Comment by kolinko
1 year ago
Gmail was revolutionary at the start, but stopped innovating 10 years ago - why don’t we still have a good search engine within it?
MapReduce would be invented anyway (I implemented it from scratch before learning of it’s existence).
Chrome is just a slightly upgraded Firefox (and novadays Safari is just as good if not better with ai)
PageRank was what gave Google monopoly, it’s not a result of monopoly.
Go - I can give you that. ProtoBuf - not my field, but isn’t it just a format that someone else would develop to fill a niche? (unlike say mp3 that had new compression algorithms baked in)
Maps - I can give you that. Some people might argue that it was an acquisition, but without Google’s muscle, Street View would not be feasible.
> Chrome is just a slightly upgraded Firefox
Wat. It's like saying that an apple is a slightly upgraded orange. I would understand if you mentioned KHTML and Safari as relatives, but "slightly upgraded" does not fit anyway.
> PageRank was what gave Google monopoly
I don't think so. PageRank has been successfully implemented elsewhere, and outmatched. What helped Google build a monopoly was the first mover advantage, the network effects, and the incessant streams of money from AdWords (invented by Google), DoubleClick (acquired) and a bunch of other advertisement tools.
> Maps - I can give you that.
Don't :) Google Maps is an acquisition from 20 years ago. (As is Android, AdSense, and many other core flagship products of the Google brand.)
If you want a relatively recent, successful Google service for general public, it's Google Photos.
>Google Maps is an acquisition from 20 years ago. (As is Android)
This is comical. When Google acquired Android, it was nothing more than a 3000 line JavaScript demo. The Android OS was created entirely at Google.
It's the same for Google Maps. It was just a C++ demo when acquired, nothing at all like what we see today.
>If you want a relatively recent, successful Google service for general public, it's Google Photos.
I seem to recall that followed the acquisition of Picasa.
Picasa was rather different: it had a desktop client, had tags, did not have a dedicated view mode, etc. It ran as a separate product, and then was shut down, not integrated.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa
> Gmail was revolutionary at the start, but stopped innovating 10 years ago - why don't we still have a good search engine within it?
Not sure about your experience, but I used to subscribe to a lot of mailing lists just so that I can search for mailing list content using gmail, because the search function implemented by those mailing lists were generally worse.