
Ask HN: What's the worst thing that could happen to Google? - bemmu
What could ruin the Google profit party? I have a hard time imagining another search engine coming along that everyone would suddenly jump to, but I guess it is possible. It is trivial to switch search engines.<p>I can't come up with any reason why AdWords spend would suddenly vanish. Presumably companies are spending so much on AdWords because they are getting a return.<p>Because of smartphones, people are searching more and more. Local search ads seem like they could be a nice new rev source. At the same time more people are getting online, so more searches there too.
======
david927
But we can never imagine what's next. When they said, "What's the worst that
could happen to IBM?" No one would have been taken seriously if they said, "A
tiny little computer that sits on your desk."

Google is king of search as it's done now. I've personally seen a startup that
can do a very new type of search. Who knows if this will be the "little
computer that sits on your desk" but what we do know is that something is most
certain to come along.

Disruption is never "if", it's always "when".

~~~
astine
* When they said, "What's the worst that could happen to IBM?" No one would have been taken seriously if they said, "A tiny little computer that sits on your desk."*

What if they had said: "A change in the market that they fail to adequately
forsee and plan for"? That's what will kill Google too.

~~~
david927
And with all the technologies and companies that are gunning for them, how can
they possibly "adequately foresee and plan for" the one which will be their
successor?

So in other words, the main poster's question is a bit like saying, "What's
the worst illness I'll get this Winter? I don't see anyone I could catch the
flu from."

------
tsally
A scandal related to personal data large enough to spook your average
consumer. We're talking serious stuff, like records being sold to criminals or
given to the government without a warrant. The only thing that could cause a
user to get over the large cost of migration is a massive breach of trust.

It doesn't even have to be related to search. A scandal involving Gmail or
Google Voice would have a large impact on search.

~~~
tesseract
> given to the government without a warrant.

It only barely registered with the general public when the telcos did it - why
should Google be any different?

~~~
tsally
Everyone already accepts shitty speeds and shitty customer service from
telecos. Mentally Google is a different ballgame.

------
ramanujan
The Affero GPL.

If it becomes popular, it closes the server side loophole and Goog would have
to either give up on using new open source software or else open source their
codebase.

That's why Chris DiBona at Google Code won't let it on their servers. Search
"Affero GPL" for more stuff around that.

Ps: if I worked at MS and wanted to destroy Goog, I would go around offering
hackers $100k or $1M to switch their licenses to Affero GPL. Basically the
size of the offer would be proportional to the userbase.

With a $100m (= size of Bing's marketing budget) you could do a lot of damage.

Note that this doesn't even get us started on how if Ballmer had any sesnse
he'd have built in adblock for adwords bundled into IE9 and turned on by
default as a feature.

~~~
richardw
Google could just use the version they have and extend it or fork it from the
old license. I reckon they put in enough to the codebase that you don't want
them out.

------
dksf
I think Google's biggest risk is in not owning enough of the most important
corpora of web content which are getting created today: social information.
The Internet is being reinvented as a network of people instead of just a
network of publications. Facebook and Twitter are leaders in owning this
people-content, but not really in searching it effectively yet. Even though
Twitter is viewable (i.e. crawlable) and open, they still have proprietary
data which could provide the best overall understanding of the information and
relationships which flow through the Twitter platform.

The technology of web search continues to get commoditized today. Google is
quite good at it, but Bing/Yahoo still do alright. Whoever provides a
differentiated and important corpus of content for some fraction of web
searches (i.e. social search or something like "real-time" or news) has the
potential to capture the search behavior across all queries. Users only want
to type searches into a single search box on the web.

------
patio11
_What could ruin the Google profit party?_

Anti-trust regulation to split Google and AdSense/AdWords would probably
figure as the Ultimate Nightmare Scenario. I don't necessarily think that it
is likely, but then again I never saw an OS/browser tag-team as being a threat
to world peace.

------
old-gregg
Commoditization of search: at some point people will stop caring whose servers
stand behind that little search box in the top right corner and whoever
controls user experience will just pick the best provider out of many, driving
down search profit margins.

This is why Google wants their own browser, this is why they want to control
cell phones and other mobile devices.

------
justinsb
How about Microsoft including an ad blocker in the next Windows Update.

