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0 pointsnickpsecurity9y ago0 comments

"Maybe you've misunderstood what artificial scarcity and rent-seeking mean. She's talking about it in the widely-used economic sense of "scarcity that's imposed solely to extract rents, inferior to an alternative method which would increase net utility". "

Ahhh. That could be it. I didn't realize it was a defined economic term. I thought it meant creating an artificial monopoly to grab a market, lock users into the benefits, deny competition via that tech, and make a financial killing in the process.

If I was wrong, I take back the critique based on artificial scarcity but keep it based on monopoly. PageRank was simply too good to beat. Patenting it led to their billions and continued dominance. They did smart things on top of that success. They might have not pulled it off without being monopolistic about search, though.

"a public-PageRank Google doesn't even come close."

How? It let them dominate search, control much ad revenue, put players with most money on top results, create a major contender in browsing, and later dominate mobile market. All that came from PageRank being both good and patented.

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wutbrodo9y ago

>> a public-PageRank Google doesn't even come close."

> How? It let them dominate search, control much ad revenue, put players with most money on top results, create a major contender in browsing, and later dominate mobile market.

The context of my original comment was that a public Pagerank algorithm isn't an artificially scarce environment. I don't understand your "how" question, and I don't see what the rest of this paragraph has to do with artificial scarcity.

Duckduckgo doesn't have a public spec for their algorithm either, because again, it would render their results useless in a short amount of time. That example should hopefully illustrate how keeping one's ranking algorithm private has pretty much nothing to do with artificial scarcity or abuse of monopoly.

nickpsecurityOP9y ago

"a public Pagerank algorithm isn't an artificially scarce environment"

I already told you I retracted artificial scarcity claim since I didnt know it had established meaning in economics. I shifted to a similar argument based on monopolies. Google's PageRank wasnt just publuc: it was patented (monopoly), extremely effective, and more efficieng than contenders that sprang up. That nobody could copy or beat the algorithm is why they stayed on top despite tons of search and meta-search engines existing.

If it was public and not patented, search landscape + Google's valuation might look a lot different. The monopoly on the best technique is why they got huge rather than a temporary advantage.

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