I didn't see anyone mention this specific fear, but a lot of people talked about this in the context of competition with Wolfram Alpha. What I fear is that google (on purpose or not) will outshine Wolfram's offering, push W|A out of the game, and then in 3-6 years decide it is not a feature worth keeping up.
Just like code search, viable companies may fail due to Google toying with their entire industry, and then Google may just drop us back to the stone age in terms of that category of product. The fact that this is a fear at all points (in my mind) to some issues of monopoly.
Then again, maybe I'm just too cynical and worried.
I don't fear Google dropping us behind where we are, I fear another IE6.
IE6 back in the day was actually quite good. But because it was really good (among other other more shady things) everything else died off and it stagnated.
What I fear is google keeping us in a local maxima of search and having us stagnate there for a decade.
I'm guessing people took this as a sarcastic remark but I was genuinely thinking you were going to be able to tell me of some new social networks to try and point out their benefits; I try to keep on top of developments in this area. Oh well.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but most of the possible meanings I can think of aren't ones that would really stop us from having google be an (unfortunate) local maxima of search for too long.
I am thinking of laws that make it unlawful to publish certain links with an arbitrary property (containing or linking to copyrighted material) or laws that prohibits it to publish the result of statistical analysis (the whole auto-suggest debate). Note also that everytime that Google changes its ranking algorithm, some companies complain because, as they paid for SEO, they feel entitled to a high google rank.
I don't think W|A is going to disappear (I work on W|A). We do a lot more than plot functions of one and two variables -- after all, Apple chose us to power much of Siri's factual question answering.
We're pioneering automatic analysis of new kinds of input, from images to long-form text to raw data (what I work on). We can out-innovate Google, even if they do a really nice job of copying our old ideas.
Of course, sometimes, like with Google Squared, they don't do such a nice job.
Cool! Hey, a tip, and I think I mentioned this in the comment/feedback box on W|A as well:
For some reason, every time I need information that makes me think "hey this would be the typical thing I'd expect W|A to be able to answer, I've seen it answer a similar question before" it hardly ever works ...
And I think a lot of that is due to how most of the demos I've seen are somewhat USA-centered and W|A doesn't have the same data when I query it for a European (or other) country.
How does that work? Because when I use Google or DuckDuckGo and look for that nation's bureau of statistics, fact sheet, even Wikipedia, the numbers are right there. Why is that? I thought W|A is supposed to index the calculatable knowledge for me so I don't have to search for it but instead can just run calculations with it?
Or does W|A just import complete available datasets and does not scrape the web for such data (even when it's in tabular form on an official government or university site)?
In which case, please get some more of those from non-US sources. Loads of governments opened up their data sources:
http://ckan.org/ <-- Germany, Netherlands, UK, France, Canada or are you using this one already? It's CC-BY-3.0 so there's no reason not to.
What monopoly? Google doesnt remotely have a monopoly on scientific visualisation, and a possible monopoly on search doesnt really overlap with that.
The problem small companies have with Google is Google's _size_, so many of their side projects are bigger than somebody else's entire business. This absolutely doesnt have anything to do with their headstart in search. Whatever project somebody else successfully starts, Google can simply outspend them and reach the goal first, but this isnt specific to Google, you have this problem with any other big solvent company. WA would have the same problem if a producer of toilet tissue with more cash reserves than WA suddenly decided to compete with WA.
If you were to take a poll of earthlings asking them whether they've heard of Google and whether they've heard of Wolfram Alpha, Google would resoundingly win. People would also, by and large, be familiar with their search if anything.
If you then asked those people where they would search for an answer to a mathematical problem, or if they wanted to find the meaning of some math equation, it's not hard to believe that they'd google it. Even if they ended up on Wikipedia, they would probably use Google to get there. Before Google launched this feature, people would use the search to (hopefully) end up at Wolfram Alpha. Now, they are likelier (than before) to have their needs met by Google itself.
A monopoly on search is a monopoly on access to knowledge. If Google goes into competition with another provider of access to knowledge, they have a tangible head start. That's where I'm coming from -- I concur that search doesn't overlap with everything, but I think it overlaps at least a bit with this.
Well, this graph viewer is fun, but it's only a tiny sliver of what Wolfram|Alpha can do; if Google wants to "toy with" the industry it will require some more serious toying!
Just like code search, viable companies may fail due to Google toying with their entire industry, and then Google may just drop us back to the stone age in terms of that category of product. The fact that this is a fear at all points (in my mind) to some issues of monopoly.
Then again, maybe I'm just too cynical and worried.