At first glance, this looks extremely ironic. Don't Socialists advocate for a centralization of economic capital (among others like political and news) or do I misunderstand? If purist socialists had there way, wouldn't there only be one search engine?
Obviously it would be great if others could compete, but I think it's simply a market gap (innovation, capital investment, etc) at this point and not for lack of competitors trying. Many died out (Yahoo!, Excite, Altavista), some survive as niche (DuckDuckGo), some still exist (Bing, Ask/Jeebs), and some are still massive but serve other markets (Baidu, Yandex).
Google has become so successful that their search is very advanced compared to upstarts. The more Google learns from their massive index corpus and userbase, the further ahead they get. Baidu might have a comparable dataset and userbase, but they specialize in different markets with different languages and cultures.
>Don't Socialists advocate for a centralization of economic capital (among others like political and news) or do I misunderstand?
Not necessarily (distributed economic planning, comumnal planning and indeed some (though not I) advance market Socialism), and further, things like search can be decentralised, as I'm sure mosts Socialists would agree with if aware that such technology exists.
>If purist socialists had there way, wouldn't there only be one search engine?
No, I see no reason to think that. This is largely stemming from the myth that "everyone has one car under Socialism"; it neglects that aside from seeking profit, different cars have different uses and advantages. It's probably the same with search engines and GNU/Linux distros.
>Google has become so successful that their search is very advanced compared to upstarts.
I agree, and I think that in a world where there is less incentive to keep secrets (though of course there is always incentive, such as personal pride, mastery, or even embarrassment over how your code looks!) because profit doesn't need to be protected from "theives", such research might even be public for others to benefit from. The learning technology can be free. Google would not have to collect data "on the sly", perhaps.
However the response to this is - would people willingly (and by this I mean when properly and fully informed of what they are doing) give over this data that Google uses to learn in such a way? If the answer is no, perhaps it's time to consider the ethical ramifications of such 'learning'.
I was not being ironic. And I believe in capitalism, why did you thought the opposite, may I ask? Capitalism advocates the free market and concurrency. If a company become too powerful, it's not good. Once a friend mine had a business that depended of Google Adwords. One day he woke up and his account was blocked. Google did not answered his emails, just automatic responses. His legal online business broke after some weeks.
I read several similar stories related to other companies, like Amazon (Affiliates).
Obviously it would be great if others could compete, but I think it's simply a market gap (innovation, capital investment, etc) at this point and not for lack of competitors trying. Many died out (Yahoo!, Excite, Altavista), some survive as niche (DuckDuckGo), some still exist (Bing, Ask/Jeebs), and some are still massive but serve other markets (Baidu, Yandex).
Google has become so successful that their search is very advanced compared to upstarts. The more Google learns from their massive index corpus and userbase, the further ahead they get. Baidu might have a comparable dataset and userbase, but they specialize in different markets with different languages and cultures.