Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why There Aren't More Googles (2008)

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 169 posts

Re: Why There Aren't More Googles (2008)

#51

Post by throwaways885 »

tangjurine wrote: post #38
bsder wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crazy idea was using commodity servers and set your infrastructure up so that you can just let them die and keep going. AltaVista, for example, ran on a couple of pretty beefy Alpha servers at the time.

Could you explain more? I'd love to hear about this

Search is a very intense application - battering hard drives and memory until it dies, so being able to buy cheap PCs made google financially feasible and scalable. Google wrote great software to run on top of cheap, commodity hardware.

Re: Why There Aren't More Googles (2008)

#52

Post by ffrr212 »

benlivengood wrote: post #4
adamsmith wrote: post #2

> I've tried to explain this to VC firms. Instead of making one $2 million investment, make five $400k investments. Would that mean sitting on too many boards? Don't sit on their boards. Would that mean too much due diligence? Do less. If you're investing at a tenth the valuation, you only have to be a tenth as sure. This turned out to be absolutely right, and the That said with the benefit of more hindsight I think…

> That said with the benefit of more hindsight I think the reason there are no more Googles is that FAANG has a stronghold on the largest technology markets. And the FAANGs are willing to pay very large amounts of cash to acquire promising startups. EDIT: Also why is it that the majority of the large tech companies are essentially marketplaces? Is there really that much friction in traditional markets (physical goods…

> And the FAANGs are willing to pay very large amounts of cash to acquire promising startups.

But I think FAANGs also drain the talent pool for startups by paying very high salaries (& partially equity) to employees such that startups have a hard time to competing on this level. At least it feels it's getting worse than, say, few years ago.

Re: Why There Aren't More Googles (2008)

#53

Post by brownbat »

PakG1 wrote: post #21
benlivengood wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That said with the benefit of more hindsight I think the reason there are no more Googles is that FAANG has a stronghold on the largest technology markets. And the FAANGs are willing to pay very large amounts of cash to acquire promising startups. EDIT: Also why is it that the majority of the large tech companies are essentially marketplaces? Is there really that much friction in traditional markets (physical goods…

I would say yes. Ronald Coase did some excellent work to explain how transaction costs get in the way of optimizing economic activity among and within firms. Traditional marketplaces would clearly have higher transaction costs than these newer marketplaces. Search costs are much higher, coordination costs are much higher, and data analysis is much harder. Tech has a huge advantage in making all three of these things…

I like the Coasean analysis. Now someone needs to build the Uber for unifying affected populations to demand rents for suffered negative externalities.

Re: Why There Aren't More Googles (2008)

#54

Post by Traster »

erik wrote: post #26
bertr4nd wrote: post #12

Something I don’t understand in this article is the “People won’t understand your ideas if they’re any good.” Like, the idea behind Google is, “Let’s make another search engine, but make it really good.” That’s not a crazy idea, is it? Was the problem that VCs thought existing engines were good enough and that Google’s wouldn’t be enough better to be worthwhile?

In the late 90's starting a new search engine would have seemed crazy to many. It was a competitive market, there were major incumbents, profit potential seemed low, and it wasn't obvious that search could be significantly improved upon.

It's kind of funny isn't it- starting a search engine in a really competitive market is crazy! Yet actually, I think that's a hell of a lot more enticing than starting a search engine today, where there's no competitive market, there's just Google.

Re: Why There Aren't More Googles (2008)

#55

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

unnouinceput wrote: post #45

Except there is another. It's called Chinese Google also know as Alibaba. And with EU regulations coming up I suspect another one will rise in Europe as well in next decade. Just give it time, Splinternet will happen and then each country will have its own Google.

>And with EU regulations coming up I suspect another one will rise in Europe as well in next decade.

lol, what?! Just because Europe loves to regulate itself to death so that the useless politicians can justify their salaries doesn't mean that will produce successful software companies. That's not how innovation works.

