Google—Competition is just one click and 27 billion US dollars away

Neeva, DDG, or Startpage, cannot be real competition, even though they could have nice features worth copying. Google and Microsoft will never be scared of them because they can be strangled at any time, simply by limiting or throttling access to their APIs... A tenant cannot really challenge their landlord, and that's why at Brave we went with the... See more

First, some background. I ran search ads at Google for over a decade, and I could see the inexorable pressure to take up more and more space with ads. It’s one of those things where there's just so much money to be made that people come up with cleverer and cleverer theories to justify why it’s okay.

Google was not pre-ordained to become a trillion-dollar business. In 2002, for example, the budding search engine company was treated with some skepticism. The New York Times titled a piece from that year, “Google’s Toughest Search Is for a Business Model,” summarizing the market’s concerns. One Salomon Smith Barney analyst more directly articulat

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In 2014, Eric Schmidt said this about Google’s competition: “Many people think our main competition is Bing or Yahoo. But, really, our biggest search competitor is Amazon”

Again, it’s important to emphasize that a.) Google understands better than anyone how important its search product is, strategically, to its business, and b.) Google employs a massive number of brilliant, dedicated, customer-obsessed employees that are focused on upholding and improving the quality of its search engine.

And yet, again, it’s difficul

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