Ask HN: How To Dethrone Google?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7705992

by fumar • 12 years ago

28 31 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Would it be systematic? For example, would a company have to compete in the search space first. Would that even be the best avenue to become the world's largest data aggregator?

hershel• 12 years ago

In general you dethrone companies by offering better or cheaper products. In the case of Google, the product is sold both to advertisers and to consumers so each case should be examined.

With regards to consumes, you'll have to offer better since you can't offer cheaper than free. But Google is motivated to offer better service so it'll be extremely complicated. One kind of potential better would make search so much better that people won't press on ads - which Google isn't interested in, so they might not offer such service, so you might have an opening there.

Another option is to attack the adversity side :find a huge ads inventory and create a service more efficient and cheaper than Google. But that's extremely hard because on top of advertising space you need better data than Google.

jeffmould• 12 years ago

Quick answer it would be a tough battle that would require significant amounts of cash backing.

The "play dirty" approach. Use the same technique used to dethrone Microsoft years back. Right or wrong, Microsoft was called a monopoly for including IE within Windows. What is so different now with including Chrome within Android? What has changed that nobody has the same fight in them to take that battle on.

gizmo686• 12 years ago

Google does not have a monopoly of Android (let alone smartphones). Also, Chrome has not been included in any version of Android I have used.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 12 years ago

Google will dethrone itself, probably not as quickly as say Xerox, but I think it will [0].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction

chillingeffect• 12 years ago

1. Use DuckDuckgo for searching. 2. Use Yahoo (or anything else) for email. 3. Install Adblock. 4. Pass it on.

That will deprive them of 99% of their revenue.

fumar• 12 years ago

It does deprive them of their search ads on the Google landing page. But, what about Google Maps/Android/YouTube? Or any of other data collection services they offer. It would also take a large unison effort by consumers to change their search habits.

sharkweek• 12 years ago

I have given this some thought in the past -- the only analogy I can really think of is comparing it to trying to compete with Amazon

Companies that try to go directly head to head against Amazon (Overstock, Buy) end up meddling along unable to really gain any traction.

The ones that actually do compete with Amazon are the scrappy niche ecommerce sites. The ones that can hyper-target their marketing efforts and deliver a far superior and more engaging experience. I used to work for a company that sold specialty products and we didn't have much trouble competing with Amazon when we offered things like really detailed guides, fun product videos, unique and tailored buying advice, etc. Things that don't scale...

I think what we could eventually see more and more of when it comes to competing with Google will be niche search engines. For example, despite Google's flight search, Kayak still provides a far superior experience. Google can't effectively scale their search results the same way a hyper focused and scrappier company can.

There are a lot of verticals that could eventually begin to chip away at Google's market share moving forward. It will continue to get tougher for Google to compete in each of them.

The natural roadblock of course being initial branding to the point where people stop going to Google to find you, instead opting to go directly to your site to search (no easy task).

ryderm• 12 years ago

I find Google Flights to be much better than Kayak, and so have the couple people I've talked to about the difference. What do you like more about Kayak?

smartera• 12 years ago

Other than flexible dates and more search options, Kayak has direct search links to the airlines. Google flights (while having brilliant map search) asks you to call a travel agency and in many cases the price was not as accurate as Kayak

orky563• 12 years ago

Since you brought up Amazon, I thought I would share Andy Dunn's (Founder of Bonobos) article on competing with Amazon. https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/d233f02d52a5 The article concludes that at some point you are inevitably going to go head-to-head with Amazon and their business already has scale to take advantage of many opportunities. Where they are weak or have chinks in their armor, they have made great acquisitions in terms of functions (e.g. customer service via Zappos) and verticals (e.g. baby products via Diapers.com/6pm via female accessories, etc.).

paulbaumgart2• 12 years ago

Buy Oculus, create a VR world that replaces the Web, sell targeted ads in this VR world that convert better than AdWords.

calbear81• 12 years ago

The Oculus angle is interesting but what were the lessons learned from the failure of second life? Targeted ads in the real world don't hold a candle to AdWords because of purchase intent and context.

paulbaumgart2• 12 years ago

The main lesson learned from Second Life is that a VR world needs to satisfy real needs for it to get widespread adoption. High-fidelity socializing across physical distances is my best guess for the first such "real need."

The purchasing intent part is a good question. People use Google search for product/service research, which is where the purchasing intent comes from. The question is, could this research be done better in an immersive VR world?

arh68• 12 years ago

First you'd want to steal their traffic, then you'd want to steal their customers.

You're going to want a few things: a free modern webmail app, a fast & useful map application, a good search tool of course. Reinvent Adwords/Adsense. Throw in a private social network app, make iOS/Android versions of everything, and just try not to run out of runway. ;)

EDIT: oh and write a modern OS for a vast assortment of wireless mobile communication devices. And make sure manufacturers can chop-shop your OS to their liking. Then you'll need to rewrite your iOS/Android code, of course.

sunir• 12 years ago

In general, you can't dethrone a blue chip company. All you can do is position yourself so you have the opportunity to take advantage of any major mistakes they make or market shifts against their favour.

In software, the market often shifts because the platforms change fairly frequently. e.g. Mainframe to PC to Web to Mobile.

lbarrett• 12 years ago

I agree. If search ever becomes less important (e.g. voice stuff like Siri takes over), then Google will struggle.

Google management is intensely aware of that, which is why they're investing so heavily in voice search, wearables, etc. It's not to mainly grow their market, but rather to keep from being stuck in a shrinking one.

