

Our secret sauce - blackswan
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/our-secret-sauce.html

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cstejerean
This article is completely missing the point of what makes Google successful.
It might have been having a better product that helped them at first, but
right now the single most important factor keeping people coming back to
Google is: habit.

Everyone is used to going to Google to search. Heck, you often hear people use
the word google instead of search. This habit is hard to break. Switching to
the competitor is not just a few keystrokes away. It takes breaking the habit
of reaching for Google whenever I need to search.

It takes more than a slightly better product for folks to break this kind of
habit. It's the same reason why Google has trouble competing with established
search engines in other countries, even if Google has better results.

When Google came out it was a LOT better than everyone else, so people
switched. Now the competitors are barely catching up to Google, or at best
making incremental advances over Google: not enough to get people to switch.

~~~
dreish
altavista.digital.com was a reflexive habit two years before Google was. Now,
there are kids who have never heard of it.

There's no doubt in my mind that if Google had failed to keep up with SEO
spammers, someone else would have replaced them just like they replaced
AltaVista. The value proposition would be simple: No more poring over search
results to find the one non-spam page you were actually looking for buried on
the fourth page.

~~~
cstejerean
sure. If google didn't manage to keep their results relevant then a competitor
could provide a significant improvement and a good reason for folks to switch.
Google however doesn't need to have the best product however, they just need
to keep the gap between them and their competitors and their momentum will
keep them ahead.

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dkasper
'Google has been searching the web for nearly 10 years, which is far longer
than our major competitors.'

As far as I know Yahoo has been around for just as long as Google. Cool
article though.

Side note: I think it's cool that both Google and Yahoo came out of projects
started by Stanford students.

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dualogy
"Supply side economies of scale" - Google must enjoy extraordinarily low costs
per hardware, given the sheer amounts they keep. Based on their volume, their
discounts must be at least around 90%. I wouldn't call that a "reasonably
small scale".

"Lock-in" / "Network effects" - I would argue that both come into play by the
sheer fact that almost all web sites are being optimized towards the way
Google's algorithms (are supposed to) work.

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foonamefoo
Once again Google plays down the significance of the PageRank patent. Is
search amongst the giants really as similar as he says here? I know that
Google has had to do a lot of tricks to avoid gaming of PageRank, but isn't
PageRank still the core?

~~~
zandorg
What's more significant is the theft of the Yahoo text ad model/patent, and
the multi-billion $ payoff for its use. I don't know exactly how they pulled
that off, but the patent's worth must be around $100 billion.

As a postscript, that patent came from Overture (which came from the Idealab
incubator), which itself was a billion-dollar buyout. I wonder if a company
will in turn buy its use off Google for even more?

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ntoshev
Does external threats ("competition is just a click away") work as such a
great motivator after the company's headcount passes 1000?

