Let me describe the world of Google: Google is a 'starting site'. It's the biggest in the world. People open their computers and go there. There are not many such 'entry points' of the internet. Being one of those entry points is insanely valuable. Examples are:
Google, Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo, Reddit, Play Store, TikTok, etc. Every other site is building on traffic that started from an entry point. Those entry points may give you traffic for free, but overtime, they all converge to charge you for access to the users.
It's a bit like building a store on a popular shopping street. The shop sells, not because of the product, but because it has the visibility of the shopping street. And the rent will be premium because of that. Google is the road and the shop landlord.
Facebook owns three such entry points - Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The monetisation potential of that is insanely large. Neither WhatsApp nor Instagram have yet been significantly monetized in any way.
Amazon charges a hefty commission to put products on there. Google uses an auction system to basically extract the most value it can to reach the user (via ads), and does not take any operational or fulfillment risk. It does not even guarantee that you will get the customer.
In competitive markets, e.g Travel, the major players bid themselves down to 0-profit on ads, and then depend on the free channels to make themselves money.
Google is a starting site because it is insanely useful to the end-user. It is the best in the world, but the new stuff it is using will make it almost impossible to compete against, and probably make it a company that will dominate for the next 100 years.
Google is using featured snippets, and showing various random ones to users. The behaviour of the users is telling Google which pages and snippets are answering the questions. At it's scale, it is learning extremely fast what the correct answers to questions are.
It does not 'know', but it knows what the consensus of users is as to what the correct answer is. This data is hidden. You cannot recreate it because you lack the data, the users and the machine training. The learned data-set can also be used to extrapolate other answers.
Once Google does this for long enough, it will be able to answer all queries, in a way that nobody else can! It cannot be reproduced. When that happens, it locks itself in as the forever 'entry point' to the internet. With that, it can extract up to 50% of all commerce value.
Of the whole world, on a huge number of different keywords, and very, very diverse markets. What Google is doing with hotels now (a custom product that shares in fulfillment value) will extend further and further. Imagine Google getting 10% of any Ferrari sale, for example.
The lock-in effects of huge data are massive. The types of companies coming into existence right now are companies that humanity has never seen before. Propriety data. Access to the entire world. Very low cost. Backed by Intelligent Machines.
