[InclinedPlane]

For extremely contrived definitions of "1998's Google" yes. But if all it took was a pile of servers and hard-drives for 1998's Google to succeed then a lot more other companies would have done so as well. It takes more than that to build a company.

[enki]

(author here)

I was writing this more in the sense that kids at BioCurious (and the DIY Bio Movement in general) are doing electrophoresis to transfer DNA from glowing jellyfish to bacteria. This is just a few (two?) years after someone got a Nobel prize for that.

That's progress. If stuff that used to be hard falls into kids hands, you're gonna see impressive stuff happening.

However I fully agree that it takes more than that to build a company (Also I wouldn't try to compete with 2012 Google using 1998 technology)

[streptomycin]

Just pointing out... Nobel prizes aren't given for cutting edge work, they're given many years later. People have been doing transfection of genes for decades.

The Nobel prize you're referring to was probably the one for GFP. Interestingly, a huge challenge in using GFP now is patent issues and thus money issues, rather than technical issues.

[InclinedPlane]

Fair enough. The title seems a bit link-baity, I think something along the lines of "the infrastructure of 1998's Google" would have been better.

[billpatrianakos]

I half disagree. If you're blogging then the point is to get that blog some eyeballs on it. Otherwise you write in a journal or don't make it publicly accessible or at the very least don't help it get indexed and never link to it.

I think there's link-bait and then there's LINK BAIT! (TM). It's a fine line between the two. You have to have a catchy, preferably keyword splattered, title or you become yet another blog no one cares about. I also think there's too much focus on the title when it comes to real link-bait. The really awful kind of link-bait is the kind that links to an article with very little to no content having anything to do with the title. In this case I think the article corresponded with the title enough for it not to be link-bait-style misleading. But that's me and there is no real answer. Just interpretations.

[InclinedPlane]

I wholeheartedly disagree. If you are blogging ideally you are doing so because you are injecting valuable insights or information into the world at large. The value is not to you that eyeballs are on your blog but to the eyeballs themselves.

[tikhonj]

I think the article was more about "Google the search technology" rather than "Google the company". It wasn't about startups or entrepreneurship but rather about technological progress.

[dredmorbius]

This also means that search is now commoditized.

Google's value doesn't come so much from search any more (it's good at it, though there are now grumblings from the Googluminati), but from its advertising network (and the concomitant connections and contracts associated with it), and the value-added services built on top of Google's underlying search technology, to the extent that those leverage Google's base tools and/or expertise.

The chinks in Google's armor are starting to show though:

- Cheap and/or federated search is now available. - OpenStreetMap is providing mapping data (and APIs) to rival Google Maps. - There's a lot of grumbling going on over privacy especially in the social and mobile spaces. Neither has quite fully coalesced, but if you look at the volatility in both spaces (consider what the largest social network and most popular smartphones were 5 years ago vs. today), things could again change quickly. - Most tellingly, trust in Google to "not be evil" is eroding, rapidly in some quarters.

Google is valuable -- because it dominates advertising, and has the users to monetize that. Chip away at the user base and it could find its hegemony starting to fail.

The fact that it's very, very cheap to replicate Google's underlying tech helps with this. DuckDuckGo is essentially a one-man shop. Yes, it has a very small fraction of Google's traffic, but it compares favorably with everyone else who's tackling Google, including Micorosft's Bing, with ... more than one man equivalent last I checked.

[forkandwait]

A pile of servers and a special algorithm. Now that the algorithm is published, rather than yet-to-be-invented, it would be very possible. So "Dad's credit card and a few late nights reading papers".