This article’s core premises are somewhat nonsensical.
1. Lack of native distributed search led to Google’s monopoly.
“The Web’s orignal architects were off base on hyperlinks; it turns out people just want to skip right to the answer they’re looking for.”
This doesn’t make any sense. Google’s entire early innovation was to use hyperlinks as an indicator of popularity and thus a proxy metric for veracity, and PageRank was born.
Original attempts at distributed search based on other metrics like text analysis were tried (Webcrawler, AltaVista which was used by Yahoo, Inktomi which was used by Lycos, HotBot, etc) but didn’t produce better results, and Google eventually grew to #1 by 2004 (6 years after intro).
Google could not have existed without the hyperlink. The reason it has a monopoly today is largely due to investment cycles and intellectual property law: after the dot com bust, there wasn’t exactly an appetite to build new search engines given PageRank was patented and would need to be licensed (it expired in 2019).
This monopoly doesn’t matter as much: generic search engine use has been declining for years in favour of other approaches to finding content (social media, syndication, domain specific aggregators, etc).
Decentralized Index/search (not just distributed but truly decentralized) remains an open research problem. it may be possible to improve and deploy with the right incentives and investment, but it’s ludicrous to think this was possible in 1992-1998.
2. Lack of native payments led to advertising to take off.
This has no factual basis: CGI-bin scripts to purchase things with HTTP POST calls existed as early as 1993. Amazon and eBay launched in 1995. PayPal started when Google did, in 1998.
More importantly, most viewed the web as another visual media like Television, which was ad-driven. People generally didn’t like paying for things that felt free, like information, or music, or movies.
But again, the Ad Words monopoly remains tenuous. Facebook has been steamrolling it in growth and will eventually eclipse it. We are also seeing a lot more willingness for people to pay for content to avoid ads.
3. “poor native video support (it is hyper_text_ after all)”
It was called hypermedia widely by around 1995 when images and audio (Real Networks in particular) took off, there just wasn’t the processing power, bandwidth, or compression algorithms available to make this real until 1998 when MP4 came out.
Google’s early attempt at video, Google Videos, was a market failure. They had to buy YouTube which (most importantly) made it easy to publish videos compared to others, but it took many years for it to reach #1.
And that position too is threatened between Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, etc.
In summary, Google is #1 in a number of markets due to a combination of smart business moves, smart technology, being an early player, and the business/investment climate at key inflection points of the industry. There are a large number of competitive pressures against Google that make this lead tenuous. Google is as vulnerable as AOL or Microsoft were in the late 90s, when they were thought to be unassailable.
As for the health of the web, let’s remember that regardless of all the claims of the death of the web, whether native mobile, or WebSockets, or walled gardens, GraphQL, or single page apps or accelerators like Amp (which had to change offer direct hyperlink access due to complaints), the web remains entrenched, omnipresent, and has no clear replacement.
This matters because the core architecture of the web: URLs, HTTP, MIME, and (to a somewhat shrinking extent) HTML remains the foundational glue that holds all this mess of media and technology together, and is fundamentally about enabling decentralization. URLs still are the main way that native mobile apps integrate with the network. HTML is still the default fallback UI. HTTP is still the primary application protocol by far.
All of this was the design intent of the architecture of the Web: to last decades, regardless of how the origin servers or user agents evolved. It’s an architecture ripe for innovation to make decentralized alternatives to today’s incumbents.
To paraphrase John Lennon, centralization is over, if you want it.
But this requires the experience to be actually better for users, and not just in an “eat your vegetables / don’t give your privacy away” manner. Starting a new venture to take this on requires a combination of investment, insight, and commitment that’s not easy to assemble. But it can and probably will happen, relative to legislation or very possible social catastrophes that entrench the current players longer than needed.
1. Lack of native distributed search led to Google’s monopoly.
“The Web’s orignal architects were off base on hyperlinks; it turns out people just want to skip right to the answer they’re looking for.”
This doesn’t make any sense. Google’s entire early innovation was to use hyperlinks as an indicator of popularity and thus a proxy metric for veracity, and PageRank was born.
Original attempts at distributed search based on other metrics like text analysis were tried (Webcrawler, AltaVista which was used by Yahoo, Inktomi which was used by Lycos, HotBot, etc) but didn’t produce better results, and Google eventually grew to #1 by 2004 (6 years after intro).
Google could not have existed without the hyperlink. The reason it has a monopoly today is largely due to investment cycles and intellectual property law: after the dot com bust, there wasn’t exactly an appetite to build new search engines given PageRank was patented and would need to be licensed (it expired in 2019).
This monopoly doesn’t matter as much: generic search engine use has been declining for years in favour of other approaches to finding content (social media, syndication, domain specific aggregators, etc).
Decentralized Index/search (not just distributed but truly decentralized) remains an open research problem. it may be possible to improve and deploy with the right incentives and investment, but it’s ludicrous to think this was possible in 1992-1998.
2. Lack of native payments led to advertising to take off.
This has no factual basis: CGI-bin scripts to purchase things with HTTP POST calls existed as early as 1993. Amazon and eBay launched in 1995. PayPal started when Google did, in 1998.
More importantly, most viewed the web as another visual media like Television, which was ad-driven. People generally didn’t like paying for things that felt free, like information, or music, or movies.
But again, the Ad Words monopoly remains tenuous. Facebook has been steamrolling it in growth and will eventually eclipse it. We are also seeing a lot more willingness for people to pay for content to avoid ads.
3. “poor native video support (it is hyper_text_ after all)”
It was called hypermedia widely by around 1995 when images and audio (Real Networks in particular) took off, there just wasn’t the processing power, bandwidth, or compression algorithms available to make this real until 1998 when MP4 came out.
Google’s early attempt at video, Google Videos, was a market failure. They had to buy YouTube which (most importantly) made it easy to publish videos compared to others, but it took many years for it to reach #1.
And that position too is threatened between Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, etc.
In summary, Google is #1 in a number of markets due to a combination of smart business moves, smart technology, being an early player, and the business/investment climate at key inflection points of the industry. There are a large number of competitive pressures against Google that make this lead tenuous. Google is as vulnerable as AOL or Microsoft were in the late 90s, when they were thought to be unassailable.
As for the health of the web, let’s remember that regardless of all the claims of the death of the web, whether native mobile, or WebSockets, or walled gardens, GraphQL, or single page apps or accelerators like Amp (which had to change offer direct hyperlink access due to complaints), the web remains entrenched, omnipresent, and has no clear replacement.
This matters because the core architecture of the web: URLs, HTTP, MIME, and (to a somewhat shrinking extent) HTML remains the foundational glue that holds all this mess of media and technology together, and is fundamentally about enabling decentralization. URLs still are the main way that native mobile apps integrate with the network. HTML is still the default fallback UI. HTTP is still the primary application protocol by far.
All of this was the design intent of the architecture of the Web: to last decades, regardless of how the origin servers or user agents evolved. It’s an architecture ripe for innovation to make decentralized alternatives to today’s incumbents.
To paraphrase John Lennon, centralization is over, if you want it.
But this requires the experience to be actually better for users, and not just in an “eat your vegetables / don’t give your privacy away” manner. Starting a new venture to take this on requires a combination of investment, insight, and commitment that’s not easy to assemble. But it can and probably will happen, relative to legislation or very possible social catastrophes that entrench the current players longer than needed.