
What Google Can't Copy (Easily) - epi0Bauqu
http://duckduckgo.com/blog/what-google-cant-copy-easily.html
======
cousin_it
Google can't copy features that would only work well on a small to medium
site. Can't think of much more.

Also, Gabriel, your work is wonderful. Keep it up, you're an inspiration to
me.

------
kscaldef
FWIW, Yahoo! Research Labs had a version of their search engine with
"more/less commercial" sliders years ago.

------
josefresco
I highly doubt Google has some master list of features already coded just
waiting to launch when a competitor releases something similar. First that
seems like a huge waste of time, but also it gives too much credit to Google
in that they'd need to have all these ideas first. Just doesn't add up. I do
think however that they do have the ability to, in a very short time frame
bake up responses to competitive features. But I would imagine it would be
more on-demand than off-the-shelf. Any ex Googlers here to comment?

~~~
epi0Bauqu
I think it is more that they are trying things all the time in a genuine
desire to improve, but most of these don't get pushed live. Since they've
tried most things internally over the past 11 years, it is highly likely they
already have code that does more or less what competitors launch. Of course,
I'd also like to hear something from real x-Googlers...

~~~
sgk284
When I was at Google the sheer number of crazy projects being worked on
internally, whether or not for profit, was insane. Literally thousands upon
thousands of projects. They are working on anything and everything, I think
that is something that the competition really underestimates here.

This is why their parking lots have electrical sockets to plug your car into
or why they released Lively (when I was there it was but a one man project
that I saw at an internal techtalk). It's all things Googlers wanted to work
on. They will work on anything they find interesting and they'll generally get
the full support of the company (at least that's how it was in 2007).

Now I'm at Microsoft and the biggest change to me is how focused Microsoft is
at executing very specific projects. The other big change is how many
strengths Microsoft has that most of the world refuses to acknowledge.
Microsoft gets a lot of bad press, but holy shit when they target something,
they go for all or nothing. There is a drive internal to Microsoft unlike any
I've seen... when they want something, they won't stop until it's theirs. They
want blood.

------
alexandros
I have immense respect for those working under google's shadow to create a
better/different search experience. The article clearly shows that their
entire product development strategy is built around what google does and does
not. Although as history has shown, when these companies accomplish anything
they usually get acquired rather than becoming individually successful. But I
guess history can only take you so far and Google was once a search underdog.
So good luck duckduckgo!

~~~
tomjen2
Potentially they could change a lot even if they where acquired, since they
could tip the balance of search and they would properly allow Microsoft to by
them for $40 billion :)

------
GavinB
I tried DuckDuckGo as my primary search provider. While I liked some of their
features, I couldn't live without maps integration (called universal search in
this post).

Honestly, it would have been fine if they just forwarded me to google maps or
mapquest.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Thx for trying it. By maps integration, I assume you are referring to when
Google displays a map when you type in an address or business name at the top
of the results? I just want to make sure I understand exactly the use case.

~~~
unalone
Yep! That's the ticket for me, at least.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Thx. I will definitely be adding this to Duck Duck Go.

------
mattmaroon
"So they wait until either a) through bucket testing they are sure it is a
good idea or b) a competitor adds a feature that users seem to like or the
press makes a big deal about. They don't want any new search engine to really
get a foothold so they need to react to these competitive feature launches
lest a new search engine actually starts getting used :)"

I think that is wrong, and it's pretty much just the first one. Google has the
scale to multi-variate test most things very quickly, and is long-term enough
in their thinking that they aren't pushing a product just because a few blogs
read by .0000000008% of their users are drooling over it.

They come up with ideas (some of which may be copies of competitors' ideas)
test the hell out of them, and push the ones that work. End of story. I'd be
surprised if they are more than marginally aware there are competitors to
their search product.

Seems highly unlikely they've got lots of features just waiting on a post from
a rinky-dink tech blog to incite them to launch.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
WolframAlpha, Cuil, and Search Wikia got a lot more press than just from
"rinky-dink[y] tech blog[s]."

~~~
vaksel
which kinda proves the point...all that press, and noone cares about them now.
The only recent launch is bing...but even that started out with millions of
original microsoft users and then was fueled by a marketing budget bigger than
a small country's GDP.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
The OC's point was that Google didn't and shouldn't have responded to Cuil,
Wolfram Alpha or Search Wikia because they were only covered by small tech
blogs. Both are wrong and them flaming out doesn't prove his point.

They flamed out because they weren't sticky with users, but it wasn't for lack
of original coverage or eyeballs. IIRC, Cuil managed to get covered in pretty
much every major news outlet, which converted into about 3M uniques on their
first day! As I alluded to in the post (and better described in the posts I
linked to), Google did their best to take the wind out of their sales with
timely released and announced features (longer snippets, bigger index, in this
case).

In retrospect, it seems that they were going to (at least initially) fail on
their own, but Google didn't know that at the time. And the point is that they
were paying attention and responding. They took the competitive threat
seriously, as I think they should.

------
patio11
Google cannot copy your startup's attitude, most particularly if your
startup's attitude is strongly opposed to facilitating the arrest and torture
of Chinese dissidents.

If I had a search engine, I'd be strongly opposed to facilitating the arrest
and torture of Chinese dissidents. Because after all, I think my American
users would actually care pretty keenly on whether companies they do business
with facilitate the arrest and torture of Chinese dissidents.

Say Google, what was your policy on that again?

