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Google, History, Profitability
sashae sent us a story about google. Google has been my search engine of choice for years now, and this is an interesting window into what's happening back there. I find it interesting that people angrily submit stories constantly about Google "selling out" whenever something that looks like it might generate revenue appears. That means more than a lot of people realize: it means people care. So many Web sites are so bloated with ads that already can't be taken seriously. Google is special: I'm not opposed to seeing ads on it (frankly I'm amazed they made it this long considering the kind of bandwidth and hardware they need) I just hate seeing ads the way the vast majority of mainstream sites do it (hundreds of little banners everywhere blurring the lines between content and commercials). And hell, they run Linux.
pronoblem
Not to mention their use of Python. That's also free software. If you don't have the money to pay your OC-48 connection then that's your only option is to advertise. I just wish there was some other way to make money on the web than just advertising.
witty sig goes here
Here, try this:
Its austere look rules
Results better than others
It is my first choice
To within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff
Not far back Yahoo dumped Inktomi for Google as their search engine. I hadn't used Google before, but and convinced Yahoo made the right choice.
IMHO the only real problem is that Google, also, continues to point to non-existent web pages.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
``Google may not be good on a particular query. If you wanted to find multimedia or audio-visual files, Google wouldn't be helpful at all.''
Very true. I use Google 99% of the time, but if I need images I find that Altavista's image search is absolutely the best. Outperforms scour.com no contest.
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
I would be willing to pay around 1/2 cent per link I click on from a google search, to keep it free of banners. this will avoid the prioritizing that major search engines do to keep its major advertisers on top of the results list.
Lemurific!
I really see no problem with a small number of banner ads on a site anyway. Even /. has them and we all know that they aren't a big money-grabbing corporation ;)
Google on the other hand provide a truly excellent service. Admittedly it's fast loading pages are a big bonus to modem users but they deserve to be sucessful.
To many people seem totally opposed to commercialisation on the internet and expect companies to provide for free. Certainly i'm not best pleased with sites like altavista that take ab out 20 seconds to load on a modem but one banner per page is perfectly acceptable.
I just hope that when they see the cash rolling in they dont take the easy route to drive profits exponentially by having adverts everywhere (ala deja.com)
This is probably the major reason why Google has succeeded - focus. If your technology is good enough in its own right, there's no need to clutter it with so-called "content" to keep bringing users back.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Google does run ads, they just do it in a far less annoying way than every other website out there.
Ads on Google consist of little more than text on a different background color than the rest of the site. IMHO this is great. It lets you know that you're looking at an ad, but it doesnt grab your attention away from what you're really trying to do.
"I find it interesting that people angrily submit stories constantly about Google "selling out" whenever something that looks like it might generate revenue appears. That means more then a lot of people realize: it means people care."
Let's be precise: It means people cared. Just because Google still gets used doesn't mean that it still gets used by the people that complained. In Google's case this is still true. But in Slashdot's case I think a lot of us "founding members" have drifted away (or tried to).
For instance, I remember protesting when the color scheme went from...brown and yellow?...to white and green. I also remember protesting when comments when from "all flat" to "all threaded". (I should also take a moment to apologize for kicking off the "First Post!" phenomena).
In those years, Slashdot's stories have definitely changed. I used to read because everything was so interesting. Now I read in order to keep up with the daily news. Slashdot has changed from a "cool site" to a "news site" (not as bad as CNN or ZDNet, granted). That's not necessarily bad, but I do miss the old Slashdot.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Another sure sign that the company is getting larger is that they recently reduced their associates' compensation from $0.03 per impression to $0.01 per impression. It doesn't really bother me as its definitely not a major source of income for me - rather I figure I might as well get paid to use a search engine that I normally use anyway. But when they slash your payout by two-thirds, it says that they're trying to bring their expenditures into line more.
I doubt they even considered the possibility of their current level of success when they said that. Who else can say they provide the search engine for the most-visited site on the internet, and a dozen others (more probably)? To get to where they are now, and stay there, they have to be fast and accurate. They need LOTS of hardware and lots of bandwidth for that. And they need lots of money for THAT. Web-only companies don't have a lot of options when it comes to revenue, and a little advertising is probably the best solution -- low overhead, no outsider VC's to siphon off the profit that might be down the road...lots of good reasons.
Of course, my biggest concern is that these ads might affect those response times. If they can add banners to their site in a nice, ignorable way, i.e. not too much clutter and no image-loading delay, I think it'll be a smart decision.
