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Ask HN: Do you think there will be a full replacement to Google?

28 pointsby source99almost 10 years ago
Someone asked about a replacement for facebook.<p>I think a much more interesting questions is what will be the next replacement for google?

23 comments

simonhalmost 10 years ago
Google is really good at being Google. A drop-in replacement for Google would need to be better at being Google than Google is, and I don&#x27;t see that happening.<p>The way to compete with them is through asymmetric warfare. Compete in such a way that they can&#x27;t effectively fight back. For example pick off one (or a few) of their products and differentiate like crazy. Apple got stuck in a situation where they neede their own maps service. That&#x27;s cost the badly because they&#x27;re goign head-to-head, but at least they have the advantage of leveraging their ownership of the iOS platform. Meanwhile they&#x27;re trying to differentiate by using an aerial 3D view instead of streetview, and now coming out with a competing local search service to streetview without it being just a clone. Duck-Duck-go competes with Google Search on privacy. Facebook competed by being completely unlike anything Google produced at the time.<p>Trying to beat Google at their own game is a failing strategy. Microsoft tried it with Bing search and Bing Maps, but just can&#x27;t differentiate effectively. Look at how Apple competes with Microsoft. Received wisdom for decades was that Apple should make itself more like Microsoft to compete with them, but in the end their success has been based on what they do differently, not on what they do that&#x27;s the same.
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bigiainalmost 10 years ago
What do you consider to be &quot;Google&quot;? The search engine? Google Maps? The advertising company? Google Ventures? Heroku? GoogleDocs? Or the whole crazy self-driving cars, automatically launched wind turbine kites, GoogleWave, Project Loon, and every other successful or spectacular failure they&#x27;ve been involved in?<p>Will anybody ever &quot;own&quot; all the market slices Google currently plays in? I _very_ much doubt it.<p>Will the Google Search engine remain an effective monopoly? I doubt that too - I remember when Alta Vista was world-changingly amazing! I suspect Google have deeply entrenched themselves in the employment market for people being very smart about making search better, and the bar is way higher so I doubt it&#x27;s ever going to be a couple of compsci&#x2F;linguistics phd students who topple the industry (the way Alta Vista fell), but things like DuckDuckGo and Blekko exist - and no doubt other more academic and less well know ones too, it not impossible (in my opinion) that someone will roll out a &quot;instantly and obviously better than Google&quot; search engine one day.
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Osmiumalmost 10 years ago
It seems likely to me that the search engine will be replaced by personal assistant type services: you ask a question, and you get direct access to that knowledge. Whether Google will replace the search engine itself, or whether it&#x27;ll be another company, who knows.<p>I&#x27;m being <i>very</i> speculative, of course, but the way I look at it: we initially had web directories, where we&#x27;d look up categories to find websites we wanted. That wasn&#x27;t because we <i>wanted</i> directories, but because there wasn&#x27;t sufficient technology for a search engine. Now, we have search engines, but is that what we really want? In some cases, yes, but in most cases we often just want the first result, or even just some information that&#x27;s on that page. So why do we still use search engines? Because there isn&#x27;t sufficient technology for something better...at least not yet, but Siri and Cortana and Google Now are getting there. Eventually these conversational interfaces and the metadata behind them will become so good that the direct use of a search engine will become an edge case.<p>I think a better question might be how many years until Google replaces its homepage with Google Now (or something similar) instead of a search box?
