Google originally won everyone over with superior results, the rest of it came pretty organically.

The underdog is always everyone's favorite until they somehow wind up on top.

The basic problem with Google is the age old software engineer problem, not knowing when enough is enough.

They kept tweaking results and trying to be helpful, and over time building a "bubble" around the individual user rather than trying to produce the objectively best results based on the query.

There's some truth to the pattern, though; Once you're no longer the underdog, those seeking power will seek you out, and it's hard to prevent infiltration by the power-hungry.

Good things dont scale. Sergey Brin & Larry Page could have been the old Japanese man in the subway station sushi joint making the the best bites of a lifetime for a few hundred humans a day. They decided to go a different route.

I don't think I follow. A good web search engine cannot be a niche product with a few users. The bigger the resources, the better the results. That's an impossible problem to overcome by merely being really good at something. DDG overcomes it, reasonably effectively, by getting results from a huge list of partners.

If there weren't huge companies offering search APIs, DDG simply couldn't compete with Google (without massive scale of their own). As it is, DDG still provides somewhat weaker results in some cases; it is still my primary search engine on all of my devices, and I like it, but when I'm frustrated by the results, I make use of !g and usually find what I'm looking for.

I think the implication is for Google to just do search. Nothing else. Not to be niche product with a few users.

Or you can use !s for StartPage and have results from Google.

Seems the key is to continually use the underdog.

> The underdog is always everyone's favorite until they somehow wind up on top.

Google was everyone's favorite for a while even after becoming the market leader. And it seems the reasons to dislike google are pretty diverse (although around here I mostly hear "because they forced g+ login on youtube" or "because they killed reader". FTR my biggest annoyances with them was 1: when they killed off Google Desktop Search, 2: the years when they insisted on fuzzing any search until it returned millions of results )

>> although around here I mostly hear "because they forced g+ login on youtube" or "because they killed reader"

You forgot {{insert all possible privacy concerns}}, and on that wave, total disrespect for user choices. As a very tech savvy human I still can't dodge all their malicious attempts to collect my data, imagine the non savvy human fellow.

Ah, Vic Gundotra.

As I recall, when I started using Google in the late 90's, it was fast, amazingly fast, and that was in the days of a clunky internet.