Just look at Russia, who despite having less wealth than the EU, has managed to produce its own Google in the form of Yandex. The EU has no Google of its own.

If we could have made our own Google we would have done it already, without regulations. But we can't. I mean, we could do it if we would put our minds and money to it just like we did with Concorde or Airbus but we're too cheap and ignorant to do it when we could just use and work for the OG Google from across the pond.

Increasing regulation in tech will only benefit the huge and bloated big consultancy corps and no way help with innovation.

Re: Why There Aren't More Googles (2008)

#56

Post by MaxBarraclough »

johbjo wrote: post #39

No. The reason there are few FANGS is that they are platform businesses, and the value of their services is proportional (or more?) to the size of their user bases. This means winner-takes-all. There were others, but they did not grow users as fast, so they lost. Another thing to point out is that while search and ads is Google's revenue, with chrome, gmail, android, etc they are achieving a form of lock-in. If anyon…

> they are platform businesses, and the value of their services is proportional (or more?) to the size of their user bases.

I don't have much to add here, but this is known as a network effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

Re: Why There Aren't More Googles (2008)

#57

Post by BlueTemplar »

mtgx wrote: post #29
eismcc wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also have a stronghold on a lot of the talent that would make the next big thing.

As in they buy them out. There should be a more laws preventing this from happening for large corporations. We now see that Google Search is turning more and more to AI. Perhaps if Google didn't buy DeepMind, but some other smaller competitor did, they could've turned that into an advantage against Google. Either way, it was a loss for the market for DeepMind to be bought by Google instead of forcing Google to come-u…

No, companies that have billions in profit have grown too big : they can just use regulatory capture to ward off real threats.

The only thing that can be done is to prevent them from getting that big (economic incentives ? limited company life ?) or to shut them down completely (which needs enough popular support for a politician to do this kind of a risky move).

Re: Why There Aren't More Googles (2008)

#59

Post by multinational »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #55
unnouinceput wrote: post #45

Except there is another. It's called Chinese Google also know as Alibaba. And with EU regulations coming up I suspect another one will rise in Europe as well in next decade. Just give it time, Splinternet will happen and then each country will have its own Google.

>And with EU regulations coming up I suspect another one will rise in Europe as well in next decade. lol, what?! Just because Europe loves to regulate itself to death so that the useless politicians can justify their salaries doesn't mean that will produce successful software companies. That's not how innovation works. Just look at Russia, who despite having less wealth than the EU, has managed to produce its own Goo…

Google has 80-90% of the market share. In practical terms, they control if your website gets visitors or not.

If you throw Yandex in the ring, then Europe has several search engines

Qwant, a French search engine Mojeek, a search engine in the UK YaCy, p2p search

Koreans seem fond of Naveer. Chinese use Baidu

Re: Why There Aren't More Googles (2008)

#60

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

multinational wrote: post #59
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And with EU regulations coming up I suspect another one will rise in Europe as well in next decade. lol, what?! Just because Europe loves to regulate itself to death so that the useless politicians can justify their salaries doesn't mean that will produce successful software companies. That's not how innovation works. Just look at Russia, who despite having less wealth than the EU, has managed to produce its own Goo…

Google has 80-90% of the market share. In practical terms, they control if your website gets visitors or not. If you throw Yandex in the ring, then Europe has several search engines Qwant, a French search engine Mojeek, a search engine in the UK YaCy, p2p search Koreans seem fond of Naveer. Chinese use Baidu

Here's where you're wrong: Yandex is not just a search engine, it's the fifth largest search engine in the world(!) and is also an email provider, a social network service, a payment service provider, a smart assistant, a ride sharing service, a cloud provider, a ML/AI and autonomous vehicle researcher, a V.C. fund. Basically most if not all of what Google/FAANG is doing.

Which European company does all those things and at such a large scale? Having some random small search engines that nobody is using, funded and kept alive by EU grants just to show that "we can", is in no way comparable to the scale of Yandex.

Post reply on HN