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
Google has been my search engine of choice for years now, and this is an interesting window into what's happening back there. I find it interesting that people angrily submit stories constantly about Google "selling out" whenever something that looks like it might generate revenue appears. That means more then a lot of people realize: it means people care. So many websites are so bloated with ads that already can't be taken seriously. Google is special: I'm not opposed to seeing ads on it (frankly I'm amazed they made it this long considering the kind of bandwidth and hardware they need) I just hate seeing ads the way the vast majority of mainstream sites do it (hundreds of little banners everywhere blurring the lines between content and commercials). And hell, they run Linux.
(Above included in case the story changes) How many years has CmdrTaco been using google? It's inception date was 1998, according to the article.
Here's another good article that covers Google from Inter@ctive Week. The article talks about their new advertising scheme, how it is text -only based, and the relative effectivness it has.
;-)
And the best part about google is that they haven't spent a penny on advertising themselves since they started in 1998. (They've spread through word of mouth and shameless plugs like the one I just gave
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
I made the switch from Altavista to Google right after it was announced on slash. It took a bit to pull me away from altavista.digital.com but for me it was that google returned good results with searches for Linux information. Good results are something that has been key to google's success, some may say that google is selling out by selling placement in their results but often that helps out a lot when you're looking for something.
For example I remember when a search for "Crappy Software" on google would return Microsoft and Netscape as the top two hits, now that's funny.
There
Ain't
No
Such
Thing
As
A
Free
Lunch
Folks, get used to it. Love doesn't make the world go around, money does. Everybody wants their piece of the pie.
--
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
Founder's Camp
Founder's Camp
News for non-Nerds. Stuff that matters.
I recently took a look as VA's new OSDN web site (?beta?). It was disgusting to look at and use; so many ads all over the place. Banner ads. Ads on the sides. Ads EVERYWHERE. Not just disgusting, but very distracting, some flash, some do other wierd things, etc. It's impossible to look at their page without seeing an ad somewhere! It is a shame what might otherwise be a potentially interesting resource is being setup for such ludicrous abuse. I will never use it again.
I have also noticed that banner ads are now found on SourceForge. I really don't care about the annoying banner ad that some sites find nessisary, but if they also start trashing SourceForge with such similar junk like they did with OSDN, I will immediately and completely remove each and every project I have hosted there.
I'm wondering how many people know this..
www.raging.com
a 1 followed by a hundred zeros is a google.
a 1 followed by a google zeros is a googleplex.
This is supposed to be great art. So why does it look like a bunch of decapitated naked people? -- Calvin
Google is God.
Search results sorted by how much money was paid... Bad!
If you find banners annoying (as I do), simply filter them out with something like Junkbuster, or my favoured solution, Squid and sleezeball. All those annoying flashing ads get replaced with a nice transparent gif. And so the advertising companies still pay my favourite sites, I occasionally click on those transparent gifs too.
If google wants to add banners, I say good luck to them. I won't be viewing the adverts, but they'll be getting revenue that will keep their service going. As long as the banners don't get in the way of the service, as they have on search engines such as Altavista, then that's fine. It's only when the websites become oriented around products rather than the service that there's a problem. IMO, this is far more likely to happen if they don't display adverts, revenues will no doubt be sapped and may force them into a position where a buyout is necessary. I somehow doubt any company which would buy them out would run the service half as well as the current google owners.
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
Honestly, I can deal with ads, they're a part of using most good free sites *looks at the top of the page*. but what completely irks me is waiting for an entirely overloaded doubleclick.com or other such ad server to load an image before the rest of the page will render propperly. BTW, maybe I'm just blind, but where are the ads on google?
Ad in classifieds: Pandora's Box (no box) $5
This really is not a problem if you examine their user interface. For example, this search on Google for "slashdot" returns 220,000 results. If you look at any one result, they have a "cached" link. For example, this is Google's cached version of Slashdot. It is a nice feature for advanced users. The site has such good usability, it makes me sick!
John S. Rhodes
WebWord.com -- Industrial Strength Usability
How to Download YouTube Videos
Please stop APK.. you're only hurting yourself.
I'm getting annoyed that people who "believe" in free software get really pissed off when it starts to make money. In this country, money is the reality and you better figure that out. If I put up a service that was free, I'd keep it that way because I believe in free software. But if people wanted to give me money for it or hire me to a job as a result of it. I'd take it because I need to eat. Since programmers can almost pick and choose thier jobs, they shouldn't have serious misgivings about getting paid to do what they love and write free stuff on the side.
