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

You get the point: It is no longer about search. Once you have done the hard technical task of building a search engine, you need to make it great in a region big enough to be interesting to partners, ideally world-wide. Then you will probably need to develop a browser, and ultimately even an operating system. Competition takes place outside of wha... See more

Starting from the search engine, Google quickly and decisively entered and protected the Internet value chain—always with the goal to protect the crown jewel and only real money-making machine: Search.

Building a search engine is without doubt a hard and challenging task[3]. You need data, you need access to crawling, you need good algorithms, you need smart people and you will most certainly need more than tens of millions of dollars. There are many technical challenges, network effects working against you, and data barriers to entry.