Is it possible to beat Google?

Not only is it possible, but it is becoming more and more likely to happen soon. 

The reason it hasn’t happened yet is because nobody has applied the correct strategy yet. I do not think it would take heroic feats of execution, given the right strategy. In order to compete with Google’s strategy, or understand why it can be beaten in the first place, it is helpful to understand it:

Despite Google’s profits, talent, and maturity, the number of ways a user can possibly search for something is very limited. The way that Google Search presents results to the user, given an input query, is also out of the user’s hands. The user, no matter how savvy, cannot instruct Google to use a different kind of search algorithm. Nor can the user see the details of the algorithm that is chosen for them, as it is a highly guarded trade secret.

This is of course a deliberate choice on Google’s part. There are a few reasons, in my opinion, why Google’s strategy is successful:

1. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”
   Google has consistently maintained a majority market share in the search engine space, despite having much more negative press than Microsoft, in recent times. There have been changes to the search engine, but those changes have been so gradual that they are barely noticeable to the user. This consistency keeps many users loyal, as they can expect that the tool will be there, reliably faithful, day after day.
2. The search engine’s lack of rich customization best serves the paying customers (advertisers), rather than the end usersThis should come as no surprise, as it is the businesses which buy advertisements. It is the businesses that generate income for Google. SEO specialists can be hired by that business to help ensure that a potential customer will find the site when searching for relevant terms. The job of an SEO specialist, thanks to the limited choices by the end user, ends up being relatively straightforward and achievable by a typical marketing professional.
   
   If a given business market is too competitive for an SEO team to push a client to the top of the search rankings, then plan B is to buy advertising (although in many cases, advertising happens regardless). Additionally, the constrained search space means advertisers can engage in bidding wars to gain a slice of the artificially small pie.
   
   This is perhaps the critical piece which I have not seen discussed elsewhere yet: If the search engine had rich customization, there would be less of an incentive for a business to purchase advertising credits, as an end user would be able to tweak the search parameters to a sufficient degree to where virtually any niche could be more easily found through the search engine.
3. The very idea of competing with Google is culturally prohibitive
   Never in the history of civilization has there been such a notable and unnoticed case of a company’s profits resulting from an artificially reduced quality to the end user. Our culture often frowns upon the idea of complaining about the quality of a free product. This is especially true when most people, being non-technical or non-innovators, will not intuitively understand that the quality is low in the first place. On top of that: in many subjective and objective interpretations, the quality isn’t even low per se, because Google Search itself is a highly polished user experience. Add all of that up, and the very idea of competing with Google will be met with fierce resistance at the cultural and societal level.
4. Competitors have failed to innovateIn the industry, I have commonly heard statements like “It’s too late to get into the search space, Google has already locked it up.” While I haven’t personally tried to start a company to compete with Google (though it is tempting), my guess is that it will be a very hard sell to get an investor to fund such an idea. What’s shocking to me is that anyone (such as Bing) who has tried to compete with Google Search, has built almost an identical interface. Basically either a watered down or imitated version of the same thing. And then the industry regulars will point to these examples, and use them to further cement the idea that you cannot compete with Google Search. I think that the vast majority of the world has not yet realized that it would be very well within the realm of realistic possibility to not only create a more interesting and rich search experience for the users, but undermine Google’s vast market share in the process.
5. Innovators who beat the odds, will often be acquired and assimilated by GoogleHere’s a List of mergers and acquisitions by Alphabet, Google’s parent company. While I can’t speculate much on the reasons of any individual acquisition, I can point out that there are a number of them involving search technologies. It is quite rare for a startup to turn down an attractive acquisition offer, as when the offer is presented, then the founders, investors, and company would be taking a massive risk by saying no. By saying yes, they will receive huge amounts of money, enough for their families to retire many times over.

With the knowledge of these points, it is not difficult to imagine that there is a real possibility that Google Search could be undermined. While it wouldn’t be a trivial task, a competing service, with the right strategy, could achieve greater user satisfaction and market share, but probably not great revenue (unless perhaps it was a subscription-based service and a huge number of people decided it was a good deal to sign up). I predict this will become more of a real possibility under decentralized smart contract systems such as the Ethereum blockchain, where value exchange itself can happen on a peer to peer basis (via a synergistic ecosystem of content curators, content providers, and content consumers).

Answered by Mark Nuzzolilo II on Quora.com