As if CmdrTaco would complain about selling out....
As an aside: the Georgian (former Sov Union) word for "bottom/butt/arse" is actually "taco"....
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
I find their almost-always-there cached copy works like a dream when the original source has been moved, deleted, modified, etc. I often go directly to the cached source anyway just to quickly locate where my search terms appear. This is especially useful in really long, not-well-formated pages.
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
Google can be good, but it still needs some work
in the advance category. Compare it with altavista.
In Altavista I can say: host:uwaterloo.ca & not (computer science) & software engine* ~ courses & link:stanford.edu
I have a lot of flexibility with Altavista.
In google you have to use their archaic form. It would be very good if develop a simple parser for their advance search, instead of the restrictive
advance form. Furthermore, proximity is not implemented.
Until then Altavista is my choice.
dmg
If you work your ass off to create the best search engine, aren't you entitled to a little dough, if you don't screw the site up in the process?
It really isn't that much for them to ask, and if I ever have something as successful as google I'd be insulted to hear people bitch because I want to move to an apartment where the kitchen isn't the same room as the bedroom...
I stopped using AltaVista when it went portal. I applaud Google for going slowly, making sure to keep searching and user experience first, then worrying about how to fund it all. Too many "dot coms" plaster their site with bad, complex html, unusable interfaces, and thousands of ads (although nothing is quite as bad as your average warez/porn site, not that I would know...), making their site hard to render, hard to read, and worst of all, hard to use.
Does anyone have any real numbers on the effectiveness of banner ads? I subconciously tune out all ads, especially the big, obxnious blinking ones (Rob! I hate blinking ads!), or even worse -- Flash ads -- but Google's small, text-based ads are far more plesant, being far less obnoxious. It would be interesting to see the clickthrough rates on Google's simple ads versus everyone else's ugly, blinking annoying ads.
One thing I especially like is Google's sense of humor. They change their logo for every holiday, and even ran a five- or six-part series of logos featuring an alien landing on the "GOOGLE" and flying away with it. In a world filled with "my portal is better than your portal", it's gratifying to see that at least someone has maintained their integrity and withstood the popular opinion.
I tried Metacrawler but I wasn't that satisfied.
What I love in Google is
- Its light entry page : one picture, one light form and you get it. Compare with the hell that pours your modem whenever reloading av.com's index page.
- It is damn quick.
- It thinks like me : I mean it really returns me the web pages I want.
- It supports the same syntax as Altavista, at least the + and the - that make my life soooooo much easier...
Now, seeing ads on Google pages wouldn't disturb me provided they are light enough. But until then, I am just the happiest guy ever with their current engine.--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Am I the only one bothered by the tone of this article? That "growing up" means going commercial? Not that I necessarily oppose this but I don't like the inplication that Google as a company is "immature" just because they don't have banner ads or ambitions to be the Net's Best Portal...
Linux Search
Mac Search
United States Government Search
University Search
But I like it best for the holiday and custom logos.
| Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
I'm another "computer savvy male" with the search applet on my browser...
Props to the founders, nice to see people running a technology company the "Right" way.
~ride hard.. live free~
Thank god for that. These people know what they want: the best search engine on the web. Hear that Yahoo, Altavista, Metacrawler, et al.? Search Engine! When I want to search, I want to search! I have other sites for news, weather, and all that other useless crap I can get from 500,000 different sources. Portals are absolutely terrible, and I have made an effort to stay away from any of those big name bloated sites.
Google looks like they are taking the right steps. They want to build a site which is the place to go for searches, no matter what you're looking for. I applaud them, and hope that they succeed without turning the site into a Yahoo competitor. They shouldn't compete with the portals, they should transcend them.
"I live in a world of make-believe, with faeries and leprechauns and tiny little frogs with funny hats."
10^100 is a googol.
10^googol is a googolplex.
And this site can help you imagine that.
----------------------------
In an article I read (TIME Magazine) they basically charge other sites for using their engine _per query_. Considering Yahoo is/has switched to them you gotta think that brings in some serious cash.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
How many of you will pay $5-$10 bucks a year for google? Be honest!
