Is Data still a moat?

Being a millennial who grew up using Altavista, then Yahoo, and then Google to search, I wouldnt have thought that Google’s dominance in search would decline, much less dethroned.

There is this idea that your data is your moat. Google supposedly being the largest hoarder of data must have an impenetrable moat. Who else could conceivably acquire more data than the almighty Google?

My personal observation would reject this notion. Data is not a moat, or at least as critical a defensive component as what it used to be.

I can think of four ways to overcome the Data as a Moat strategy:

1. Data acquisition: Your opponent can acquire wholly different set of data, through wholly different means. Google relied on scraping the web for data. Yet Tiktok relied on data that people create themselves. While Google owns Youtube with its massive video collection, no other platform has more user-generated videos than Tiktok. Users can remix videos for added relevance & better curation, a mechanism that is absent from Google Search.
2. Data presentation: In search, more data = more relevance. Google’s rise to power was in its algorithm to rank the most relevant search result for you. As a user, you are then expected to click a bunch of links at the top of search result to figure out what works best. The way OpenAI engineered ChatGPT brought this behavior to a stop. Users now expect structured & elaborate answers instantly, we are too lazy to click on every search result.
3. Data trustworthiness: Websites with relevant content used to be a trust-signal, but nowadays a user-submitted video is worth so much more. Bots can easily craft 800-1500 long articles that can rank on Google. Compare that to a video uploaded by a trusted creator, shared and liked by thousands of other like-minded users. Trustworthiness through the roof!
4. Data relevancy: We used to think that data platforms like Google and Facebook will not d!e; data will always remain relevant. Well guess what, people grow old and new generations emerge. The new gens couldnt care less about the platforms dominated by the older gens. They will flock to a new skibidi platform, creating a fresh new cycle.

If you think about using data as Moat, think again. Apparently anyone can just build a moat atop of a different hill, attracting their own set of users.