[sushicalculus]

> 20% of that, 14,000 searches per second, seems a meaningful number of searches to scale to.

This is only part of the story. 20% to me is not really meaningful. More importantly, Google wields power to affect the 80%. 20% is a paltry alternative.

[UncleMeat]

But the argument is that 20% isn’t enough to sustain another business. This is plainly false.

[voisin]

Doesn’t it depend on how competitive the other 20% is? Having one player with 80% and the remaining 20% split amongst 20 companies would indicate market dominance and that the others are competing with each other and not meaningfully with the market leader. I think the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index[0] is used in these cases but I am not sure what it looks like for search.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herfindahl–Hirschman_Index

[mattmcknight]

For scale, the % doesn't matter. The implication was that there wasn't enough data to drive ad serving.