paulr

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4072772.stm


How easy would it be possible for someone to come along and develop a better search engine which took off and became number one,and then google would be f**ed?

fatherpierre

Not that easy as google's established and is massive.

How many rivals to ebay have started up?? Probably loads but none of them are the houshold name and phenominon.

Tiggs

Almost impossible.

How easy is it to make a better burger than McDonalds?

paulr

Ebay is popular because it has the most potential buyers therefore best price,and most sellers so more choice of items.Its a kind of self perpetuating thing.Its value is in the customer base.
Google on the other hand has a good name,and is simple to use,but surely that could easily be replicated,then its just a case of spreading the word.I used to use Alta-Vista,then google came along.I only changed cos i like the home page.

My point is what is behind this massive valuation.What are google's assets?

paulr

McDonalds have the sites,staff,infrastructure,suppliers,no-one could replicate that easily.

What does google have?

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

Google has the brand recognition, not to mention a non-trivial existing database and a great deal of computing horsepower available to it. Persuading people to change over to using a different search engine would require the competitor to offer demonstrably better search results, and Google now has a massive head start in terms of the number of sites it's indexed already.

Commercially speaking, though, its real jewel is in the AdSense technology, which brings you the ads at the foot of this page and on thousands of other pages too. It scans the content of each web page and serves up ads which it believes are relevant - and, I have to admit, it's often right.

The advertising system borrows search engine technology, but other than that it has nothing to do with the search engine side of the business. So, even if people stopped using it to search for the answers to life and the universe, they still make money out of advertisers and other sites using their technology to host advertising.

Tiggs

McDonalds have their name...thats it. Nobody buys a bigmac becuase of their property holdings or staff numbers......its a brand.

to overtake google now would be almost impossible, certainly within the short/med term.

T

jods

Wait till the F*&ktards in the USA start up with an Anti-Trust campaign against Google like they have with Microsofty.

LG John

Name and marketing is massively important and why taking google's place would now be as good as impossible!! Take the crazy frog for example - as annoying as it is - there probably isn't a person in the country that doesn't know of 'Jamster' now and the company probably didn't exist this time 2 years ago!! Being 'recognized' is big big big BIG business.

StickyMicky

microsoft have had crisis meetings, as they see the google team as a serious threat to themselves in a few years time

says it all IMO

paulr

But i'm trying to justify a value of $80 billion dollars and i just dont see it.
My point earlier about changing from Alta vista to google was i just liked the interface and that was it,Alta Vista was history.Or Napster,once it was the king of downloading,then along came Kazza.
And that bit of technology is worth 80 billion?

letdown

The stocks are worth 80 Billion.

fast bloke

when you enter normal household terminology - then you have it sussed. If I said to 10 people, you can either dogpile it, ask Jeeves or Google it, which one would virtually everyone understand. I know people who think that google is the ONLY way to search the web

As far as the valuation goes - you are setting up a new business - would you pay 50 quid to be in the top three archie* listings or a grand to be in the top three Googles?

Before Google there was a variety of 'favourite' search engines. Now there is only one. It is much much harder to break a monopoly

*archie
One of the first search engines introduced to the nets, developed by Peter Deutsch and others at McGill U. Archie is software that indexes thousands of ftp sites and lets you search for the files and software that you want. It was short for "archiver"

Brit_in_Japan

Google now have squillions to invest in research & development and can afford buy up any new upstart which had better technology. They have great brand recognition and I think the chances of any company creating a search engine which is a quantum leap up from Google (as Google was over other search engines) is remote.

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

Depends. What's the annual sales growth rate?

Wurzel

iTrader: (1)

It is easy just go into ANY Burger King!!!!!