Apple is also intensely aware of Google's vulnerability, which is why they're developing things like Siri and maybe even wearables.

orky563• 12 years ago

Google has publicly admitted they did not recognize the emergence of social. Despite their size and resources, their size, culture, and business process prevented them from capitalizing on it sufficiently well enough to prevent Facebook from practically owning social for the past 5 years.

lifeisstillgood• 12 years ago

If you enter a race, and chase after the fastest runner, you will find you are always at least a step behind.

Instead concentrate on your race, choose your own route, your own pace. The fastest runners may take a wrong turn - and had you been following them you would have taken that wrong turn also.

There are plenty of people ready to prevent obvious market abuses, and we have yet to even glimpse the shape of the world of tomorrow. Focus now on the problems for which we know the shape of the solution, poverty, war, famine, medicine and worry about Google and Big Data when we know what we want it to look like.

orky563• 12 years ago

On mobile, Facebook is looking to own the majority of the apps on your home screen regardless of whether it has the explicit Facebook brand or is under Instagram/WhatsApp/etc. On Android, you still have your first party apps and on iOS your browser homepage is most likely Google.

On desktop, native applications fell by the way side as websites and web apps have become more powerful. Google is your initial connection from the browser (Chrome), to search, to a website (Google Analytics), and to their ads. They own your workflow and thus habits.

On mobile, native apps are more popular. The device (Android), app store (Android Market), app, and ads still have Google influence but definitely not as much as on the desktop. Companies like Flurry have great offerings for app analytics and ads are fragmented among a ton of companies.

Google needs to think less in terms of multi-platform and more in terms of mobile only. If you're mobile only and are capturing market share quickly, Google will be jealous.

graycat2• 12 years ago

Just for the search part, should be easy enough: Why? Because Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go, etc. search totally sucks for over half, say, ballpark 2/3rds, of the (nearly all safe for work) content on the Internet, searches people want to do, and content they want to find. So, build something good for the other half+ or 2/3rds. Then could be maybe a little bigger in search than Google but nothing in phones, self-driving cars, video glasses, etc. Then move a little into Google's part of search and, thus, 'dethrone' them. Tough really to kill them off because for a narrow part of search they are quite good and tough to improve on.

Version 1.0 of the software is written and being tested and polished.

Would anyone here like to see an announcement here of going live?

ddorian43• 12 years ago

why does it suck for the 1/3 ?

graycat2• 12 years ago

Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go, etc. do not suck for their 1/3rd. Instead they are from something up to okay up often quite good up to excellent.

Recently they handle some special cases in cute, special ways but for most of their core work are still basically an old library card catalog subject index with the results sorted by a gross popularity measure. Net, their technique can work quite well when looking for content based mostly on just text, possibly from metadata, and where the user has a list of key words/phrases that accurately characterize the content. In that way they grabbed their 1/3rd.

read• 12 years ago

The way to dethrone Google isn't to steal their traffic. It's to dampen their ads.

You don't win with a frontal attack. It's a better strategy to come in from the side, or even do the opposite of Google.

Make browsers hide Google's ads, or show yours instead, and you control advertising. You can make a browser plugin that shows ads only based on user preferences. For example something like AdBlock, but putting advertising money to users' pockets rather than Google's.

segmondy• 12 years ago

If you can find a way to get people to view ads, click on them. You can eat some of Google's food. It doesn't need to be search. Google is an ad company in search clothing.

joshfenmore• 12 years ago

There are a few possibilities but the easiest one is to come up with something that would radically change the way we interact with the web.

I say, the first company to create a True AI will dethrone any company on the market with ease. Or a company coming up with a product for a totally different market and dominating it and then after capturing users, offering features of other competing companies like FB is doing now. You need a really Big Buzz as well.

I am usually able to predict with a 95.4% accuracy some parts of the future ( no arrogance intended) so I strongly believe one of these things will happen in the near future.

31reasons• 12 years ago

True AI will dethrone IP of entire humanity. It will be interesting times when (human intelligence) << (machine intelligence) and you get machine intelligence for free.

joeclark77• 12 years ago

Google does a thousand things, but only one of them makes any money -- advertising. If somebody (e.g. Bing) is able to capture a bigger share of eyeballs, or if somebody (e.g. Facebook) finds a way to target ads better so that people will be more likely to click on them, or if somebody (e.g. you!) finds a way to solve the fraudulent-clicks problem (the enormous elephant in the room), then Google will see its revenue stream dry up. And when it happens, it will happen FAST.

lugg• 12 years ago

I dont think the seach space is necessary. As long as you can attack their advertising income you would have them by the balls. Without search you might run into trouble serving up your ads.

I think the most likely point of failure for them and pretty much all american tech businesses is the developing world markets especially those which run in different languages. Whatsapp pointed this out and now alibaba has confirmed it.

vijucat• 12 years ago

Google as a whole : I don't know. But I suppose Google Search can be rendered useless when when an NLP engineer creates a website generator whose content is indistinguishable from human-generated content, i.e., when the Turning test is passed as far as static website content is concerned.

What will happen at that point is that a million SEO idiots will create a trillion spammy websites and blogs that the Google Search engine, or rather the Page Rank algorithm, cannot handle. Every Google search returns 90% junk, interspersed with a few genuine search results. The Internet will becomes a Graffiti filled ghetto, impossible to auto-index and we will be forced to go back to the early Yahoo Directory days : manually created categories of real sites. Ironically, the otherwise-useless people who live off being online personas, aka famous bloggers, will have a centre-stage role to play in this new era : their web sites are the ones which are eminently trustable. They wll be the new institutions of online reputation, having been there from since the dawn of the century!

By that point, it is possible that gmail, et al will have lost their relevance, too, (WhatsMail?), and suddenly, Google does not have a single attractive eyeball outlet.

Ask HN: How To Dethrone Google?

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