I would go one step further and question the premises that a) the next google must necessarily be dominant/monopolistic and b) that said dominance must necessarily ride on top of free user economics.
What TikTok shows to me is that users want specific things when they go to a site: for TikTok, they want fresh entertainment, plain and simple. I go to HN when I want tech discussion. I go to reddit when I want aggregation of niche topics. I go to costco.com when I'm looking to shop.
Google is frankly a horrible experience for ecommerce, it simply cannot compete w/ the likes of Amazon or any retail store website, really. Being a search portal, it's fundamentally incompatible with the concept of evolving through permanence of a hivemind; every new search is like reseting a would-be community to zero all over again, so you cannot gradually build up a collective commons on Google like you can on HN. Youtube has recently gotten pretty bad with cycling fresh content on the front page. For stack overflow sort of stuff, any other search engine does more or less the same. For trivia, Siri/Alexa are fine substitutes. The Google search properties have become mediocre on average; they're not particularly great at any particular thing.
Are many of these domains walled gardens? Yes, think of things like Doordash/Uber Eats grocery catalogs, a ton of brick and mortar shops are choosing to integrate with these delivery apps, and these catalogs are completely invisible to Google. News SERPs on Google are often garbage since they just link to paywalled content half the time, might as well just get a subscription from the actual news outlets. Etc.
IMHO, the next Google is already here, and it's everybody else wisening up to the simple business fact that they need to own the top of their funnels.
What TikTok shows to me is that users want specific things when they go to a site: for TikTok, they want fresh entertainment, plain and simple. I go to HN when I want tech discussion. I go to reddit when I want aggregation of niche topics. I go to costco.com when I'm looking to shop.
Google is frankly a horrible experience for ecommerce, it simply cannot compete w/ the likes of Amazon or any retail store website, really. Being a search portal, it's fundamentally incompatible with the concept of evolving through permanence of a hivemind; every new search is like reseting a would-be community to zero all over again, so you cannot gradually build up a collective commons on Google like you can on HN. Youtube has recently gotten pretty bad with cycling fresh content on the front page. For stack overflow sort of stuff, any other search engine does more or less the same. For trivia, Siri/Alexa are fine substitutes. The Google search properties have become mediocre on average; they're not particularly great at any particular thing.
Are many of these domains walled gardens? Yes, think of things like Doordash/Uber Eats grocery catalogs, a ton of brick and mortar shops are choosing to integrate with these delivery apps, and these catalogs are completely invisible to Google. News SERPs on Google are often garbage since they just link to paywalled content half the time, might as well just get a subscription from the actual news outlets. Etc.
IMHO, the next Google is already here, and it's everybody else wisening up to the simple business fact that they need to own the top of their funnels.