I'd hesitate to call Google search entertainment or community-building (social) though. Those are the two characteristics where universal appeal is difficult that I meant to highlight.
Google is really good at universal systems that produce quantitatively better results when the user input is minimal and the output is easily optimized.
You could argue my restaurant example is an input-output problem. Good ingredients in. Solid, repeatable kitchen process. Good food out. Unfortunately, food preparation is a manual process involving high levels of individual skill and has an inherently large variance. That's why running a restaurant is a people problem. The tricky output is the ambiance. Food is important but restaurants are also social entertainment. Combine those two and that's why niche restaurants are almost always better than chains (imo of course.)
Google is really good at universal systems that produce quantitatively better results when the user input is minimal and the output is easily optimized.
You could argue my restaurant example is an input-output problem. Good ingredients in. Solid, repeatable kitchen process. Good food out. Unfortunately, food preparation is a manual process involving high levels of individual skill and has an inherently large variance. That's why running a restaurant is a people problem. The tricky output is the ambiance. Food is important but restaurants are also social entertainment. Combine those two and that's why niche restaurants are almost always better than chains (imo of course.)