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Comment by kennethh | Hacker News Reader

There were many search companies in the start and for a long time all of them did the same, google came and delivered a better product and kept innovation. People came and saw the google homesite with a logo, textfield and a button. This is simple we can make this also without knowing all the stuff behind it.

Search is now a mature industry, it is always better to go for the new places where there are no dominant players. Google biggest competitor is not another search engine but Facebook. This is the ways it is supposed to work.

If someone offer you a product cheaper than you can make it yourself, take the offer and find something better to do. Everyone looses by protectionism.

I think everyone forgets the innovation in Ad Words which made it possible for small businesses to thrive. One can now get started with 100$ marketing budget while one before needed 10000$.

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> it is always better to go for the new places where there are no dominant players

It's funny, I've heard several times the total opposite from startup founders ("It's easier to go for a big market and to chunk some % in order to get viable, rather than going on a totally new market in which you'll have to both be better than the competition and convince the clients that's it's actually a promising market")

> If someone offer you a product cheaper than you can make it yourself, take the offer and find something better to do. Everyone looses(sic) by protectionism.

Uh? Protectionism has historically worked exceptionally well to develop your own industry, as a matter of fact, all the big players heavily used protectionism in their time to nurture their industry before being big (England, USA, China, South Korea). You just cannot compete with an on-going industry while starting from scratch, so your industry will never take off.

Protectionism is only good if you're already the best in town & want to be sure that you keep the upper hand, but it helps in no way the under-developed country.

Also, people forget the automobile industry of Japan was beneficiary of protectionism for decades.

Google's search was - for me - much better some years ago than it is now. But now there is no alternative (well, duckduckgo, not yet on googles niveau but getting better).

Don't see the innovation with Ad Words: as _every_ small company can use it, you fight towards the bottom and sometimes against cowards instead for quality which an independent non-ad-financed search engine would much better reveal.

That's true for me too. Many of my Google results are buried in "fresh" blogspam, none of which contains anything either original or interesting.

This may be the result of good search and Sturgeon's law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

If so, the real problem is that Google search is incapable of identifying content by quality. As a result, the more Google searches, the more crap it finds, and the worse the results become.

Refutations of this idle hypothesis welcome ;-)

I agree that protectionism is normally bad, but the reason that it is bad is that it suppresses competition most of the time.

If guelo's argument that Google not being in China fostered more tech companies in China is correct, then removing an initially dominant foreign company with big first mover advantage and economies of scale can actually increase competition in the market.

That said, once the home grown companies are sufficiently mature to compete on a level playing field with already established companies I agree the protectionism should be withdrawn again

For reference, an economist would call this the "infant industries" rationale for protectionism and it is generally considered a reasonable policy tool when done purposefully.

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