61–70 of 169 posts
We have discussed recently a huge issue preventing new Google-like web crawling competitors from emerging :
If you're not GAFAM(-like), and so aren't whitelisted, then anti-spam/DDoS filters like Cloudflare will simply prevent your crawler from working !
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…
> 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.
In related news, DuckDuckGo has gone up ~10m DAU in the last month (~12.5%) and has gone up ~30m average DAU since January (~60%). [0] [0] https://ddg.gg/traffic
DDG doesn't have its own search engine though.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/du...
Its primary SERPs are baased on Bing and Yandex.
(I'm a heavy long-term DDG user myself.)
> 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…
He argues since returns are distributed by a power law, more due diligence and fewer invests make more sense for VCs.
> 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…
In related news, DuckDuckGo has gone up ~10m DAU in the last month (~12.5%) and has gone up ~30m average DAU since January (~60%). [0] [0] https://ddg.gg/traffic
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?
At the time that Google entered the market, there were at least 16 other search engines in existence [1] and all Google did was search. They had the smallest front page of any of the search engines at the time. It was very refreshing, and Page Rank turned out to be incredible at returning results but the "making money" thing was still very unclear at the time. I seem to recall they wanted to sell out to Yahoo for $10…
Using a different definition of Google than TFA : We have discussed recently a huge issue preventing new Google-like web crawling competitors from emerging : If you're not GAFAM(-like), and so aren't whitelisted, then anti-spam/DDoS filters like Cloudflare will simply prevent your crawler from working !
I recall last time i set up my own mail server that it was very hard to do it in such a manner that emails from it were not automatically listed as spam
> 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…
Where is Microsoft?