This article is completely missing the point of what makes Google successful. It might have been having a better product that helped them at first, but right now the single most important factor keeping people coming back to Google is: habit.<p>Everyone is used to going to Google to search. Heck, you often hear people use the word google instead of search. This habit is hard to break. Switching to the competitor is not just a few keystrokes away. It takes breaking the habit of reaching for Google whenever I need to search.<p>It takes more than a slightly better product for folks to break this kind of habit. It's the same reason why Google has trouble competing with established search engines in other countries, even if Google has better results.<p>When Google came out it was a LOT better than everyone else, so people switched. Now the competitors are barely catching up to Google, or at best making incremental advances over Google: not enough to get people to switch.
'Google has been searching the web for nearly 10 years, which is far longer than our major competitors.'<p>As far as I know Yahoo has been around for just as long as Google. Cool article though.<p>Side note: I think it's cool that both Google and Yahoo came out of projects started by Stanford students.
"Supply side economies of scale" - Google must enjoy extraordinarily low costs per hardware, given the sheer amounts they keep. Based on their volume, their discounts must be at least around 90%. I wouldn't call that a "reasonably small scale".<p>"Lock-in" / "Network effects" - I would argue that both come into play by the sheer fact that almost all web sites are being optimized towards the way Google's algorithms (are supposed to) work.
Once again Google plays down the significance of the PageRank patent. Is search amongst the giants really as similar as he says here? I know that Google has had to do a lot of tricks to avoid gaming of PageRank, but isn't PageRank still the core?