~~~
vaksel
i think it comes to the bottom line, all the "causes" don't really mean
anything. It's always the same 10,000 people protesting environmentalism,
darfur, G20, care bears. And even those, majority will come back to Google a
week later when the "boo Google" protests get boring and they'll switch to
"boo Sponge Bob squarepants, a corrupt depiction of the scumbag capitalist
anti-environmentalism"

The bottom line, is that Google doesn't want to lose a 1 billion person
Chinese market over a bunch of hippies. Long term(20-30 years) it'll account
for 70-80% of their revenue, turning the back on it now would be the dumbest
thing for them to do.

~~~
patio11
_i think it comes to the bottom line, all the "causes" don't really mean
anything._

I disagree -- Google reacts to bad PR. It is about the _only_ external factor
they react to, since they've got a de-facto monopoly on the Internet's license
to print money combined with essentially no regulatory oversight, anti-trust
issues, etc.

See, e.g., how quickly they killed their I-can't-believe-its-not-Campfire app
when seven PR-savvy guys in a room in Chicago threatened them with being seen
as the Goliath for a change.

~~~
vaksel
they react to bad PR when it costs them nothing to fix it. The whole Chinese
incident would have cost them billions, and it blew over after a few weeks

------
seldo
I really don't see how drastic changes are outside of Google's ability. Google
(and Yahoo) can both bucket-test drastic interface changes to 1% or 0.01% of
their audience, effectively simulating a small startup doing the same thing.

(Related: post-search deal with Bing, experimenting with user interface in
this way is Yahoo's explicit strategy for competing in search.)

------
Everest
People don't bookmark pages because search engines make it so easy to find
content. So rather than bookmark the php manual page on date formatting, I'll
just type php dates into Google knowing that it will pop up in the first ten
results. However, I also notice that I regularly have trouble locating content
this way when I go back for it. This is usually when I am looking for
something very specific and forget the exact query string that generated that
result.

On the other hand, there are times when I'm searching for a datapoint and am
frustrated that Google keeps throwing the same links at me. I have to
constantly hit "next" to get the results that I want.

I wonder if there is an opportunity for a search engine to heavily invest in
either providing people with completely fresh info every time they query for
something or provide them just the results they've seen before.

This is probably not relevant to Duck Duck Go but thought I'd throw it out
there.

------
ramoq
_I find it hard to believe that anything is off limits to Google due to
technical complexity_

I somewhat disagree. There are some things, most likely due to technical
complexity and cost/effort, that google provides at a low level of quality.
ie. gmail search!!

~~~
dschobel
While I agree Gmail search can be infuriating, how do you know it's a
complexity issue that keeps it this way?

~~~
btilly
I don't know if it is accurate, but
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850938> sheds a lot of light on why
search might be the way it is.

------
Tichy
"First, they can't easily make drastic changes to their results pages."

Maybe they can't change their main page, but they can easily launch variant
pages that look like whatever they like. They already did so in several cases.

------
TheEcclesiast
Google can easily copy it, but a feature I'd like is a more convenient way to
search within sites. The idea is expressed better in a picture :
<http://imgur.com/jRj89.png>

~~~
nostrademons
What's wrong with the site: restrict?

[http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+d...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+duck+duck+go+google)

~~~
TheEcclesiast
Nobody but power users understand this feature, and it is not convenient. Is
your mother using site: restrict ?

~~~
litewulf
(Actually... yes. Strangely enough, I've been very surprised. She figured it
out because whatever site she uses has a "search box" that is basically just
adding site:awesome.com to the query. She was then able to generalize it on
sites with no search.)

------
easyeboy
Also, this is really neat. Definitely something DuckDuckGo should look into.
<http://www.smallmeans.com/tools/siteflow/>

------
easyeboy
DuckDuckGo could make better operators or custom search features that are easy
to use.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Care to elaborate on specifics?

