> Google's origin story doesn't seem relevant to me, in that Google won because they made radical leaps forward in search quality, compute cost, and and compute scale.
That's the myth, but it's pretty far from the reality. Long before Google became such a dominant player, competing search engines had matched or exceeded its quality, compute cost, and ability to scale.
> All at a time when the web was exploding: only 19% of people used the web at Google's launch; by 2008 it was circa 70%.
Bingo. You nailed it. It turns out the search market was largely a distribution game. You wanted to be the search engine distributed to that massively growing audience, and Google did a great job of establishing itself as the first search engine presented to people.
> It seems to me that by 2008, there were fewer easy innovations lying around to make.
There's certainly been a lot of innovations in search since 2008, but nothing that was "disruptive". It's very hard to get more than a small percentage of people to change what search engine they use, and advertisers are not particularly interested in chasing that segment of the population.
> The way that other people have tried and failed since points that way too, as Google's market share is even larger now than it was in 2008.
Yeah, I really have to scratch my head at how people look at the empirical evidence and think that in 2008 it was a mistake to recognize the losing position competitors were in.