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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?

#91

Post by david927 »

astine wrote: post #90
david927 wrote: post #86

But we can never imagine what's next. When they said, "What's the worst that could happen to IBM?" No one would have been taken seriously if they said, "A tiny little computer that sits on your desk." Google is king of search as it's done now. I've personally seen a startup that can do a very new type of search. Who knows if this will be the "little computer that sits on your desk" but what we do know is that somethi…

* When they said, "What's the worst that could happen to IBM?" No one would have been taken seriously if they said, "A tiny little computer that sits on your desk."* What if they had said: "A change in the market that they fail to adequately forsee and plan for"? That's what will kill Google too.

And with all the technologies and companies that are gunning for them, how can they possibly "adequately foresee and plan for" the one which will be their successor?

So in other words, the main poster's question is a bit like saying, "What's the worst illness I'll get this Winter? I don't see anyone I could catch the flu from."

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

#92

Post by DougBTX »

rubinelli wrote: post #89
justinsb wrote: post #2

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

Do you remember that one time when Microsoft tried to add "smart tags", keyword-based links that showed up as squiggly lines? Do you remember the uproar, even though there was a simple op-out mechanism, and how quickly they dropped the whole idea? That would be nothing compared with a bundled ad blocker.

There is a similar feature in IE8 called "Accelerators", but with less uproar.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/features/...

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

#93

Post by bh23ha »

They could go public, discounting the benefits of staying a private founder run company like SAS, and instead going for the quick pay-off of an IPO.

Then the usual pressures for quarterly results would slowly eat away at their "don't be evil" motto.

Imagine what that would be like!

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

#94

Post by frig »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #16
bemmu wrote: post #3

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?

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

This cute legal theory hasn't been tested at web scale to my knowledge (closing down shop due to threat of lawsuit != the theory is tested, just that the depth of someone's wallet has been tested and found wanting).

What makes it curious in the web context is the following: say we can decompose the transmitted web page into the "content" and the "ads".

It is occasionally the case that the full ad content is directly embedded in the transmitted work but that is not the norm; far-and-away the most typical setup is:

- the content is transmitted as part of the page

- the ads are transmitted as scripts embedded in the page; the ads are thus not directly transmitted but if the receiving user's browser operates in a particular fashion than those scripts will execute and insert the actual ad-content into the page in a way the user can see it

If an ad-blocker works by stripping out javascript there is a smidgen of a derivative-work argument here.

If, instead, the ad-blocker works by altering the operation of the javascript interpreter (eg: leaving it unable to connect to the ad server) then nothing in the combined content+ads has been changed by the ad blocker.

If the ad-creating javascript were somehow involved in protecting the content (eg: the web page is transmitted "encrypted"; the page's javascript is waiting for a key to be transmitted in the ad content before decrypting the page content) then you might be able to work up a DMCA anti-circumvention claim, but your user experience would be so terrible it probably wouldn't make economic sense to do this.

All that said: an "ad-blocker" program is safe so long as it has substantial non-infringing uses.

Given the vast range of computers in use (in terms of cpu/ram/intended usage/etc) and given the vast range of hazards out on the internet (phishers/virii/etc.) a program that facilitates one or both of:

- "hostfile management" (blocking or restricting address to particular servers or ip ranges, etc.)

- "javascript management", adding additional checks or safety controls to how a browser interprets javascript

...is clearly going to have substantial non-infringing uses and should have a clean legal bill of health provided it is marketed as a generic security / performance solution and not an "ad-blocker".

Thus in the unlikely event that your legal theory vis-a-vis ad blocking is found to have teeth all that will be needed to continue ad blocking as before will be to rebrand the software as a more generic hostfile+javascript management with a way of sharing and importing configuration files from other users (allowing the users, then, to block ads themselves).

So as cute as it is this isn't a theory that will do much more than prevent any serious commercial ad-blocking venture from getting serious traction.

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

#95

Post by frig »

A major change is that good search algorithms or giant server farms could become sufficiently useless that a remote search engine makes no economic sense.

I don't see that happening in the near term but there are sci-fi scenarios in which it might happen; I'll sketch them so the pattern becomes clear.

EG:

- user's local storage and local cpu / throughput goes through a quantum leap and most users most of the time have locally cached copies of any content they might find useful, and the cpu power to search it all efficiently

- some quantum leap in bandwidth and other IT infrastructure means you can scour large chunks of the web directly in a short time period (eg: if everyone had terabit fiber-to-the-home and backend infrastructure were built out enough you could just download entire websites and full-text search them in the time it takes now to search @ google)

- some quantum leap in "software agents" and safely-executing remote code comes to pass and users send out long-lived, virus-like agents that constantly scour-and-index-the-web-for-them (executing at the site of the content host

This is basically a sci-fi "what-if" but as a thought exercise it gets the point across: right now it makes sense to have a centralized spider-and-archive-and-index-and-rank facility b/c the web is so huge and its pipes are so tiny compared to the # of end users and their individual computing capacities; a sufficiently radical shift in end-user capacities would make it moot. All probabilities for the above I'd put at .01% or something similarly lame.

Weaker versions of the scenario include anything that reduces the use of the web and consequently reduces the need for search services:

- next-generation rich-client driven chat + forums + social-networks become the dominant areas of internet activity (with the web relegated to low-grade entertainment, reference material, and shopping); users don't need external search engines for these activities and the service-operators' databanks are deliberately opaque to conventional spiders

- despite all the naysaying the semantic web takes off in some fashion, with enough widely-used, useful-enough ontologies and so forth that user-run agents and user-run spam filters and user-run relevance+credibility assessors can auto-navigate the web to find what the user is looking for without passing through a conventional search engine

...etc., which I'd move up to .1% or so likelihood.

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

#96

Post by llimllib »

dasht wrote: post #64
dmoney wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much were you willing to bet?

I'm potentially in on that bet, too, but what do we mean by public utility? It's a hard bet to decide the outcome of. -t

hence it was a gentleman's wager.

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

#97

Post by fauigerzigerk »

They might find themselves on the wrong side of the growth divide. Advertising money follows consumers ready to spend. US consumers are badly indebted. Most of the growth is going to be in emerging markets.

I get the feeling that people there may prefer their own national champions as they become more confident and less inclined to favor foreign brands.

The fastest growing regions often shape the fashions and trends. The people closest to those developments will recognise new trends first. So if there is some kind of paradigm shift in the making it may not be google who gets it first.

On the other hand I do remember the Japan hype of the 1980s. The japanese were supposed to take over everything until their own bubble burst. It's so hard to make predictions (at least about the future as they say)

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

#98

Post by Create »

natch wrote: post #71

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 ste…

Now you know why GOOG tried to play the card as being analogous to "Banking Secrecy", calling for immunity and special status. The issue is privacy.

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

#99

Post by Create »

Create wrote: post #62

It is the collapse of the US Empire. Which is bound to happen given History, like it or not, even if it is not allowed to fail (wall street). If you look at GOOG closely, you will realize, that it is not based on the purported commercial grounds at all. No single Company can: - map the moon as a "cool factor" - get all the UN translations for Bayes - inherit the Corona Project - hand out Tb of mail storage ...does yo…

thanks for factually contradicting my points. But true: I did not comment on the tubes (optic, u), nor the droids, neither the scholar (Terman)

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

#100

Post by nailer »

Tichy wrote: post #80
nailer wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but nobody was suggesting they didn't already do this, unlike whitebit with Microsoft, whom I was replying to.
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