
Ask HN: How To Dethrone Google?  - fumar
Would it be systematic? For example, would a company have to compete in the search space first. Would that even be the best avenue to become the world&#x27;s largest data aggregator?
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sharkweek
I have given this some thought in the past -- the only analogy I can really
think of is comparing it to trying to compete with Amazon

Companies that try to go directly head to head against Amazon (Overstock, Buy)
end up meddling along unable to really gain any traction.

The ones that actually do _compete_ with Amazon are the scrappy niche
ecommerce sites. The ones that can hyper-target their marketing efforts and
deliver a far superior and more engaging experience. I used to work for a
company that sold specialty products and we didn't have much trouble competing
with Amazon when we offered things like really detailed guides, fun product
videos, unique and tailored buying advice, etc. Things that don't scale...

I think what we could eventually see more and more of when it comes to
competing with Google will be niche search engines. For example, despite
Google's flight search, Kayak still provides a far superior experience. Google
can't effectively scale their search results the same way a hyper focused and
scrappier company can.

There are a lot of verticals that could eventually begin to chip away at
Google's market share moving forward. It will continue to get tougher for
Google to compete in each of them.

The natural roadblock of course being initial branding to the point where
people stop going to Google to find you, instead opting to go directly to your
site to search (no easy task).

~~~
ryderm
I find Google Flights to be much better than Kayak, and so have the couple
people I've talked to about the difference. What do you like more about Kayak?

~~~
smartera
Other than flexible dates and more search options, Kayak has direct search
links to the airlines. Google flights (while having brilliant map search) asks
you to call a travel agency and in many cases the price was not as accurate as
Kayak

~~~
Dwolb
This is surprising to me because Kayak uses ITA Software [1] which is owned by
Google. Perhaps Kayak has better relationships with the airlines than Google
and cultivates more accurate pricing this way.

[1]
[http://www.itasoftware.com/index.html](http://www.itasoftware.com/index.html)

------
hershel
In general you dethrone companies by offering better or cheaper products. In
the case of Google, the product is sold both to advertisers and to consumers
so each case should be examined.

With regards to consumes, you'll have to offer better since you can't offer
cheaper than free. But Google is motivated to offer better service so it'll be
extremely complicated. One kind of potential better would make search so much
better that people won't press on ads - which Google isn't interested in, so
they might not offer such service, so you might have an opening there.

Another option is to attack the adversity side :find a huge ads inventory and
create a service more efficient and cheaper than Google. But that's extremely
hard because on top of advertising space you need better data than Google.

------
orky56
On mobile, Facebook is looking to own the majority of the apps on your home
screen regardless of whether it has the explicit Facebook brand or is under
Instagram/WhatsApp/etc. On Android, you still have your first party apps and
on iOS your browser homepage is most likely Google.

On desktop, native applications fell by the way side as websites and web apps
have become more powerful. Google is your initial connection from the browser
(Chrome), to search, to a website (Google Analytics), and to their ads. They
own your workflow and thus habits.

On mobile, native apps are more popular. The device (Android), app store
(Android Market), app, and ads still have Google influence but definitely not
as much as on the desktop. Companies like Flurry have great offerings for app
analytics and ads are fragmented among a ton of companies.

Google needs to think less in terms of multi-platform and more in terms of
mobile only. If you're mobile only and are capturing market share quickly,
Google will be jealous.

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graycat
Just for the search part, should be easy enough: Why? Because Google, Bing,
Duck Duck Go, etc. search totally sucks for over half, say, ballpark 2/3rds,
of the (nearly all safe for work) content on the Internet, searches people
want to do, and content they want to find. So, build something good for the
other half+ or 2/3rds. Then could be maybe a little bigger in search than
Google but nothing in phones, self-driving cars, video glasses, etc. Then move
a little into Google's part of search and, thus, 'dethrone' them. Tough really
to kill them off because for a narrow part of search they are quite good and
tough to improve on.

Version 1.0 of the software is written and being tested and polished.

Would anyone here like to see an announcement here of going live?

~~~
ddorian43
why does it suck for the 1/3 ?

~~~
graycat
Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go, etc. do not suck for their 1/3rd. Instead they are
from something up to okay up often quite good up to excellent.

Recently they handle some special cases in cute, special ways but for most of
their core work are still basically an old library card catalog subject index
with the results sorted by a gross popularity measure. Net, their technique
can work quite well when looking for content based mostly on just text,
possibly from metadata, and where the user has a list of key words/phrases
that accurately characterize the content. In that way they grabbed their
1/3rd.

------
lifeisstillgood
If you enter a race, and chase after the fastest runner, you will find you are
always at least a step behind.

Instead concentrate on your race, choose your own route, your own pace. The
fastest runners may take a wrong turn - and had you been following them you
would have taken that wrong turn also.

There are plenty of people ready to prevent obvious market abuses, and we have
yet to even glimpse the shape of the world of tomorrow. Focus now on the
problems for which we know the shape of the solution, poverty, war, famine,
medicine and worry about Google and Big Data when we know what we want it to
look like.

------
vijucat
Google as a whole : I don't know. But I suppose Google Search can be rendered
useless when when an NLP engineer creates a website generator whose content is
indistinguishable from human-generated content, i.e., when the Turning test is
passed as far as static website content is concerned.

What will happen at that point is that a million SEO idiots will create a
trillion spammy websites and blogs that the Google Search engine, or rather
the Page Rank algorithm, cannot handle. Every Google search returns 90% junk,
interspersed with a few genuine search results. The Internet will becomes a
Graffiti filled ghetto, impossible to auto-index and we will be forced to go
back to the early Yahoo Directory days : manually created categories of real
sites. Ironically, the otherwise-useless people who live off being online
personas, aka famous bloggers, will have a centre-stage role to play in this
new era : their web sites are the ones which are eminently trustable. They wll
be the new institutions of online reputation, having been there from since the
dawn of the century!

By that point, it is possible that gmail, et al will have lost their
relevance, too, (WhatsMail?), and suddenly, Google does not have a single
attractive eyeball outlet.

------
sunir
In general, you can't dethrone a blue chip company. All you can do is position
yourself so you have the opportunity to take advantage of any major mistakes
they make or market shifts against their favour.

In software, the market often shifts because the platforms change fairly
frequently. e.g. Mainframe to PC to Web to Mobile.