~~~
bemmu
True, that would really hurt them. I can't even immediately come up with any
reason why they couldn't do that, ad blockers are a very legit piece of
software after all. Given how much sense this makes, what's been stopping MS
from doing it so far?

~~~
aaronblohowiak
Ad blockers create an unlicensed derivative work of the copyrighted works that
are received, and they could likely be sued for that.

~~~
jrockway
Fair use.

~~~
nailer
...would only cover a portion of the document.

------
pg
To become so bureaucratic that all the smart people leave.

~~~
Raphael
Like Yahoo!

------
eugenejen
I think we don't know the answer. 10 years ago few would imagine Microsoft not
being a tech leader. 30 years ago few would image that PCs would replace IBM
mainframes for most of the computing tasks. 150 years ago few imaged computing
machines exists.

There are always something out of left field that knock dinosaurs on the head
and flip them over. Unfortunately we never know what that will be until it hit
the dinosaurs.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Umm...just FYI, Microsoft is still very much a tech leader.

~~~
nailer
Revenue from MS Office and Windows is great, sure. But those products are more
than ten years old, and are increasingly being commoditized. What new
technology has Microsoft led in the 2000s?

Surface isn't an invention. Portable media they lost out on bigtime. Web video
they lost on. The CLR is innovative and great but more than 10 years old now.

------
dasht
I've pondered that very question off and on for several years. I don't know
what the "worst" thing would be but some places where I think there are clouds
(pun intentionality uncertain) on their horizon - in no particular order:

1) Culture fail: leading to dithering and waste that swamps the ship. Until a
recent few years, Google hired and operated like Larry and Sergey's late night
bull session dream: hiring "people like them", creating outrageously
extravagant perks (like grad school life on steroids with high pay), using the
"20% free time" rule to implement a kind of AI search for business ops, etc.
They over-hired. They lacked coherent focus. They became a perpetual ego-
stroke for the boys at the top. They built an arrogant and self-validating
culture. They developed a culture that is often snobbish beyond
accomplishment. On and on. They even had a "uniquely theirs" house style for
interior decorating. Historically those elements are a recipe for a company
that at some point seizes up and becomes incapable of fighting in the markets
(c.f., e.g., the collapse of SGI whose former campus, ironically, is mostly
occupied by GOOG). Under Schmidt, et al. in recent years this appears to be
starting to be reined in but I'm not convinced yet the professional management
is making advances beyond shoring up results quarter by quarter - I don't see
the new, customer-centric culture yet.

2) Collapse of advertising. Advertising can collapse out from under Google in
at least three, plausible ways. First, some _other_ content delivery medium
comes to dominate as the place where effective advertising goes. Google can't
be everywhere at once (not even Google) and, frankly, I think the big market
for Internet advertising is going to look a lot more cable TV than web
surfing. Second: a new market maker. As technological opportunities to _place_
ads change, ad placement will drift away from what you can build on a search
engine to more targeted placement. Right now it's cheap and easy to put some
space in your content in Google's market - Google is a market maker taking a
cut. As mass consumption of content condenses to a smaller number of content
providers - providers better equipped to make sophisticated sales of their ad
properties will emerege (e.g., e.g., content providers who do more than add
links and declare a few keywords). New market makers will enter and take
Google's margin on ads to $0 (in the limit). Third, on-line advertising as a
paradigm may get severely shaken by its poor performance (for most
advertisers) in bad economic times along with alternatives. An alternative I
think likely to work, for someone, is the request-driven marketing paradigm.
If I need to or want to buy X, typing search terms into a search engine seems
a painfully indirect and horrible way to go about it. Instead, in any large
market, I want domain-specific heuristics to connect me to the general search
thing of "what consumers are saying" and connect me to the ad placement thing
in the sense of domain-specific searching through ads. Ads on such a "decision
engine" (!) should ultimately be based purely on actual sales commission, not
CPMs (though even commissions will be a pretty small slice - perhaps bundled
with on-line transaction handling service).

3) Misplaced capital investment. On the one hand, Google makes a plausible
play to build their massive manufacturing plants for commodity computing
(their newest generation "data centers"). On the other hand, if their closed,
arrogant culture and over-reliance on ads causes them to fail to monetize
those centers well they may wind up being left holding the bag where they have
to sell of to someone who knows how to make money off of them. They seem well
on their way to failing hard on those data centers by trying to monopolize
what system software runs on them.

In general, you pretty much know that something is going to take them down, at
least if history is any evidence. They wound up, a few years back,
_outrageously_ overcapitalized. Not just over-valued but actually over-
capitalized. History shows that no management team in that situation - the
extreme outlier in capitalization - is ever competent to invest the money
flows wisely enough to keep it up.

