What about the huge investment in advertising to get people to know about you? (How much has Microsoft invested in advertising for Bing? And most people had already heard of Microsoft.)
Life, there is in my view 3 classes of webmasters out there. There is the webmaster who is part of a larger corporate IT group, there is the mercantile webmaster who supports web properties on behalf of other small and mid-size businesses and there is the business owner webmaster. This universe of webmasters effectively controls, in one way or another, the decisions on default browsers and default search engines that the larger internet public (surfers) uses. And so therefore there will be little to do to get them to use a particular search portal as long as it returns useful results which responds to their needs. This is a key advantage that no other search portal enterprise may enjoy. That fact also gives this a good level of immunity against the mishaps of Cuill as
G1SMD suggested. It does not mean that Webmasters can keep the larger surfing public captive of a particular Search Portal, but they can exert great influence.
But what about the investment in software that's going to give "better" results?
Life, this is not about giving "better" results or outcompeting. In fact, we want Google to be around, as much as Bing or any other. This is as much about offering stable results, based on clear explicit rules as much as it is about offering competitively relevant results. If our respective States were to change or
update the rules of commerce every 3 or 4 months, and issue secretive regulatory rules, no business in America would be able to develop a business strategy and/or stay in business for long. Yet this is what we are confronted with in the world of Search. This is about giving every man, every business, small or big, the same chance, just as it was in the early days of Search. When Allan Greenspan in the late 90's acknowledged that
the internet has changed the economy, that is the reality that his comments were reflecting.
And what are you going to do when all the other webmasters game the system just like they've figured out how to game Google after all these years? Not trying to rain on anyone's parade. But if it were that easy, someone would have already built a better G oogle.
Life, somebody is always going to try to game the system for self gain or to have an edge. After all, that's why criminals and offenders of all kinds are still with us, everywhere and thru the ages, they don't want to play by the rules... That is why a robust system ought to always have a layer of Monitoring and Correction. There will be less of that though if everybody gets a fair chance (just a bit less I must concede!). Moreover we have also seen that when you have an internet community that polices itself you can get one of the most effective forms of control ever.