flyfastalmost 10 years ago
The Search Engine?<p>Maybe not in the sense of &quot;A site where you enter text and find pages containing that text&quot;. Just like Microsoft Windows might never be replaced as the most popular Desktop OS. Desktop OS just become less and less important.<p>But certainly in the sense of &quot;A way to get answers to your questions&quot;. I expect computers to learn about the world and give answers directly. Just like image recognition software can tell you the answer to &quot;Does this image has tomatoes?&quot;. Software will be able to answer &quot;Do tomatoes grow in China?&quot;. Or answer &quot;Paint me an image of tomatoes in China&quot; the way Googles deep dream net can already &quot;paint&quot; lots of things [1].<p>It will be interesting how this turns out for &quot;content creators&quot;. When computers learn and become creative, there will be no more SEO :) Because your site will just be read and ingested by a bot and make it better to answer questions. No more clickt-hroughs to your website.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;deepdream" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;deepdream</a>
pantulisalmost 10 years ago
I think no one is going to beat Google, just the same as no one could beat Microsoft in desktop computing --at least in the enterprise.<p>What may -or may not- happen is that the web indexing business become less relevant that is today. You see, a lot of people think &quot;the internet&quot; is Facebook, or Whatsapp. Apple is trying to move publishers to its own garden. These movements all threaten Google&#x27;s web advertising business in some way or another.
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V-2almost 10 years ago
Everyone seems to assume that Google&#x27;s dominant position could only be undermined via free market competition.<p>In America, perhaps, but in whole-world perspective, not necessarily.<p>Google is having some anti-monopoly issues in European Union (not unlike Microsoft in the past), and Russia threatened to ban Google altogether.<p>They always had a hard time in China, too - their services being suspended or blocked from time to time, their market share decreased several times over the years.<p>So if we&#x27;re talking about &quot;what can happen in 10-20 years&quot;, then absolutely there is a possibility that Google&#x27;s world dominance gets crushed by governments which gang up against it at some point rather than by competitors. And replacements will just fill the void.
kdanialmost 10 years ago
Check out Searx: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;asciimoo&#x2F;searx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;asciimoo&#x2F;searx</a>
stephenralmost 10 years ago
It depends what you mean by &quot;Google&quot;?<p>The primary thing non-tech people think about Google is search, but Google&#x27;s primary (by a large margin) revenue is from it&#x27;s ad network.<p>So if we discount the other sectors of the company which are currently rounding errors in terms of general mind-share and revenue, we come down to search and ads.<p>Search I believe will become less dominated - I&#x27;m really happy to see the rise in popularity of things like DuckDuckGo, but I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if as others have said, device-linked services such as &quot;Search&quot; on iOS&#x2F;OSX or Microsoft powered devices, where they hook into a variety of services directly to provide common answers.<p>I&#x27;d love to see a result where we have less of these huge data-hungry monster companies like Google, Facebook, etc and more services&#x2F;products focused on user privacy and control.
harelalmost 10 years ago
I doubt it. To become Google you need a good few years of building up your IP and infrastructure. Google were very good at getting to be that big (biggest?) in a relatively short time and because they are so far ahead, anyone else will need not only to have better search, products (Android, Docs, Gmail, Self driving cars etc.) but also the infrastructure to match and exceed that of Google. By the time they get there, Google will be further ahead still. Perhaps in 20 years or so, the computing landscape would have changed so much that you&#x27;ll have the entire Google infra in your brain implant or something like that but with all that progress moving forward, so will Google. I&#x27;m pretty certain they are here to stay.
1arityalmost 10 years ago
Of course.<p>You really think we&#x27;re going to be searching for &quot;one version of truth&quot; forever?<p>Everyone thinks different, and a full replacement of Google will be a personalized search engine, matched to how you think, not how the &quot;average human&quot; (or the average AI) thinks.<p>The web is going to become what people make it, not what these companies tell us is their single authority version of the best user interface for everyone, or the best answer for everyone.<p>The future of the internet is not wikipedia, it&#x27;s augmenting our own biases enough that our egos aren&#x27;t catastrophically challenged every day while feeding ourselves just the right of to-each-of-us contrarian opinions to grow.<p>The internet is a giant exercise in expanding the collective human mind, so the idea that there will be these gigantic portals that serve &quot;answers&quot; based on a &quot;golden algorithm&quot; is at best, inappropriate for anyone but the hypothetical &quot;middle of the bell curve human&quot; and at worst, it&#x27;s a spiral of awful that converges on something really wrong.<p>Oh, hey! That&#x27;s what we already see with the internet. Millions of human minds connected for the first time in an elaborate feedback loop -- we get these non-adaptive non-linear emergent effects, these harmonics, like &quot;flame wars&quot;, hatred, and all kinds of weird new forms of harassment. People are just getting used to this huge mesh their brains now exist in, and they are still dysfunctional at it.<p>&quot;Single versions of truth&quot; ( single UI, single UX, single algorithms ) for everybody don&#x27;t help this, they reinforce the feedback loops and amplify these harmonics. They don&#x27;t mitigate and create diversity, they create, &quot;a cacophony of homogeneity&quot;.<p>The future of the internet is people writing the algorithms that curate the content for them. Then the gap between the human and the computer ( today, by computer we mean, the web ), will be as small as we like to make it. That&#x27;s when we get the real benefits of extending our minds into this digital medium.