~~~
whitebit
Until recently, these were the exact reasons that I avoided GOOG stock.

Nowadays, however, Google has a more immediate problem: Bing.

What would happen if Microsoft starts doing search deals with ISPs, portals, &
mobile companies? Why would any company integrate Google search if Microsoft
was willing to pay them to use Bing? Isn't this already happening with the
Microsoft-Facebook and Microsoft-Yahoo deals?

~~~
nailer
Microsoft already pays ISPs to use IE and Microsoft search, and has done since
the mid 1990s.

~~~
Tichy
Google is also paying browser manufacturers to include Google search.

~~~
nailer
Sure, but nobody was suggesting they didn't already do this, unlike whitebit
with Microsoft, whom I was replying to.

------
llimllib
I made a bet with a friend 5 years ago that by 2015, Google will be a public
utility.

(This is also the worst thing that could happen to Google)

~~~
dmoney
How much were you willing to bet?

~~~
dasht
I'm potentially in on that bet, too, but what do we mean by public utility?
It's a hard bet to decide the outcome of.

-t

~~~
llimllib
hence it was a gentleman's wager.

------
jsz0
I don't think there's any one silver bullet that's going to take them by
surprise. For search I think the biggest danger is not being able to keep up
with spammers and tricksters. People may not abandon Google search but it
would make their advertising platform far less appealing and open the door to
competitors. For everything else there's the privacy & reliability concerns. A
few big high profile privacy breaches, some frequent outages, or any hint of
corruption in how Google handles personal data would take their toll.

Purely on competition I think Google Docs is a weak spot. IMO it's pretty bad
and has not been improving. Microsoft's Office Online looks pretty good. As
inept as Microsoft is it would be unwise for Google to let them get a foot in
the door. They might end up regretting the years they decided not to make any
significant improvements to Google Docs.

------
brown9-2
Government regulation.

~~~
dbreunig
Agreed, I think eventual trust-busting will occur.

------
dmoney
If people doing SEO found tricks that Google isn't able to overcome, and those
became prevalent and persistent enough, people would start to lose faith in
the quality of search results. Then they would go looking for other search
engines.

~~~
ComputerGuru
already happening... Just the other day there was an 'ask hn' thread on this.

------
jjonte
The Semantic Web blossoms beyond the need to infer meaning from bodies of
text. If the information on the web becomes more structured, structured beyond
the need for Google.

If web pages and web services were to all completely expose their information
as RDF and embed rich metadata inside bodies of text the need for Google's
fancy AI and Entity extraction would be none.

Google's bread and butter is advertising. That advertising is driven from
their search domination - their ability to extract meaning from web pages and
match that meaning up to searched terms. Semantic web completely commoditizes
that function - if you can crawl, you can search.

~~~
btilly
May I have some of what you're smoking?

The Semantic Web depends on having everyone who writes web pages also
categorize them. Whenever you have 20 different people categorizing content
you're going to get 20 different interpretations of what the semantics mean.
The vision of a decent, consistent categorization emerging across the web is a
pipe dream.

Furthermore the fundamental problem that Google solves is not finding content.
It is narrowing in on _worthwhile_ content. In a world filled with people
pushing commercial content with a dubious value proposition, you can't depend
on content creators to provide an accurate assessment of their quality. That's
where Google comes in. They not only categorize, they _rank_ data well enough
that end users are happy to accept the results.

