The comments here about building search engines that viably compete with Google in terms of quality are hilariously wrong.
Hilariously wrong.
The dominating cost is not hiring smart people to work on the problem, it's hiring enough smart people to work on the problem.
Consider. Here at Microsoft, we employ a search relevance staff of -- what, 20% the size of Google's? And Google's engineers are rock solid. MS might be able to make up a small margin, but our search relevance staff -- good though they are -- cannot compete with a brilliant workforce that is 5 times larger than them. If we are going to actually compete with Google, the problem is not hiring smart people, it's hiring 5 times the current number of smart people employed for this task at MS.
Never mind buying such a team. MS can afford that. How do you even find that many people in 2-3 years?
When you consider the rest of the data, the case for building something like Google really begins to look grim. For example, how much does it really cost to build a search engine? We've poured at least tens of millions of dollars into just search relevance (I'm not even counting infrastructure). That's good mileage, considering that this way is littered with the corpses of companies like Cuil, who made investments in this area and failed miserably. Still, while this has been a great deal for us, we're still not there yet, and it's not clear we will be in the very near future. And so it's worth wondering: if MS can't buy something like that, realistically, who can? DDG? lol no.
In the end, this is the true dominating cost of building a search engine: people capital. Other bottlenecks, like engineering debt, politics, etc. pale against the sheer, awe-inspiring investment of Google in people capital.
The dominating cost is not hiring smart people to work on the problem, it's hiring enough smart people to work on the problem.
Consider. Here at Microsoft, we employ a search relevance staff of -- what, 20% the size of Google's? And Google's engineers are rock solid. MS might be able to make up a small margin, but our search relevance staff -- good though they are -- cannot compete with a brilliant workforce that is 5 times larger than them. If we are going to actually compete with Google, the problem is not hiring smart people, it's hiring 5 times the current number of smart people employed for this task at MS.
Never mind buying such a team. MS can afford that. How do you even find that many people in 2-3 years?
When you consider the rest of the data, the case for building something like Google really begins to look grim. For example, how much does it really cost to build a search engine? We've poured at least tens of millions of dollars into just search relevance (I'm not even counting infrastructure). That's good mileage, considering that this way is littered with the corpses of companies like Cuil, who made investments in this area and failed miserably. Still, while this has been a great deal for us, we're still not there yet, and it's not clear we will be in the very near future. And so it's worth wondering: if MS can't buy something like that, realistically, who can? DDG? lol no.
In the end, this is the true dominating cost of building a search engine: people capital. Other bottlenecks, like engineering debt, politics, etc. pale against the sheer, awe-inspiring investment of Google in people capital.