What Google Can't Copy (Easily)

http://duckduckgo.com/blog/what-google-cant-copy-easily.html

by epi0Bauqu • 17 years ago

74 43 17 years ago

alexandros• 17 years ago

I have immense respect for those working under google's shadow to create a better/different search experience. The article clearly shows that their entire product development strategy is built around what google does and does not. Although as history has shown, when these companies accomplish anything they usually get acquired rather than becoming individually successful. But I guess history can only take you so far and Google was once a search underdog. So good luck duckduckgo!

tomjen2• 17 years ago

Potentially they could change a lot even if they where acquired, since they could tip the balance of search and they would properly allow Microsoft to by them for $40 billion :)

josefresco• 17 years ago

I highly doubt Google has some master list of features already coded just waiting to launch when a competitor releases something similar. First that seems like a huge waste of time, but also it gives too much credit to Google in that they'd need to have all these ideas first. Just doesn't add up. I do think however that they do have the ability to, in a very short time frame bake up responses to competitive features. But I would imagine it would be more on-demand than off-the-shelf. Any ex Googlers here to comment?

epi0Bauqu7• 17 years ago

I think it is more that they are trying things all the time in a genuine desire to improve, but most of these don't get pushed live. Since they've tried most things internally over the past 11 years, it is highly likely they already have code that does more or less what competitors launch. Of course, I'd also like to hear something from real x-Googlers...

kscaldef2• 17 years ago

I'm an ex-Yahoo, and there were all sorts of things like this in the Research Lab.

sgk284• 17 years ago

When I was at Google the sheer number of crazy projects being worked on internally, whether or not for profit, was insane. Literally thousands upon thousands of projects. They are working on anything and everything, I think that is something that the competition really underestimates here.

This is why their parking lots have electrical sockets to plug your car into or why they released Lively (when I was there it was but a one man project that I saw at an internal techtalk). It's all things Googlers wanted to work on. They will work on anything they find interesting and they'll generally get the full support of the company (at least that's how it was in 2007).

Now I'm at Microsoft and the biggest change to me is how focused Microsoft is at executing very specific projects. The other big change is how many strengths Microsoft has that most of the world refuses to acknowledge. Microsoft gets a lot of bad press, but holy shit when they target something, they go for all or nothing. There is a drive internal to Microsoft unlike any I've seen... when they want something, they won't stop until it's theirs. They want blood.

gojomo• 17 years ago

It doesn't even have to be a matter of conscious strategy. Assume there are many, many creative people with many, many internal projects in many, many states of half-done-ness or neither-killed-nor-approved-for-rollout.

Any competitor launch immediately gives all similar internal projects a second look, by a larger group of reviewers. The people working on it get another burst of motivation. To release it, even in rough 'labs' form, now benefits from an additional 'news hook' and blunts any impression Google is not innovating.

It doesn't require a strategic plan, or large preemptive investment in ideas that are then intentionally held back -- it's just normal big-but-still-creative company dynamics.

numbchuckskills• 17 years ago

they do: it's called 20% time.

cousin_it• 17 years ago

Google can't copy features that would only work well on a small to medium site. Can't think of much more.

Also, Gabriel, your work is wonderful. Keep it up, you're an inspiration to me.

kscaldef2• 17 years ago

FWIW, Yahoo! Research Labs had a version of their search engine with "more/less commercial" sliders years ago.

GavinB2• 17 years ago

I tried DuckDuckGo as my primary search provider. While I liked some of their features, I couldn't live without maps integration (called universal search in this post).

Honestly, it would have been fine if they just forwarded me to google maps or mapquest.

epi0Bauqu7• 17 years ago

Thx for trying it. By maps integration, I assume you are referring to when Google displays a map when you type in an address or business name at the top of the results? I just want to make sure I understand exactly the use case.

unalone• 17 years ago

Yep! That's the ticket for me, at least.

GavinB2• 17 years ago

There are three basic use cases:

1) 123 main street wichita kansas -> should show me map or link that obviously takes me to a map

2) two addresses with the word "to" in between should offer me a link with directions

3) "restaurant" (or other business type) plus an address or zip code should take me to something like this: http://www.google.com/search?q=restaurant+11211&ie=utf-8...

These really only save a few clicks, but I love having one box which can answer pretty much any question. Google does a decent job with the mapping, but it's definitely possible to do better. Of course, correctly guessing what a searcher means is always a tricky challenge.

ramoq• 17 years ago

I find it hard to believe that anything is off limits to Google due to technical complexity

I somewhat disagree. There are some things, most likely due to technical complexity and cost/effort, that google provides at a low level of quality. ie. gmail search!!

dschobel• 17 years ago

While I agree Gmail search can be infuriating, how do you know it's a complexity issue that keeps it this way?

btilly• 17 years ago

I don't know if it is accurate, but http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850938 sheds a lot of light on why search might be the way it is.

seldo• 17 years ago

I really don't see how drastic changes are outside of Google's ability. Google (and Yahoo) can both bucket-test drastic interface changes to 1% or 0.01% of their audience, effectively simulating a small startup doing the same thing.

(Related: post-search deal with Bing, experimenting with user interface in this way is Yahoo's explicit strategy for competing in search.)