~~~
adw
Much of the web is databases with a thin layer on top, and the whole point of
the SW/LD architecture is that different sites don't need to agree on
ontology; it just becomes an alternate, aggregatable database view, in a
sense.

I think a lot of the SW hype's overblown - and I've worked in the field - but
you're attacking something which doesn't exist.

~~~
btilly
While it may not exist, there are still people who promote the possibility. In
particular the person I am responding to subscribes to the vision enough to
believe that some day the user supplied categorization will be sufficient to
make Google unnecessary.

------
nailer
Facebook know more about their average customers than Google does (keeping in
mind most Google users don't use gmail).

Facebook use this to move into search. So when I search for 'cappucino book',
FB knows I mean the web framework from the context of my discussions with
FB/Twitter friends.

FB encourages users to make FB their first destination, users do this because
it's search and their friends in one place, and why would you want anything
else, when, in this scenario, FB's results are always better than Google's
anyway?

------
Chirag
My take is there is a yet a better way to search the Internet. We are still
looking at search as a keyword driven application. Which is not the optimal
approach to search. Though no one can argue that google give decent results to
most of the searches you key-in. Search can be more intelligent and
personalized as everyone expects a different result to the keywords "will
apple fall".

If search can be made personal and more of a 1:1 activity that will go wrong
with Google.

------
asheniam
How about click fraud getting wildly out of control? Google's profit is based
solely off of online advertising. Click fraud is a never ending battle to
undermine that business and Google has teams of phds hard at work to
understand what is click fraud and what is not. Now if click fraud reached a
point where advertisers can't trust the pay per click model, Google's revenues
go poof.

------
frig
A major change is that good search algorithms or giant server farms could
become sufficiently useless that a remote search engine makes no economic
sense.

I don't see that happening in the near term but there are sci-fi scenarios in
which it might happen; I'll sketch them so the pattern becomes clear.

EG:

\- user's local storage and local cpu / throughput goes through a quantum leap
and most users most of the time have locally cached copies of any content they
might find useful, and the cpu power to search it all efficiently

\- some quantum leap in bandwidth and other IT infrastructure means you can
scour large chunks of the web directly in a short time period (eg: if everyone
had terabit fiber-to-the-home and backend infrastructure were built out enough
you could just download entire websites and full-text search them in the time
it takes now to search @ google)

\- some quantum leap in "software agents" and safely-executing remote code
comes to pass and users send out long-lived, virus-like agents that constantly
scour-and-index-the-web-for-them (executing at the site of the content host

This is basically a sci-fi "what-if" but as a thought exercise it gets the
point across: right now it makes sense to have a centralized spider-and-
archive-and-index-and-rank facility b/c the web is so huge and its pipes are
so tiny compared to the # of end users and their individual computing
capacities; a sufficiently radical shift in end-user capacities would make it
moot. All probabilities for the above I'd put at .01% or something similarly
lame.

Weaker versions of the scenario include anything that reduces the use of the
web and consequently reduces the need for search services:

\- next-generation rich-client driven chat + forums + social-networks become
the dominant areas of internet activity (with the web relegated to low-grade
entertainment, reference material, and shopping); users don't need external
search engines for these activities and the service-operators' databanks are
deliberately opaque to conventional spiders

\- despite all the naysaying the semantic web takes off in some fashion, with
enough widely-used, useful-enough ontologies and so forth that user-run agents
and user-run spam filters and user-run relevance+credibility assessors can
auto-navigate the web to find what the user is looking for without passing
through a conventional search engine

...etc., which I'd move up to .1% or so likelihood.

------
jasonlbaptiste
google doesn't make money off "search". you don't pay them to click the search
button. Google gets paid when people pay for you clicking on those ads (or
viewing them with doubleclick). If the money that is spent on those ads+clicks
is spent elsewhere that's the worst thing that could happen to Google.

Search share matters, because that share is matched with ad inventory being
filled. If that inventory isn't filled, but they are still high in search
shares, it doesn't matter. Odds are this won't happen though. Here's what is
worrisome to me though:

Referral traffic is a good indicator of where things are going. Less and less
traffic is coming from search referrals, and more and more is coming from
social networks. If the paid referrals follow suit with the organic referrals
, then Houston has a problem.

------
fauigerzigerk
They might find themselves on the wrong side of the growth divide. Advertising
money follows consumers ready to spend. US consumers are badly indebted. Most
of the growth is going to be in emerging markets.

I get the feeling that people there may prefer their own national champions as
they become more confident and less inclined to favor foreign brands.

The fastest growing regions often shape the fashions and trends. The people
closest to those developments will recognise new trends first. So if there is
some kind of paradigm shift in the making it may not be google who gets it
first.

On the other hand I do remember the Japan hype of the 1980s. The japanese were
supposed to take over everything until their own bubble burst. It's so hard to
make predictions (at least about the future as they say)

------
iterationx
A superior Chinese language search engine coupled with a deep(er) recession in
the US would hurt their profit machine. The web could also change with regards
to categorization. For example if I want a book I go to Amazon, if I want to
learn about boardgames, I go to boardgamegeek, if I want general knowledge I
go to wikipedia. So on a long enough time line if I want to do X on the web, I
go to Y. Where Y is not Google. Also I assume one of these days someone will
figure out how to implement a metaverse that everyone wants to use and then
searching might be different there as well. Or maybe Wolfram will figure out
something useful to do with his engine.

------
human_v2
I don't think advertising is going to be able to sustain Google indefinitely.
As more tech-savvy users get on the web, their tolerance for advertisements
will dwindle, along with advertisers' return. Google probably knows this,
which is why they've moved into other markets like Android and Google's office
tools. As far as search goes, I think they're either going to be king forever
as we know it, or a 'better' search will come out... though I can't think of
what could make search better than what Google has.

I, personally, would like to see Google become their own ISP. When there was
news they were buying up 'dark fiber' I thought this might be in their future
plans.

