Are there actually barriers to search? I feel like I could start writing a web crawler and index the results with little/no real problem, other than how much worse I would be at it than Google is.
Does being really good at something actually constitute a barrier for others? Practically, it definitely does, but wouldn't any check on that provide some pretty perverse incentives?
Also, I don't think GM, Ford and Daimler Chrysler would merge to become a monopoly. Volkswagen, Honda, BMW all would still provide stiff competition.
The thing we care about w/r/t monopolies is the stifling of innovation. Do you think innovation is being stifled, in any of the areas Google has products in? I largely do not.
Crawling the web is very resource intensive. You'll need thousands of machines, and probably a pretty sizable IPv4 allocation to go with that. You'll find that people allow GoogleBot and maybe a few other crawlers, but don't allow you -- because crawling causes too much load on their site.
Once you have a snapshot of the web, you have two problems. The first is that your snapshot is out of date; you're going to have to continuously update it. The second is you have to figure out how to turn that enormous data into something useful. That's probably going to take thousands more servers, plus or minus lots of development to figure out what's useful.
And then, if you do manage to decent results, you have two more problems. speed -- to compete with Google, you need to be fast, and to be fast, you need to be close to users, which means you need datacenters spread throughout your market area. Even if your results are objectively and subjectively better if blind compared, people are going to prefer the google results because they have google branding.
It's not an insurmountable barrier, but it's pretty big.
None of this sounds like "barriers" in the sense that I need to do any of this to release a search engine. My engine may be utterly terrible, but the barriers aren't to entry, they're to competence.
That seems fine to me. You have to be better than the competition to enter the market, or have some kind of innovation that obsoletes their business method. Makes sense!
Does being really good at something actually constitute a barrier for others? Practically, it definitely does, but wouldn't any check on that provide some pretty perverse incentives?
Also, I don't think GM, Ford and Daimler Chrysler would merge to become a monopoly. Volkswagen, Honda, BMW all would still provide stiff competition.
The thing we care about w/r/t monopolies is the stifling of innovation. Do you think innovation is being stifled, in any of the areas Google has products in? I largely do not.