Comment by wiether

> I'd love to see us build a British Google for example.

Here in France we have (had ?) Qwant[1] that never really worked because at first it was about having a search engine at the level of Google, then being user privacy focused (like DDG), then being focused on kids, then on music, then...

But from the beginning it was failing because they were just providing a proxy for Bing's results. They were not even providing a sanitized version of those results. It was Bing's results with a different UI. And then, because they needed money, they focused on some topics (like the kids, which provided them public money) or music (income from partners companies). Also there was a lot of political/bureaucratic crap involved within the direction.

So it looks like the issue is that it was people with money that said "we are going to be the French Google". But they hadn't enough money to do so and being "the French Google" is not enough.

If we look at DDG, first it was a bad search engine but they focused on their promise about user privacy. And then they improved their search engine from there. Now they are a credible alternative to Google because they have something that Google don't, while on the core feature (search engine) they are almost the same. If you want to compete, you have to offer something different while providing the same core features.

I think ProtonMail (Switzerland) is a good example. At the moment they don't provide a webmail as good as Gmail, but they provide great email service while focusing on user privacy. They are trying to compete against Google on email like DDG dig on search engine. And that's why it's more and more popular.

So there's probably a mindset issue : don't compete for the sake of competing. Offer something different and then try to reach the competitors level on the core feature. You can't beat a multi-billion giant at its own game.

[1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant