The world needs more search engines

We're here for curious conversation. The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Google Search is pretty well embedded into Android. You can use Baidu or Yandex or Bing / DuckDuckGo on an Android phone, but there's substantially more friction. Considering mobile is now more than 50% of search traffic and Android is 80% of devices, that's close to 40% of all searches basically going to Google for free.

Combine that with the fact that Google is embedded into Chrome -- which is used by ~67% of web traffic -- and there's SOME friction to using a different search engine:

You have to set your default to a different search engine, or go directly to that page, rather than just type into your URL bar -- like most people do.

It's not hard to see that Google has a huge advantage.

search isn't a naturally monopolistic market, because although there are some initial high fixed costs, much of those costs can be roughly scaled with size. there aren't really any other significant barriers to entry.

marginally but noticeably better search results (e.g., pagerank) did provide an early advantage for google, which is how it established its monopoly over time in the first place (combined with the ad auction model from overture, which gave it economic & political might), but that advantage has eroded with its lack of focus on search. google also has a giant suite of data gathering products but it's not clear that those provide a true competitive advantage in search (again, search results aren't much better than the competition).

the other interesting characteristic of search is that its competition isn't necessarily zero-sum. a user might do the same search on multiple search engines, providing each competitor with a full marginal revenue opportunity, rather than only one competitor winning the business (as in classic competition).

because of all this, i'm neutral on the breakup argument but am bullish on the "increasing competition" argument for search.

We will also be sharing more details on the process on data collection in the blog posts scheduled in the next 3 days. Of course, you don't need to trust what we say, all the code used for collecting data is open-source for transparency and auditing: https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser-core

Lastly, privacy policies are legally binding documents, and we take the law very seriously. We are located in Germany, where privacy laws are as tough as they get (e.g. GDPR was loosely just a re-wording of the existing data protection directive in Germany).

Others disagree, including Google Chief Economist Hal Varian, who said (in 2008)[1]:

“Scale is pretty critical [because] search technology exhibits increasing returns to scale.”

Or Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President of Product Management and Marketing: “So more users more information, more information more users, more advertisers more users, more users more advertisers, it’s a beautiful thing."

Or Eric Schmidt: “Scale is key. We just have so much scale in terms of the data we can bring to bear.” “We are a company that operates at scale . . . trust me it is a scale company.” “We think search is about comprehensiveness, freshness, scale and size for what we do. It’s difficult for [Microsoft] to copy that.”

It seems obvious to me that internet search has both economies of scale and network effects, both classic barriers to entry.

[1] http://fairsearch.org/fact-checking-google-scale-is-a-barrie...