I don't think search really has a high barrier to entry. Certainly not compared to things I usually associate the term with like, say, airplane manufacture or deep sea oil extraction. Duck Duck Go only had three employees when they passed a million visitors, so I can't imagine they required huge amounts of capital.
> I don't think search really has a high barrier to entry.
Others disagree, including Google Chief Economist Hal Varian, who said (in 2008)[1]:
“Scale is pretty critical [because] search technology exhibits increasing returns to scale.”
Or Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President of Product Management and Marketing:
“So more users more information, more information more users, more advertisers more users, more users more advertisers, it’s a beautiful thing."
Or Eric Schmidt: “Scale is key. We just have so much scale in terms of the data we can bring to bear.” “We are a company that operates at scale . . . trust me it is a scale company.” “We think search is about comprehensiveness, freshness, scale and size for what we do. It’s difficult for [Microsoft] to copy that.”
It seems obvious to me that internet search has both economies of scale and network effects, both classic barriers to entry.