~~~
appathy
However, Android isn't a direct moneymaker. Android is just a way to ensure
that they make money off mobile search. aka advertising.

~~~
chrischen
Android is actually a way to keep Apple from dominating, and to keep other
mobile devices open.

Google knows it dominates certain services like search, so it can use Android
to make sure other devices stay open in order to compete against it. This
forces them to let people choose and Google knows more often than not that
choice will be for Google services. For example if Android allows Google talk,
then Apple will become tremendously pressured to do the same because it's
supposedly a really useful feature.

Android forces others to be more open, Google dominates, therefore more open
means more customers for Google, more eyes looking at Google ads, etc.

------
flashgordon
what about P2P search? or essentially a distributed search engine (or engines)
running on volunteers' servers? Google's good fortune for now is that search
is not yet a commodity. Can distributed search engines make search a
commodity?

------
quizbiz
It just seems vulnerable that despite the diversity of Google's products and
services, they make basically all their profit from displaying [very relevant]
ads.

------
deyan
The fragmentation of traffic sources might limit Google's growth (i.e.
Facebook and other social media are quickly becoming a very meaningful place
to advertise). In addition, international competitors and Bing might put more
pressure on them.

But in terms of something killing Google - that would have to be a really
fundamental screw up and/or shift in the way the Internet works I think. Then
again, history is full of wrong predictions :)

------
dsplittgerber
When Google doesn't find a way to stay on top of real-time search, social
search and regular search - or doesn't find a way to combine those before a
competitor does - they are going to fail. It's not a given that Google stays
on top. Remember Yahoo, Altavista et al? Search is going to adopt to changing
times and possibilities. And the #1 spot will be up for grabs again soon
enough.

------
bhousel
They could bring Brad Lidge in to save the company.

