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Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?

#11
google doesn't make money off "search". you don't pay them to click the search button. Google gets paid when people pay for you clicking on those ads (or viewing them with doubleclick). If the money that is spent on those ads+clicks is spent elsewhere that's the worst thing that could happen to Google.

Search share matters, because that share is matched with ad inventory being filled. If that inventory isn't filled, but they are still high in search shares, it doesn't matter. Odds are this won't happen though. Here's what is worrisome to me though:

Referral traffic is a good indicator of where things are going. Less and less traffic is coming from search referrals, and more and more is coming from social networks. If the paid referrals follow suit with the organic referrals , then Houston has a problem.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?

#12
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I don't think advertising is going to be able to sustain Google indefinitely. As more tech-savvy users get on the web, their tolerance for advertisements will dwindle, along with advertisers' return. Google probably knows this, which is why they've moved into other markets like Android and Google's office tools. As far as search goes, I think they're either going to be king forever as we know it, or a 'better' search…

However, Android isn't a direct moneymaker. Android is just a way to ensure that they make money off mobile search. aka advertising.

Android is actually a way to keep Apple from dominating, and to keep other mobile devices open.

Google knows it dominates certain services like search, so it can use Android to make sure other devices stay open in order to compete against it. This forces them to let people choose and Google knows more often than not that choice will be for Google services. For example if Android allows Google talk, then Apple will become tremendously pressured to do the same because it's supposedly a really useful feature.

Android forces others to be more open, Google dominates, therefore more open means more customers for Google, more eyes looking at Google ads, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?

#13
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How about Microsoft including an ad blocker in the next Windows Update.

True, that would really hurt them. I can't even immediately come up with any reason why they couldn't do that, ad blockers are a very legit piece of software after all. Given how much sense this makes, what's been stopping MS from doing it so far?

Remember the anti-trust party that was started when Microsoft started giving away a free browser in competition with Netscape? That would be nothing compared to the storm that would emerge if Microsoft tried to directly attack AdWords from its still-a-convicted-monopolist position with an action like that.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?

#14
I think Google's biggest risk is in not owning enough of the most important corpora of web content which are getting created today: social information. The Internet is being reinvented as a network of people instead of just a network of publications. Facebook and Twitter are leaders in owning this people-content, but not really in searching it effectively yet. Even though Twitter is viewable (i.e. crawlable) and open, they still have proprietary data which could provide the best overall understanding of the information and relationships which flow through the Twitter platform.

The technology of web search continues to get commoditized today. Google is quite good at it, but Bing/Yahoo still do alright. Whoever provides a differentiated and important corpus of content for some fraction of web searches (i.e. social search or something like "real-time" or news) has the potential to capture the search behavior across all queries. Users only want to type searches into a single search box on the web.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?

#15
My take is there is a yet a better way to search the Internet. We are still looking at search as a keyword driven application. Which is not the optimal approach to search. Though no one can argue that google give decent results to most of the searches you key-in. Search can be more intelligent and personalized as everyone expects a different result to the keywords "will apple fall".

If search can be made personal and more of a 1:1 activity that will go wrong with Google.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?

#16
post #3
post #2

How about Microsoft including an ad blocker in the next Windows Update.

True, that would really hurt them. I can't even immediately come up with any reason why they couldn't do that, ad blockers are a very legit piece of software after all. Given how much sense this makes, what's been stopping MS from doing it so far?

Ad blockers create an unlicensed derivative work of the copyrighted works that are received, and they could likely be sued for that.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?

