Google does user profiling and this means not only that they can serve better ads, it also means that they are giving users what they want, with queries being at least location dependent. E.g. when I'm searching for "Ruby", it gives me the homepage of the programming language as the first result and most other results are about this language too. When my wife searches the same thing, it gives her the Wikipedia page on rubbies, some stuff about Ruby's Diner, 1 or 2 YouTube videos, etc...
Of course I've noticed that this user-profiling is pretty dumb currently, but it's getting better. And skipping over privacy issues and the death of the long-tail, this is in fact what most people want and I also think that normal users do not care about the loss of privacy, unless they've been bitten by the side effects.
Then Google's own crawler can hardly be matched. Consider how web interfaces these days are more and more reliable on JavaScript. It's easy to run a headless browser and render a JavaScript-enhanced page from a script, but it's hard to scale that to hundreds of millions of web pages and workaround all the idiotic things that people do with JavaScript. Also couple that with the need to serve fresh news to people that want it, so the crawler has to be smart enough / fast enough for near real-time consumption.
Then Google's other services are complementing their search, stuff like Google Places or Google Maps. Personally I hate when such results are cluttering my view, but when searching for places (e.g. restaurants, kindergartens), people are happy to get such results straight on the first page. And btw, I don't know how they do search by voice recognition on Android, but it's a no-brainer to improve the voice recognition based on global trends or even on the user's profile - the point being that there's a lot they can do with the data and infrastructure they have that's out of reach for small startups.
Personally I liked the old Google better, but it's going to take a lot more than improved privacy to eat their launch.
Google does user profiling and this means not only that they can serve better ads, it also means that they are giving users what they want, with queries being at least location dependent. E.g. when I'm searching for "Ruby", it gives me the homepage of the programming language as the first result and most other results are about this language too. When my wife searches the same thing, it gives her the Wikipedia page on rubbies, some stuff about Ruby's Diner, 1 or 2 YouTube videos, etc...
Of course I've noticed that this user-profiling is pretty dumb currently, but it's getting better. And skipping over privacy issues and the death of the long-tail, this is in fact what most people want and I also think that normal users do not care about the loss of privacy, unless they've been bitten by the side effects.
Then Google's own crawler can hardly be matched. Consider how web interfaces these days are more and more reliable on JavaScript. It's easy to run a headless browser and render a JavaScript-enhanced page from a script, but it's hard to scale that to hundreds of millions of web pages and workaround all the idiotic things that people do with JavaScript. Also couple that with the need to serve fresh news to people that want it, so the crawler has to be smart enough / fast enough for near real-time consumption.
Then Google's other services are complementing their search, stuff like Google Places or Google Maps. Personally I hate when such results are cluttering my view, but when searching for places (e.g. restaurants, kindergartens), people are happy to get such results straight on the first page. And btw, I don't know how they do search by voice recognition on Android, but it's a no-brainer to improve the voice recognition based on global trends or even on the user's profile - the point being that there's a lot they can do with the data and infrastructure they have that's out of reach for small startups.
Personally I liked the old Google better, but it's going to take a lot more than improved privacy to eat their launch.