

Beating Google? - bostonbiz
http://www.blogmaverick.com/2008/05/14/beating-google/

======
mlinsey
An interesting idea, but the natural result would be for the web being
segmented into multiple parts, as no one company will buy off all of the top
sites. No one search engine would be clearly better, since each would give you
its exclusive piece of the web. At this point, you would almost assuredly see
third party sites or tools which would simply scrape and aggregate search
results from all of the major engines. You used to see this back in the '90s
before Google managed to out-index everyone else. These aggregation sites
would. So not only would this idea be very bad for users, it probably wouldn't
be sustainable.

~~~
redorb
Agreed also his numbers are flawed, We do around 1mm a year online and it
would cost easily 10x valuation to buy us out - now think about amazon, best
buy etc...

------
reitzensteinm
There's a scary side to this - what if Google themselves gave you better
rankings or lots of free adwords if you agreed to only be indexed by them
(selectively block the other crawlers)?

Of course they have no reason to now, and maybe not ever, and even if they did
maybe there would be anti trust issues. But it's still a scary amount of lock
in - probably even more powerful than Wintel.

------
marcell
$1000? Are you kidding me? Some companies spend that much on AdWords in one
DAY.

And not to mention the lawsuits. $16 billion dollars of revenue can pay for a
LOT of lawyers.

~~~
keating
"Would the top 1k most visited sites take a cool $1mm each, plus a committment
from MicroSoft or Yahoo to drive traffic through their search engines to more
than make up for the lost Google Traffic. After all, once consumers realized
that Google no longer had valid search results for the top 25k searchs, that
traffic would most likely go to MicroSoft and Yahoo."

------
tlrobinson
Being one of the top 5 results for a common search term is worth a hell of a
lot more than $1000.

There's no way you could simply pay off the top sites to leave Google.

------
gojomo
Interesting albeit evil idea.

The top natural results are worth a ton, and as the incumbent, Google could
probably bid higher for them.

But more problematic for the strategy: if the top 5-10 results disappeared,
wouldn't some enterprising we-try-harder also-ran in the same categories just
rush up to fill the void with equally-good results? Most top results are
probably not so proprietary they can't be rebuilt by others -- just look how
many top results are from Wikipedia.

Finally, if this buy-out strategy actually did start to work, it could attract
legal/regulatory attention as being anticompetitive or anticonsumer. Legal
grounds for indexing sites even against their wishes could be found or
legislated. Plausibly legal workarounds (like having users index materials as
they visit, and forward summaries to Google, a law the old Grub project) would
be devised.

~~~
DenisM
Author is a true hacker. His numbers are off, but he is thinking quite outside
the box, pondering weakness of the system from different angles.