TheEcclesiast2• 17 years ago

Google can easily copy it, but a feature I'd like is a more convenient way to search within sites. The idea is expressed better in a picture : http://imgur.com/jRj89.png

nostrademons• 17 years ago

What's wrong with the site: restrict?

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+d...

TheEcclesiast2• 17 years ago

Nobody but power users understand this feature, and it is not convenient. Is your mother using site: restrict ?

lacker• 17 years ago

Google does put a site-search box in like that sometimes.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=imdb

mattmaroon• 17 years ago

"So they wait until either a) through bucket testing they are sure it is a good idea or b) a competitor adds a feature that users seem to like or the press makes a big deal about. They don't want any new search engine to really get a foothold so they need to react to these competitive feature launches lest a new search engine actually starts getting used :)"

I think that is wrong, and it's pretty much just the first one. Google has the scale to multi-variate test most things very quickly, and is long-term enough in their thinking that they aren't pushing a product just because a few blogs read by .0000000008% of their users are drooling over it.

They come up with ideas (some of which may be copies of competitors' ideas) test the hell out of them, and push the ones that work. End of story. I'd be surprised if they are more than marginally aware there are competitors to their search product.

Seems highly unlikely they've got lots of features just waiting on a post from a rinky-dink tech blog to incite them to launch.

epi0Bauqu7• 17 years ago

WolframAlpha, Cuil, and Search Wikia got a lot more press than just from "rinky-dink[y] tech blog[s]."

tokenadult• 17 years ago

Too bad so much of Cuil's press was about the failure of its launch. WolframAlpha is a good way to get most of the functionality of Mathematica for free, but for many informational searches Google still easily beats it. What's the advantage of Search Wikia over Google?

vaksel3• 17 years ago

which kinda proves the point...all that press, and noone cares about them now. The only recent launch is bing...but even that started out with millions of original microsoft users and then was fueled by a marketing budget bigger than a small country's GDP.

easyeboy2• 17 years ago

Also, this is really neat. Definitely something DuckDuckGo should look into. http://www.smallmeans.com/tools/siteflow/

patio113• 17 years ago

Google cannot copy your startup's attitude, most particularly if your startup's attitude is strongly opposed to facilitating the arrest and torture of Chinese dissidents.

If I had a search engine, I'd be strongly opposed to facilitating the arrest and torture of Chinese dissidents. Because after all, I think my American users would actually care pretty keenly on whether companies they do business with facilitate the arrest and torture of Chinese dissidents.

Say Google, what was your policy on that again?

vaksel3• 17 years ago

i think it comes to the bottom line, all the "causes" don't really mean anything. It's always the same 10,000 people protesting environmentalism, darfur, G20, care bears. And even those, majority will come back to Google a week later when the "boo Google" protests get boring and they'll switch to "boo Sponge Bob squarepants, a corrupt depiction of the scumbag capitalist anti-environmentalism"

The bottom line, is that Google doesn't want to lose a 1 billion person Chinese market over a bunch of hippies. Long term(20-30 years) it'll account for 70-80% of their revenue, turning the back on it now would be the dumbest thing for them to do.

patio113• 17 years ago

i think it comes to the bottom line, all the "causes" don't really mean anything.

I disagree -- Google reacts to bad PR. It is about the only external factor they react to, since they've got a de-facto monopoly on the Internet's license to print money combined with essentially no regulatory oversight, anti-trust issues, etc.

See, e.g., how quickly they killed their I-can't-believe-its-not-Campfire app when seven PR-savvy guys in a room in Chicago threatened them with being seen as the Goliath for a change.

moe• 17 years ago

American users would actually care pretty keenly

Looking at the market share figures I would say your argument falls apart at this point.

patio113• 17 years ago

Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google are indistinguishable with regards to their policies in this matter. A hypothetical startup which did not have or particularly want a presence in the Chinese market could differentiate on this.

Granted, they'd have to be pretty adroit about it, but it is a compelling PR story since it makes Google look like the giant, not-particularly-moral, profit-focused advertising firm that they are instead of the two dudes in a dormroom that they pretend to be (and probably actually seem themselves as).

easyeboy2• 17 years ago

DuckDuckGo could make better operators or custom search features that are easy to use.

epi0Bauqu7• 17 years ago

Care to elaborate on specifics?

Tichy• 17 years ago

"First, they can't easily make drastic changes to their results pages."

Maybe they can't change their main page, but they can easily launch variant pages that look like whatever they like. They already did so in several cases.

Everest• 17 years ago

People don't bookmark pages because search engines make it so easy to find content. So rather than bookmark the php manual page on date formatting, I'll just type php dates into Google knowing that it will pop up in the first ten results. However, I also notice that I regularly have trouble locating content this way when I go back for it. This is usually when I am looking for something very specific and forget the exact query string that generated that result.

On the other hand, there are times when I'm searching for a datapoint and am frustrated that Google keeps throwing the same links at me. I have to constantly hit "next" to get the results that I want.

I wonder if there is an opportunity for a search engine to heavily invest in either providing people with completely fresh info every time they query for something or provide them just the results they've seen before.

This is probably not relevant to Duck Duck Go but thought I'd throw it out there.

What Google Can't Copy (Easily)

Related Stories