#17
I've pondered that very question off and on for several years. I don't know what the "worst" thing would be but some places where I think there are clouds (pun intentionality uncertain) on their horizon - in no particular order:

1) Culture fail: leading to dithering and waste that swamps the ship. Until a recent few years, Google hired and operated like Larry and Sergey's late night bull session dream: hiring "people like them", creating outrageously extravagant perks (like grad school life on steroids with high pay), using the "20% free time" rule to implement a kind of AI search for business ops, etc. They over-hired. They lacked coherent focus. They became a perpetual ego-stroke for the boys at the top. They built an arrogant and self-validating culture. They developed a culture that is often snobbish beyond accomplishment. On and on. They even had a "uniquely theirs" house style for interior decorating. Historically those elements are a recipe for a company that at some point seizes up and becomes incapable of fighting in the markets (c.f., e.g., the collapse of SGI whose former campus, ironically, is mostly occupied by GOOG). Under Schmidt, et al. in recent years this appears to be starting to be reined in but I'm not convinced yet the professional management is making advances beyond shoring up results quarter by quarter - I don't see the new, customer-centric culture yet.

2) Collapse of advertising. Advertising can collapse out from under Google in at least three, plausible ways. First, some other content delivery medium comes to dominate as the place where effective advertising goes. Google can't be everywhere at once (not even Google) and, frankly, I think the big market for Internet advertising is going to look a lot more cable TV than web surfing. Second: a new market maker. As technological opportunities to place ads change, ad placement will drift away from what you can build on a search engine to more targeted placement. Right now it's cheap and easy to put some space in your content in Google's market - Google is a market maker taking a cut. As mass consumption of content condenses to a smaller number of content providers - providers better equipped to make sophisticated sales of their ad properties will emerege (e.g., e.g., content providers who do more than add links and declare a few keywords). New market makers will enter and take Google's margin on ads to $0 (in the limit). Third, on-line advertising as a paradigm may get severely shaken by its poor performance (for most advertisers) in bad economic times along with alternatives. An alternative I think likely to work, for someone, is the request-driven marketing paradigm. If I need to or want to buy X, typing search terms into a search engine seems a painfully indirect and horrible way to go about it. Instead, in any large market, I want domain-specific heuristics to connect me to the general search thing of "what consumers are saying" and connect me to the ad placement thing in the sense of domain-specific searching through ads. Ads on such a "decision engine" (!) should ultimately be based purely on actual sales commission, not CPMs (though even commissions will be a pretty small slice - perhaps bundled with on-line transaction handling service).

3) Misplaced capital investment. On the one hand, Google makes a plausible play to build their massive manufacturing plants for commodity computing (their newest generation "data centers"). On the other hand, if their closed, arrogant culture and over-reliance on ads causes them to fail to monetize those centers well they may wind up being left holding the bag where they have to sell of to someone who knows how to make money off of them. They seem well on their way to failing hard on those data centers by trying to monopolize what system software runs on them.

In general, you pretty much know that something is going to take them down, at least if history is any evidence. They wound up, a few years back, outrageously overcapitalized. Not just over-valued but actually over-capitalized. History shows that no management team in that situation - the extreme outlier in capitalization - is ever competent to invest the money flows wisely enough to keep it up.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?

#18
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Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, that would really hurt them. I can't even immediately come up with any reason why they couldn't do that, ad blockers are a very legit piece of software after all. Given how much sense this makes, what's been stopping MS from doing it so far?

Remember the anti-trust party that was started when Microsoft started giving away a free browser in competition with Netscape? That would be nothing compared to the storm that would emerge if Microsoft tried to directly attack AdWords from its still-a-convicted-monopolist position with an action like that.

Agreed, but Microsoft could probably delay things for long enough to hurt Google sufficiently. It might be enough simply to auto-install it, hook customers on ad blocking, pay the fine, then send out a patch to make it opt-in only.

My guess is that at the moment it seems that the DoJ really has its eyes on Google, and Microsoft doesn't want to pull a stunt like this and distract them.

Re: Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google?

#20
I think we don't know the answer. 10 years ago few would imagine Microsoft not being a tech leader. 30 years ago few would image that PCs would replace IBM mainframes for most of the computing tasks. 150 years ago few imaged computing machines exists.

There are always something out of left field that knock dinosaurs on the head and flip them over. Unfortunately we never know what that will be until it hit the dinosaurs.

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