the offer would be proportional to the userbase.
With a $100m (= size of Bing's marketing budget) you could do a lot of damage.
Note that this doesn't even get us started on how if Ballmer had any sesnse he'd have built in adblock for adwords bundled into IE9 and turned on by default as a feature.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?
#39what about P2P search? or essentially a distributed search engine (or engines) running on volunteers' servers? Google's good fortune for now is that search is not yet a commodity. Can distributed search engines make search a commodity?
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?
#40The Semantic Web blossoms beyond the need to infer meaning from bodies of text. If the information on the web becomes more structured, structured beyond the need for Google. If web pages and web services were to all completely expose their information as RDF and embed rich metadata inside bodies of text the need for Google's fancy AI and Entity extraction would be none. Google's bread and butter is advertising. That…
May I have some of what you're smoking?
The Semantic Web depends on having everyone who writes web pages also categorize them. Whenever you have 20 different people categorizing content you're going to get 20 different interpretations of what the semantics mean. The vision of a decent, consistent categorization emerging across the web is a pipe dream.
Furthermore the fundamental problem that Google solves is not finding content. It is narrowing in on worthwhile content. In a world filled with people pushing commercial content with a dubious value proposition, you can't depend on content creators to provide an accurate assessment of their quality. That's where Google comes in. They not only categorize, they rank data well enough that end users are happy to accept the results.