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
One thing that's endeared Google to me is how they dress up the logo for occasions like St. Patricks's Day, Christmas, New Years, etc. (My favorite was the necktie on the logo, signifying Father's Day. I stole the idea for one of my sites. The customer loved it.) I always click on those dressed-up logos to see the message it leads to. Perhaps ads could be done the same way, and remain tasteful and non-obtrusive. Make the logo pour a glass of Coke, or whatever. If it were done right, it would be funny, get the message across, and lead the viewer to 'click-thru' on the logo.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
...Google needs only one thing:
pr0n.google.com
And to be the ultimate among Anonymous Cowards:
grits.pr0n.google.com/portman
Dear my! What are those things coming out of her nose?
Spaceballs!
First off, I'd like to say I absolutely love google. In case you didnt know, not only do they have a big mega-search, but they also have a Linux search and BSD search. That makes it very easy to use them to find information on all sorts of software, because if you use those subsearches you can often enter a chunk of an error message verbatim and get back truly relevant results.
I think google has a great look-and-feel. While spartan, it's truly functional, and I love the way they change the google logo to relevant holidays and events. They have great contests, and on fathers day I actually won a T-shirt! While they do have ads, they dont have many. Their ads are no more invasive than slashdot's, and if they want to try and keep the site funded and themselves comfortable, that's cool with me. Note that they also have a number of different options for sites who want to use their search; the more customizable ones are googles other revenue stream.
I think that their page-rank technology is great; it gets you more relevant results than many other search engines, because people will tend not to link to the pages that aren't very good. What google isnt always good for is searching for something in joe-random-company's tech support, because people tend not to link to those pages, and so altavista can sometimes return the better results. Nevertheless, google is a great search engine. I'd say you should put the google Slashbox on your slashdot page and never look back!!
Q:Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on dead people?
A:All my autopsies have been performed on dead peop
I have no objections to Google using small ad banners to bring in revenue. I can always filter them out. What I don't like, though, is their recent changes to the way the site works. If your initial search didn't find what you were looking for, you used to be able to repeat the search, with a larger number of results displayed. You can't do that anymore without going to their cumbersome advanced search page. That would be OK, but their page rank technology isn't quite good enough yet. You'll usually find what you're looking for in the top 10 results, but not always (and I find, increasingly less so with time -- I was getting more accurate results 6-9 months ago, for example).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Goggle dosn't let me do that yet. I can scan those 24,000,000+ or so matches that I may want to look at or just browse. Quite nice.
Respond to s
I am an analyst at a Big 5 Accounting firm. I spend a great deal of my day doing research on the Internet. I am usually search for information on somewhat obscure industries, such as kidney dialysis. I have found that Google is consistantly the better search engine for my needs. I particularly like that it is so much faster that the other sites, it seems primarily because they don't have any of those obnoxious banner ads. More and more sites I visit are littered with ads from Double Click.
While I love the fact that Google has stayed away from advertising, I've also done enough research on Internet content providers, Internet Portals, etc. to know that they won't be around that long if they don't start generating positive cash flow. Because they are selling anything tangible, this means to generate incoming cash flow they have to sell services. For an Internet company, selling services most likely means selling advertising. Let's face it, people generally belive that information should be free on the Internet. I work for one of the largest accounting firms in the world, and I spend a great deal of time looking for free research and information on the internet because the belief is that if it is on the Internet, it should be free.
The point is, I would rather see Google start selling ads, staying away from the obnoxious Double Click banner ads, and stay around as one of the better search engines. Not enough people will pay for search service to generate enough cash flow to keep Google around.
Incidently, if you looked through the 10k filing of Andover.Net (use Edgar Scan a data base by a comptetive firm or Free Edgar), and go all the way into the notes of the financial statements, all the way to page 61 of the report, you will find the pro forma financial statement on Slashdot. For the year ending September 1999, Slashdot was profitable. All of the revenue was generated from advertising.
I don't want to have to pay each time I access the damn web. That's insane. Even for access to a search engine. Search engines are a staple of access to information and retrieval on the internet. Withough search engines we would have to go looking and testing out various links and the like to get anywhere.
Personally if the web ever gets to use "micropayments" in any large scale fashion where using the web at all requires payment (in addition to my ISP fees) I will never use it again. It's just not worth *that* much to me.
Respond to s
I learned something from my own post:
On the holiday and custom logos page there are some cool beta graphics and a BackRub graphic. According to the site, "[w]hen Google was a Stanford research project, it was nicknamed BackRub because the technology checks backlinks to determine a site's importance."
backrub.com, backrub.org, and backrub.net are all owned by different entities but nothing seems to exist at any of these locations.
| Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
From last week's dead tree edition of Time, now available online here.
