Oh so fungible

Search, it seems to me, is the ultimate in easily substitutable products. I recall the overnight demise of my usage of Alta Vista – the ‘search engine that helps you find exactly what you’re looking for’ just didn’t seem to any more. More recently, given the wave of privacy concerns, I’ve tried DuckDuckGo, ‘the search engine that doesn’t track you’, and it worked rather well, too.

So what barriers are there to a Googlebeating search engine in Europe? The era of cloud computing means the need to first build a hyper-scale datacentre is no longer there; the necessary compute is a commodity available to any startup. In the USA, of course, there are questionable software patents, impeding innovation, but thanks to more enlightened European legislation, these are not a problem. Of course, scale provides economies and also attractiveness to advertisers – so significant capital would need to be ventured. Beyond that, are there truly network effects in search?

The sight of companies that have happily milked huge network effects themselves – not to mention having been caught abusing their resulting monopolies – attacking Google is rather amazing.