Rambunctiousalmost 10 years ago
Well, one threat for Google&#x27;s search business is possibly Apple. By controlling the device, browser and the platform - they have an option to integrate their own search offering instead of relying on third parties. Not sure what the Topsy acquisition was about - but perhaps there is some sort of a social search integration in the works.<p>And then there&#x27;s Facebook. The key for them is to figure out a viable business out of head search queries i.e. instead of going after all possible searches. Perhaps mainly target shopping oriented search queries via recommendations from friends?<p>Of course, this is all easier said than done. Apple has seen its struggles with Maps and even Google couldn&#x27;t do much with Google+.
jacquesmalmost 10 years ago
That&#x27;s a bit like asking if there will be a full replacement for Hyundai, Samsung or Sony. What those companies have in common with Google is that they have fingers in a great many pies. Each of those fingers will have serious competition but for some company to compete on <i>all</i> fronts with Google at the same time is very unlikely and most definitely won&#x27;t lead to a win.<p>The biggest and baddest are not taken down by other biggest and baddest, they&#x27;re taken down by packs of hungry hyenas that don&#x27;t care for their own personal survival.
learnstats2almost 10 years ago
Google as a general search engine, do you mean?<p>I think Google will remain the primary general search engine for 10+ years. They&#x27;re embedded. Direct competitors universally follow the pattern of &quot;Copy Google&#x27;s ideas about search, but with less economic resources&quot;.<p>However, I expect more specific, targeted search engines will eat into Google&#x27;s market.<p>Possibilities are endless and unimaginable: but a current example is Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha searches displace Google searches.
kluckalmost 10 years ago
Yes. I bet it is a search engine that is based on a distributed search index, hosted by individuals not by a giant corporation. At least I would hope so.
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fractalbalmost 10 years ago
It mostly depends on the time-frame you consider. If you think of next 10 to 20 years, it looks highly unlikely. But if you think beyond that, it will largely depend on how the search landscape evolves. In any case there will be no Google that is as powerful as today&#x27;s.
sidcoolalmost 10 years ago
Google is bad at many things, but so good at a handful that it will suffice it&#x27;s market share for years to come. A full replacement to Google (as a search engine and mobile operating system company), in my estimation, is a full decade away.
Dorian-Mariealmost 10 years ago
The companies that are the most similar to Google are Microsoft and Yahoo, both far behind.
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ameliusalmost 10 years ago
The European government will replace Google, if they think they are interfering with the market too much, or if they don&#x27;t comply to EU privacy rules, or if they simply don&#x27;t like idea of European data in the hands of a US based company.
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chxalmost 10 years ago
Is it necessary that Google get replaced? Consider <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;idlewords.com&#x2F;talks&#x2F;web_design_first_100_years.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;idlewords.com&#x2F;talks&#x2F;web_design_first_100_years.htm</a>
amirouchealmost 10 years ago
The way I see Google loosing steam is a massive change in the way people are consuming IT products. I&#x27;m thinking about P2P maybe they are others.<p>I can&#x27;t think about a big IT company that disappeared the last 50 years.
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ameliusalmost 10 years ago
Apple&#x27;s &quot;Finder&quot; will replace Google.
reilly3000almost 10 years ago
Only when we have a different internet.
Sven7almost 10 years ago
Yes. From China or India or both.