~~~
orky56
Google has publicly admitted they did not recognize the emergence of social.
Despite their size and resources, their size, culture, and business process
prevented them from capitalizing on it sufficiently well enough to prevent
Facebook from practically owning social for the past 5 years.

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
Google will dethrone itself, probably not as quickly as say Xerox, but I think
it will [0].

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction)

------
joshfenmore
There are a few possibilities but the easiest one is to come up with something
that would radically change the way we interact with the web.

I say, the first company to create a True AI will dethrone any company on the
market with ease. Or a company coming up with a product for a totally
different market and dominating it and then after capturing users, offering
features of other competing companies like FB is doing now. You need a really
Big Buzz as well.

I am usually able to predict with a 95.4% accuracy some parts of the future (
no arrogance intended) so I strongly believe one of these things will happen
in the near future.

~~~
31reasons
True AI will dethrone IP of entire humanity. It will be interesting times when
(human intelligence) << (machine intelligence) and you get machine
intelligence for free.

------
arh68
First you'd want to steal their traffic, then you'd want to steal their
customers.

You're going to want a few things: a free modern webmail app, a fast & useful
map application, a good search tool of course. Reinvent Adwords/Adsense. Throw
in a private social network app, make iOS/Android versions of everything, and
just try not to run out of runway. ;)

EDIT: oh and write a modern OS for a vast assortment of wireless mobile
communication devices. And make sure manufacturers can chop-shop your OS to
their liking. Then you'll need to rewrite your iOS/Android code, of course.

------
joeclark77
Google does a thousand things, but only one of them makes any money --
advertising. If somebody (e.g. Bing) is able to capture a bigger share of
eyeballs, or if somebody (e.g. Facebook) finds a way to target ads better so
that people will be more likely to click on them, or if somebody (e.g. you!)
finds a way to solve the fraudulent-clicks problem (the enormous elephant in
the room), then Google will see its revenue stream dry up. And when it
happens, it will happen FAST.

------
read
The way to dethrone Google isn't to steal their traffic. It's to dampen their
ads.

You don't win with a frontal attack. It's a better strategy to come in from
the side, or even do the opposite of Google.

Make browsers hide Google's ads, or show yours instead, and you control
advertising. You can make a browser plugin that shows ads only based on user
preferences. For example something like AdBlock, but putting advertising money
to users' pockets rather than Google's.

------
lugg
I dont think the seach space is necessary. As long as you can attack their
advertising income you would have them by the balls. Without search you might
run into trouble serving up your ads.

I think the most likely point of failure for them and pretty much all american
tech businesses is the developing world markets especially those which run in
different languages. Whatsapp pointed this out and now alibaba has confirmed
it.

------
jeffmould
Quick answer it would be a tough battle that would require significant amounts
of cash backing.

The "play dirty" approach. Use the same technique used to dethrone Microsoft
years back. Right or wrong, Microsoft was called a monopoly for including IE
within Windows. What is so different now with including Chrome within Android?
What has changed that nobody has the same fight in them to take that battle
on.

~~~
gizmo686
Google does not have a monopoly of Android (let alone smartphones). Also,
Chrome has not been included in any version of Android I have used.

------
chillingeffect
1\. Use DuckDuckgo for searching. 2\. Use Yahoo (or anything else) for email.
3\. Install Adblock. 4\. Pass it on.

That will deprive them of 99% of their revenue.

~~~
fumar
It does deprive them of their search ads on the Google landing page. But, what
about Google Maps/Android/YouTube? Or any of other data collection services
they offer. It would also take a large unison effort by consumers to change
their search habits.

------
segmondy
If you can find a way to get people to view ads, click on them. You can eat
some of Google's food. It doesn't need to be search. Google is an ad company
in search clothing.

------
paulbaumgart
Buy Oculus, create a VR world that replaces the Web, sell targeted ads in this
VR world that convert better than AdWords.

~~~
calbear81
The Oculus angle is interesting but what were the lessons learned from the
failure of second life? Targeted ads in the real world don't hold a candle to
AdWords because of purchase intent and context.

~~~
paulbaumgart
The main lesson learned from Second Life is that a VR world needs to satisfy
real needs for it to get widespread adoption. High-fidelity socializing across
physical distances is my best guess for the first such "real need."

The purchasing intent part is a good question. People use Google search for
product/service research, which is where the purchasing intent comes from. The
question is, could this research be done better in an immersive VR world?

~~~
001sky
_High-fidelity socializing_

Advertsising works on TV because the latter is a passive medium. It's the
story-teller and you are the listener. VR is more like gaming-- there is
product placement-- but the decisionmaker is using the SW to make decisions.
Decisioning and being receptive to stories are different cognitive phases,
especially with respect to T+1 buying intent. _High-fidelity socializing_ ,
however, is the last place you want someone trying to manipulate you.

