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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?

#71

Post by natch »

How about...

The AI Google is growing becomes "too powerful to fail," a more insidious version of the "too big to fail" we hear from banking. The humans at Google lose control of their business as automation increasingly leaches more money from any business possible. It becomes harder and harder for the Google humans to unwind each ad transaction to determine whether the ad leads people into scams. Users start to step back from their engagement with Google. Alternatives begin to get traction. Humans at Google start to become alarmed. As a defense against the power of the AI, Google transitions over to a new system and allows the old data to fossilize. The new system allows for a higher degree of human input, though it's still not under human control. At this critical point, competitors move in and take away a lot of the market from Google.

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

#72

Post by asheniam »

How about click fraud getting wildly out of control? Google's profit is based solely off of online advertising. Click fraud is a never ending battle to undermine that business and Google has teams of phds hard at work to understand what is click fraud and what is not. Now if click fraud reached a point where advertisers can't trust the pay per click model, Google's revenues go poof.

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

#73

Post by nailer »

jrockway wrote: post #21
aaronblohowiak wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Fair use.

...would only cover a portion of the document.

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

#74

Post by nailer »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #51
eugenejen wrote: post #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 dinosau…

Umm...just FYI, Microsoft is still very much a tech leader.

Revenue from MS Office and Windows is great, sure. But those products are more than ten years old, and are increasingly being commoditized. What new technology has Microsoft led in the 2000s?

Surface isn't an invention. Portable media they lost out on bigtime. Web video they lost on. The CLR is innovative and great but more than 10 years old now.

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

#75

Post by dsplittgerber »

When Google doesn't find a way to stay on top of real-time search, social search and regular search - or doesn't find a way to combine those before a competitor does - they are going to fail. It's not a given that Google stays on top. Remember Yahoo, Altavista et al? Search is going to adopt to changing times and possibilities. And the #1 spot will be up for grabs again soon enough.

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

#76

Post by nailer »

btilly wrote: post #40
jjonte wrote: post #27

The 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 find…

I agree with you perfectly. However your point can stand on its own merits without needing to be impolite.

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

#77

Post by nailer »

whitebit wrote: post #58
dasht wrote: post #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…

Until recently, these were the exact reasons that I avoided GOOG stock. Nowadays, however, Google has a more immediate problem: Bing. What would happen if Microsoft starts doing search deals with ISPs, portals, & mobile companies? Why would any company integrate Google search if Microsoft was willing to pay them to use Bing? Isn't this already happening with the Microsoft-Facebook and Microsoft-Yahoo deals?

Microsoft already pays ISPs to use IE and Microsoft search, and has done since the mid 1990s.

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

#78

Post by axod »

whitebit wrote: post #58
dasht wrote: post #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…

Until recently, these were the exact reasons that I avoided GOOG stock. Nowadays, however, Google has a more immediate problem: Bing. What would happen if Microsoft starts doing search deals with ISPs, portals, & mobile companies? Why would any company integrate Google search if Microsoft was willing to pay them to use Bing? Isn't this already happening with the Microsoft-Facebook and Microsoft-Yahoo deals?

Forcing people to use bing isn't really going to work IMHO.

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

#79

Post by axod »

bemmu wrote: post #3
justinsb wrote: 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?

Because ad-blockers are trivially simple to get past.

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

#80

Post by Tichy »

nailer wrote: post #77
whitebit wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until recently, these were the exact reasons that I avoided GOOG stock. Nowadays, however, Google has a more immediate problem: Bing. What would happen if Microsoft starts doing search deals with ISPs, portals, & mobile companies? Why would any company integrate Google search if Microsoft was willing to pay them to use Bing? Isn't this already happening with the Microsoft-Facebook and Microsoft-Yahoo deals?

Microsoft already pays ISPs to use IE and Microsoft search, and has done since the mid 1990s.

Google is also paying browser manufacturers to include Google search.
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