I have been using metacrawler for more than 5 years, when it was still a university research project. I use to say it was the smartest of all the search engines because it was the laziest: it simply forwards the requests to the other search engines, analyses their work, and returns the 10 best results. During five years, it never failed me. I use to think "If it can not be found on Metacrawler, DejaNews or FtpSearch, it is not on the net." Well, this is not true anymore, because now Metacrawler gives me more and more garbage, though, not (yet) as much as the other search engines.
*Sigh*
The thing that I really enjoy the most is the Search as a Phrase feature. I used to find everything with it. For example, to find
- lyrics: search for " we sailed unto the sun till we found the sea of green " as a phrase, and you will find the lyrics for Yellow Submarine by the Beattles
- .
- acronyms: search for " KGB stands for " as a phrase, and you'll discover that it means Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (try to find the same thing on another search engine! No way)
- specific definitions: search for " CORBA est un " as a phrase, and you'll be able to explain your work to your French cousin who is visiting you next week.
Ain't that cool? If someone out there knows a search engine as powerful as this one, please let me know. I'm ready to switch.Compare with the hell that pours your modem whenever reloading av.com's index page.
Try av.com/?text
I use google almost exclusively, but AltaVista is still useful sometimes. And when I do use it I prefer text mode (originally created for text-based browsers like Lynx)
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Only 520, eh? I swear I get more than that, and I don't even have a TV! It seems like there's absolutely nowhere I can turn my eyes (except what little of the sky I can see in Chicago, and the pavement) that isn't plastered with adverts. I'm beginning to think the entire US economy is based on advertising.
Earlier it mentions that their text-based ads have a click-through rate four times higher than the average banner ad. Someone here mentioned earlier that a lot of sites blur the distinction between content and commercial -- well if they put up text link ads, keyed off of search criteria, of course people are going to click on them because they don't realize that they're ads, plus nobody's used to seeing ads on Google.
People have a natural (well, socialized) aversion towards advertising so it's logical that they take this subtle approach (that and the bandwidth issue).
But all in all, I think Google is a great service and a teensy bit of advertising to support costs isn't evil or anything.
[pink beam of light]
So goes business at Google, a company trying to emerge from adolescence into maturity.
But like many Internet companies these days, Google is grappling with very adult issues such as revenue and profit.
In another sign of its maturing process...
Is it just me, or does "Corporate America" typically see the Linux movement, or anything involving herds of geeks, as "immature". Why should the focus of everything good and powerful and cutting edge always be relegated to a bottom line of financial gain? Isn't that part of the core of Open Source? Of Linux? Of Geekdom in general?
I'm certainly not opposed to making money. I make fairly good money, and want to make more. But it's like homework. The more I was pushed to do it, the more I tried to get out of it. But "bonus projects" and "extra credit"--I was always all over that.
To Corporate America: Stop trying to squeeze the techno-culture into your stiff, boring, and decaying business model. We're free/Free because we want to be. If everyone had the same mindset and started giving things away, we wouldn't need so much money in the first place.
--SpookComix
You read fiction? I write it! Lemme know what you th
Well, they still don't serve ad banners on pages, which keeps low-bandwidth and portable web servers happy. The paid ads that they have for selected keywords are clearly labeled with colored backgrounds and separated from the rest of the links. I can live with that.
What really impressed me in the article was the quote "If we wanted to sell ad banners, we could call DoubleClick and be profitable today." But they're not calling DoubleClick, to the rejoice of privacy-paranoid Slashdot readers everywhere. It's refreshing to see a company provide a useful service without intrusive advertising methods.
I signed up to make my page o' forms a Google Affiliate site, meaning I get three cents (soon to be just one cent) for every time I use it. Google also reserves the right to post ads on the searches from my box, in exchange for them paying me. That's another idea -- people are voluntarily "opting in" to get ads served on their pages in return for a trivial amount of cash. Unfortunately, companies like AllAdvantage [look Ma, no referrer tag!] have been bleeding cash by doing nothing but paying for eyeballs.
For more information, click here.
Google is good, but what was this article about ? ....
Me bored
Just another coder...
The point here isn't to list every search engine that is out there but to demonstrate that not one search engine will meet each and every need you have. If I am looking for something obscure, then I use Alta-Vista. AV has the most indexed pages (as of August 2, 2000) and I may have to dig, but I'll usually get what I want. Google is great for broad topic searches. Dogpile is a great shotgun approach as is SavvySearch.
Google is doing the right thing by staying focused on being a search engine and I have to say that ever since I first used the site (back when it was a logo, text box, and two buttons) I appreciated the simplicity of the site.
