Google's goal is not to provide search; it is rather to gather infinite data about people and monetize it. If google offered a search API, it would destroy its surveillance system.
replyWe should have outlawed targeted advertising and Google should have been broken up under antitrust a long time ago.
I wanted to add a quote from one of the google founders: "everyone can compete with cheap, but nobody can compete with free".
reply(Context was email services when they rolled out gmail worldwide)
> I get that it means they can't serve ads
replyEasy enough to run the ad-engine over the query, estimate the ad revenue, and bill the user the value of the lost revenue.
They are free to recoup that by serving their own ads or even using Google's ad services.
Wow. That's a great concept.
replyExactly why it seems to make sense to be willing to disrupt yourself.
There are so many ways to still make money.
But, I'd be willing to bet that avoiding self-disruption increases the likelihood of failure over longer timescales.
Google sold search appliances between 2002-2016, the replaced it with Google Cloud Search.
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