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Comment by rightbyte | Hacker News Reader

It's hard now when Google have their market position. For Google it was easy to grab the low hanging fruit.

I wonder if former competitors like Altavista just never though of spying on their users and selling the info or if they assumed it would be illegal and didn't do it?

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I was pretty surprised that gmail was successful. I didn't imagine that people wouldn't care that their email wasn't on their own computer. But, there you go.

Well, people had been using hosted email from their ISPs, AOL, Hotmail, etc. long before Gmail.

Gmail came out and offered an insane amount of storage, basically toppling the regime.

So surely Gmail wasn't the one that surprised you. That ship had long sailed before then.

Altavista had enough issues with trying to become a portal versus being a good search engine (plus being sold multiple times), which probably hobbled them more than anything else.

Yea I thought something similar - executives at the older companies feared jail time for doing some of those tactics so they stayed away. Of course there’s always lawyers to read the fine print, but still...

Ah come on, the truth is not at all that altavista didn't spy, or didn't do ads. It's that they (and exite, yahoo, infoseek, ...) completely overdid the spying and ads and Google instead massively optimized their backend.

And then a crisis came boom no more competitors.

Google was the least obtrusive of all of the search competitors, and the most useful. That was their great strength.

Man thinking about when this happened, it's now some 20 years ago. I'm old.

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