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Comment by jshen | Hacker News Reader

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jshen·

enshitification

This also means there is a huge opportunity to disrupt google at this pont.

edit to add reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

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How do you disrupt a monopoly?

I don't think that is the right way to think about google. There is virtually no friction or switching cost for a user to use a different search engine. I think the biggest thing keeping google at the top is that they are the default on mobile phones, and they pay a ton of money to apple to keep it that way.

I also think that disruption will come from something that looks different than google, maybe something like chatgpt, that doesn't appear to be a direct competitor at first but ends up taking a significant bite out of usage of google.

There is a some amount of friction because browsers default to it and user inertia from using it for decades.

And the billions Apple gets paid to pick Google as the default

That's a good point, and I think the big issue here is that Google owns the most popular browser too.

Google's product is not their search engine.

I'm not sure what you mean.

Google sells ad space on certain web properties. Some of those properties are search engines, but that is entirely incidental and not important.

What they actually sell is a B2B SaaS for participating in auctions on those web properties.

Do you know the split between their search ads and the others?

One feature at a time

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