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Comment by smokinn | Hacker News Reader

I don't fear Google dropping us behind where we are, I fear another IE6.

IE6 back in the day was actually quite good. But because it was really good (among other other more shady things) everything else died off and it stagnated.

What I fear is google keeping us in a local maxima of search and having us stagnate there for a decade.

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Couldn't you say the same for anyone who's product is seen as quite good?

FB is holding us back because new, more innovative social networks can't get users to switch, for example.

>more innovative social networks //

Such as? Or perhaps what would be better is if you can name-check some networks and say what you find so innovative about them.

Wasn't the point, just a hypothetical example.

I'm guessing people took this as a sarcastic remark but I was genuinely thinking you were going to be able to tell me of some new social networks to try and point out their benefits; I try to keep on top of developments in this area. Oh well.

Don't worry. Little by little, politicians come up with ways that will make it impossible for google to continue its business...

I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but most of the possible meanings I can think of aren't ones that would really stop us from having google be an (unfortunate) local maxima of search for too long.

I am thinking of laws that make it unlawful to publish certain links with an arbitrary property (containing or linking to copyrighted material) or laws that prohibits it to publish the result of statistical analysis (the whole auto-suggest debate). Note also that everytime that Google changes its ranking algorithm, some companies complain because, as they paid for SEO, they feel entitled to a high google rank.

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