~~~
jbyers
That joke may not age well, but at this moment, fantastic.

------
FreeRadical
If an effective search method was developed that wasn't based on pagerank and
link volumes, but rather the internal quality of a page

~~~
Tichy
Not sure why you were downvoted. There is life after page rank. Just imagine
"real AI", only million times faster - could make for some good search
engines.

------
vseloved
It has already happened: they've screwed up search, when moved away from
PageRank to some reputation-based algorithms (and set-up the Facebook & co. as
sites with biggest reputation, which is nonsense, as that's UGC). It's not so
visible in English-language search, although begins to be, but, for example,
for Russian I've stopped using it altogether.

------
protomyth
Some search startup comes along (probably via local search) that has a real
focus on user experience and design.

------
bh23ha
They could go public, discounting the benefits of staying a private founder
run company like SAS, and instead going for the quick pay-off of an IPO.

Then the usual pressures for quarterly results would slowly eat away at their
"don't be evil" motto.

Imagine what that would be like!

------
natch
How about...

The AI Google is growing becomes "too powerful to fail," a more insidious
version of the "too big to fail" we hear from banking. The humans at Google
lose control of their business as automation increasingly leaches more money
from any business possible. It becomes harder and harder for the Google humans
to unwind each ad transaction to determine whether the ad leads people into
scams. Users start to step back from their engagement with Google.
Alternatives begin to get traction. Humans at Google start to become alarmed.
As a defense against the power of the AI, Google transitions over to a new
system and allows the old data to fossilize. The new system allows for a
higher degree of human input, though it's still not under human control. At
this critical point, competitors move in and take away a lot of the market
from Google.

~~~
Create
Now you know why GOOG tried to play the card as being analogous to "Banking
Secrecy", calling for immunity and special status. The issue is privacy.

------
dlevine
In the short term, not much. In the long-term, disruptive technology.
Something will come along and do to Google what it has done to Microsoft.

Eventually, the game will change, and the existing players won't be able to
compete.

------
davidw
They seem big enough and profitable enough that to really dent their progress,
it will probably take something no one has foreseen, and which they can't
easily chase without ruining their current business.

------
chrischen
It is trivial to switch search engines physically, but not necessarily
psychologically. Plus you could easily switch, I switch occasionally, but to
permanently shifting your usage trend is tougher.

------
gord
That they dont get split into smaller pieces [like Ma Bell]

------
jmonegro
Legal crackdown on monopoly claims.

------
rooshdi
VSS

------
zackattack
I know this is off-topic, but bemmu, you need to paypal me $20 as per our bet
made in #startups on IRC. You haven't showed up in the chatroom lately. If you
had won the bet, I certainly wouldn't have reneged. You can send payment to
the email in my profile.

------
Create
It is the collapse of the US Empire.

Which is bound to happen given History, like it or not, even if it is not
allowed to fail (wall street).

If you look at GOOG closely, you will realize, that it is not based on the
purported commercial grounds at all. No single Company can:

\- map the moon as a "cool factor"

\- get all the UN translations for Bayes

\- inherit the Corona Project

\- hand out Tb of mail storage ...does your default Corporate Entity allow
that for their employees, let alone for anybody?

\- have urchins and alike everywhere

\- use NASA site as a terminal (that's a challenge(er))

\- view all the streets it is allowed to (think urban w[t]f)

\- operate one of the largest computers on the Planet, though interestingly
enough still with only a few percent of Intel's production

\- scan all books ...and "legally" violate (C) at the drop of the hat (have
the power to make law up as you go)

...you would have hard trouble doing any of the above, let alone do all of
them at once (with still some omissions) without strong backing. If you rather
think of it as a RAND, you will notice, that all this has nothing to do with
the order of magnitude of the rev. sources you are alluding to. And think of
search the other way around (like zeitgeist), it will make much more sense.

~~~
Create
thanks for factually contradicting my points. But true: I did not comment on
the tubes (optic, u), nor the droids, neither the scholar (Terman)

