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Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

This article handily leaves out that the products most crucial to Google's core business - selling ads against search - are on an absolute tear:

- YouTube is now the world's second biggest search engine.

- AdMob grew by 4x in the last year and is growing FASTEST in China which is hugely important.

- Android is well on its way to becoming the ubiqutious consumer phone platform.

- Gmail is growing like a weed and rolling out really useful and innovative features reguarly.

I agree that Google has lost some of the spit shine and I would never want to work there, but I don't think he's properly framed the "failures".

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but the fear is gone. Remember back in the day when everyone feared going into a market that Microsoft might get into? There was a similar fear with Google, but it's not there anymore. That's a problem for Google.

Microsoft still tried to compete in search, Apple are competing despite Google's smartphone entry, there are other mobile advertising networks being founded and people are still attempting to found alternative video networks. Did the fear actually stop competitors? I think not.

the fact that some competitors exist does not mean that others were not scared away. Hell, most could have been scared away.

Your argument is a non sequitur.

Is there a company that instills similar fear today? I suppose Facebook inspires a similar fear for any company doing something social, but the thing about MS and Google at their peak was they saw their domain as "software" and "the internet" respectively, so anyone doing literally anything profitable in software or the web had a target on their back back then. Facebook's focus seems a lot narrower.

are coupons social?

> There was a similar fear with Google, but it's not there anymore.

There never was such fear, what are you talking about??

Yes there was. In 2005, when you founded a startup, you had to explain why Google couldn't smoosh you by cloning you and integrating with Gmail. And, moreover, they did exactly that to Kiko. Now that's not really the foremost question in people's minds.

I was there in 2005, never felt any google fear. The web is so huge and expanding at such a great rate (even more so in 2005) that anybody thinking google or any other site could control it or get all the market is really shortsighted.

Nobody thought Google could control the web. That wasn't the claim. The claim was, Google was sufficiently badass in 2005 that for any given idea, you got asked if this is so great, why can't Google notice it and do it faster better stronger. There were reasons that it couldn't for some ideas, obviously. But for others, like Kiko, it could and did.

The core of his point was the degradation of search results. How does that translate to him leaving "selling ads against search" out? I'm starting to think half the people commenting here didn't read past the 4th sentence

There is no proof of "degradation of search results" whatsoever. You could always find a bunch of search queries which don't work quite right and write a sensationalist article about it.

Has anyone done a scientific study, involving careful observation of quality of thousands representative queries on Google over a prolonged period of time? No.

If anything, the recent hysteria only shows how good Google has been at increasing people's expectation of search quality over the years.

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