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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

The fact that Alphabet is just above AT&T in that list is what gives me hope that this time it will be different. It's a nasty business, and I hate that Google has to participate in bribery in order to be allowed to innovate on behalf of consumers, but the alternative of having AT&T writing the laws is far more awful (and is why we're in the mess we're in when it comes to Internet service in the US).

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In 15 years when the search engine have failed to evolve because Google is a monopoly and has no incentive to keep improving it, you may have a different perspective.

I am not defending AT&T, just pointing out that corporations do not care, and all of them (even Google) ultimately seek profit margins at the expense of others.

I'm confident there will come a day when I'm ranting about Google and their anti-competitive practices (and not just, or even most importantly, on the search engine front) and rent-seeking. Google will be scary when they achieve the soulless status of T or VZ.

Uh, some of us started complaining about search engines failing to evolve a decade ago, guess we were before our time! Or at least too early to market.

In 15 years when the search engine have failed to evolve because Google is a monopoly and has no incentive to keep improving it, you may have a different perspective.

LOL, Wut?

I don't think you appreciate what it takes to maintain and improve a search engine these days. For example...

Remember when link farms were big? They were doing this to boost their score for the existing PageRank algorithm. All search engines had to detect this, to determine in an automated fashion (because the web is waaaay too big) when to ignore that crap.

And in a related issue.... spam. Fifteen years ago, guys like me were trying to fight it using regular expressions to filter our inbox (Spamassassin). It was a losing battle, even then. We've needed the very best machine learning to try to keep our heads above water. The spammers are constantly improving what they're doing too.

The search engine looks the same (simple one-line text box), but the infrastructure behind it has vastly changed, and continues to rapidly evolve. Go read the Spanner and F1 papers... that stuff certainly didn't exist at all when Google started.

> In 15 years when the search engine have failed to evolve because Google is a monopoly and has no incentive to keep improving it

- Google improves all the time (source: I have access to the search quality measurements)

- In all major countries they have someone trying to catch up to them and take their place

- In some major countries they are not even in the lead

Things can change in 15 years by the trends are not pointing downwards currently.

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