And, as an entity more powerful than any living thing on this planet (with the power to kill or support nearly any online business), they owe the world quite a bit of fairness: Otherwise, they can watch as their search business drops to nothing overnight. Facebook and Amazon and most B2Bs have quite a bit of lock in. But google, if they piss everyone off, we'll we're just one tab away from using something else: and once people realize that something else is equal or better, it's all over for G.
I switched to duck duck go a few months ago for search and the cost of switching was Zero.
> with the power to kill or support nearly any online business
Absolutely untrue. Almost every startup I've worked for considered search traffic to be negligible. I've also worked at a place where google traffic accounted for 70% of sales and they actually went out of businesses a few months after we dropped off the front-page, but there is no inherent reason why our company deserved the top spot any more than those that replaced us on the front-page.
There is another more effective way to kill Google if they would turn evil. It just takes a number of the biggest and most important websites such as wikipedia, newspapers, stackoverflow and so on to block google in the robots.txt. Users will then think Google is broken because those websites are missing and use another search engine.
> And, as an entity more powerful than any living thing on this planet (with the power to kill or support nearly any online business), they owe the world quite a bit of fairness: Otherwise, they can watch as their search business drops to nothing overnight.
So are they powerful or aren't they? How can they be so powerful if they are one night away from ruin?
This is a surprising thing to hear. I think given Google's influence, they owe them at least some fairness.