> Accept that 1998 is gone and that window has closed

Inflection points are when giants get mauled. New houses with new windows get built, old windows don't get re-opened.

Amazon's echo and or whatever is coming next in AI is the biggest threat Google has ever faced. They've moved past the stage of being nimble, it'll take everything they've got to not get buried (at worst) or stagnated (most likely) in the shift. AI will fracture (is fracturing) and distribute search as a concept all over the place, constantly stealing microshare from the traditional search bar / page with every thing that has AI in it that people interact with. Google knows this, it makes them very desperate, they're still young enough to be very paranoid (the same reason they knew to go get Android, the iPhone caused a new inflection).

Agreed! Also, I don't quite understand this discussion. I'm very satisfied with Google search. True, sometimes you need to ask for "verbatim" results to prevent it from interpreting the terms of the query too much, and sometimes it's more efficient to restrict the search to some sites if you already know which ones are more likely to have an answer (which is, not often).

But Google works very well. Competitors like Bing, Duckduckgo, Qwant, etc. are really bad by comparison -- and I don't know what I would do better even if I had infinite ressources.

Search on a specific site is likewise much better on Google than on said site; if you want to find a family of products on Amazon it's much more efficient to search for it via Google images with site:amazon.com; same for Alibaba, etc. And those are companies that one imagines has the ressources to build good in-house search. Yet they don't, or can't.

Same. I search I bet far more than the average person and find Google results just amazing in most cases. It is pretty rare I have to go even to the second page of links.

I would pay at least $10 a month for a good search engine, like google when it first started. Maybe that web is gone, so it could not work, but in the old days one could copy almost any error message and get a great explanation of the problem. I bet at least a million other people would too. Maybe $10 million a month in revenue could support a user focused search engine?

Whenever anyone talks about business ideas, there's always some person that says "Oh, well I will pay so much for it!" and when you implement...they don't pay. That's probably been the downfall of many a web service when they realize its cheap for a person to say that they might pay so much for something, but hard for them to open their purse when it's time.

I agree that the vast majority won't pay. 99% of people won't pay for news. 1% will pay for the WSJ or New York times. 0.001% pay $24,000 per year for a Bloomberg terminal. I think search engines could differentiate similarly. Maybe they have and I just don't know about the good paid options.

What's key to selling? Is it to pander to customer's wants? or make something so good to make it practically a need that money means little and customers will gamble?

Google search earns over $138,000,000 per day. Best of luck outgunning them.

You don't need to beat Google on revenue. You just need to make enough to cover costs and retain enough talent to keep improving your search engine.

Source?

Google made $79B from ad revenue in 2016[1]. $79B in a year / 365 days per year = 218M per day. So GP underestimated by quite a bit.

Or put another way: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=google+ad+revenue

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven...

(Brought to you by Google Search: so ubiquitous it has become it's own meme.)

is "making per day" profit or revenue?

Revenue

If I had a hot dog cart and sold $500 worth of hot dogs, but the hot dogs cost me $100, to me, that's not making $500.

that's hardly "beating" Google, or even DDG for that matter

People said the same thing about Microsoft Windows in the 1990s, and the same thing about IBM computers in the 1980s, etc., etc.

Microsoft has 80% desktop market share, a growing stock price, and a growing mountain of cash. If this is what being beaten looks like, sign me up for a beating.

IBM survived two world wars.

Products come and go, and no single company will own all profit streams.

The context is search. Think by any measure Google has "beaten" MS in search. Would say the same in Mobile, browser, AI and a couple of other things. Can not think of anything Google had that MS took away.

The desktop has declined substantially in importance.

> Accept that 1998 is gone and that window has closed

No.