[joe_the_user]

The weird thing with the "also-rans" of various competitions is that they seem to utterly collapse in a strange fashion.

MySpace got shittier and shittier even as Facebook expanded and there was visible mind-share searching for new things.

Yahoo has gotten similarly worse despite being in a space where people wanted a Google alternative.

The impression I get is that also-rans basically aim to cash-out rather than continuing. The big thing seems to be few investors actually want to think long term and there's money only in being a market leader or in being ad-driven, self-discrediting crap-site - and it costs lots of money running a big website despite it seems like it should be cheap.

[Retra]

Some of those may be the result of trying to differentiate themselves. People might want an alternative to Google (the company), but they don't really want an alternative to Google (the search engine.)

If you're trying to beat someone like Google by offering a different-but-worse search engine, it's not really going to work. Facebook offers the same kind of problem. You're also not going to win by being the same. You have to do different-but-obviously-better, which is actually very very hard.