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nostrademonstoday at 7:44 PM1 replyview on HN

Eh, it's true that Google's incentives aren't really aligned with bookmarking tools, but the magnitude of the effect is much less than you're thinking of. Basically 100% of Google's revenues come from commercial-seeking queries, cases where the user has a purchasing intent before they came to the search engine. All of the non-commercial uses - coding, random facts, research, education, navigational queries, etc - are just loss-leaders so that your fingers automatically reach for Google when you're searching for lawyers, contractors, home-improvement fixtures, apps, furniture, flowers, restaurants, consumer electronics, etc. Google (of the 2010s certainly, but also true now) considered Amazon to be its primary competition, not Yahoo or del.icio.us.

They put precisely zero effort into killing bookmarks. I know because I was there, and probably would've been tasked with doing it. Well, that and because bookmarks still exist and I can still use them. They also put zero effort into improving bookmarks or making them easier for you to use, but it's death by inaction and consumer choice, not by anything Google did.


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aucisson_masquetoday at 9:42 PM

I don’t know if they did or didn’t try to kill bookmarks.

But on the commercial incentives, it does make sense for them to kill it.

Companies pay good advertisement so they show up first on the search result when a user want to find them.

Eg you want to go to carglass website: you type carglass in google and the company will most likely pay Google to show up first in the ads section because competitors are trying to sway away customers from them. If they didn’t outbid their competitors, even though the customer want to go to carglass, he will click on first result and may end up buying from their competitor without even noticing.

That wouldn’t happen if people had put carglass.com website in bookmark.

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