I recently read a report that the Search Engines are barely covering the web. Should search engines be sub-divided into 'web regions' in order to more thoroughly cover what is out there? Is there better technology we could be using?
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
I wholeheartedly agree. If we want to continue to get the level of service we've come to expect from Google, they're going to need to get some income.
P.S.: Anyone know where I can get a copy of Junkbuster?
When dilber first started showing ads, Scott Adams included a little comment about the ads, and why they were there. It boiled down to something like:
1) they offered us lots of money
2) we like money
I really don't know where the attitude that the world is obliged to offer us whatever we want for free comes from. Keeping your software ideologically pure, and then providing free hardware for the world to use it, doesn't feed the kids.
I don't mind ads. I do mind things that blink at me. OK, they can blink once, but once they repeat, I edit my junkbuster file to block them. Then again, very view bother to make their ads readable in lynx, which I usually use. The top of *this* page says "Click Here!" in the blue letters indicating a link; I've seen others that tell me what they're about (and have followed a couple).
Just replace banner ads an cached pages with ones that google gets paid for.
- My password is slashdot
I want to know why they took down historical data. It's just disk, right? How large can their archive be? A couple of gig?
That disk is going to really valuable to sociologists one day, so I hope they've kept it.
Johan
Did you actually read what I said?
"Never even considered" means just that. Of course I'd be idealistic Open-Source Free as in Beer/Speech when it's reasonable to be like that. But I'm sure Google's founders reached a crisis, like every company does at some point, if not often. There's went along the lines of "Well, we said we'd never advertise, but we need money if we want to keep being the Google that people like." Would you rather they said, "Well, we said we'd never advertise, and since we can't afford our hardware and bandwidth, we're going to shut down rather than stay afloat with some banner ads."
Didn't think so. While their no-ads motto might be a nice idea, I think their service is more valuable than just being ad-free. The speed and relevance of their search engine is what makes Google good. The lack of ads was just a little gravy on top.
And let's be honest, who cares? When's the last time you clicked a banner ad? I rarely even SEE banner ads, unless the page they're on is using annoying pop-ups or just abysmally slow. And I certainly don't click on them -- if it's interesting, I note the URL and type in the relevant part by hand.
Those of us who truly despise banner ads learn to not be bothered by them, indeed to not even notice them. So those truly savvy 'Net users who use Google won't notice a change, unless they screw up the technical side (unlikely). Those people who DO follow banner ads will probably be happy to see them on Google -- I'm sure Google can parlay their relevance expertise to come up with targeted banner advertising on their search results pages.
This isn't a Metallica-degree of sellout...it's a smart decision from a smart company -- one of the few web-only smart companies out there.
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
People talk about hotmail because that's all they know.
People talk about google because it kicks so much ass.
--
Considering that Google has introduced the concept of democracy to ranking the prominence (or relevance) of sites is revolutionary thinking, and they deserve to reap the rewards of their thinking. Google know that by refusing to offer the top-heavy extras of other sites, they too will rule supreme on the democracy of the Internet as one of the most popular search engines.
Google will continue to offer speedy search engine results, and they will probably do all they can to preserve their unique status. By cutting down on advertisements and extras, combined with their Linux-operated rack systems of off-the-shelf motherboards and spaghetti wiring, Google is also making enormous savings compared to conventional search engines.
Sure Google is going public next year, but they won't need massive ads and extras to draw in revenue. Unlike conventional search engines, Google doesn't charge a flat rate, but based on per search basis when other sites link it to, and the revenue will keep pouring in, without killing both the principle and advantages of Google.
MashPotato - Mobile Array of Support Helpers for Potato
-- "I can't tell the future, I just work there." -- The Doctor
As a webmaster for several websites, I have always found the backlinks checking option on Google to be one of the neatest features of the site.
For those not familiar with how Google works: in part it measures the relevancy of a site based on how many other sites contain links to it. So it tracks these links, called Backlinks, and you can check them using Google search.
For instance, to see a list of webpages which contain links to Slashdot (and which are also indexed by Google of course, so its a subset of the web as a whole), we enter the following search in Google:
links: http://www.slashdot.org
The results displayed are the pages that contain links back to Slashdot.org. Note that this is by individual URL, so this list does not contain links to http://www.slashdot.org for instance.
Omphalos - The Directory and Search Engine for Paganism & Witchcraft!
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I understand web sites need to have banner ads to be profitable....But why must banner ads always (or most of the time) be so tastless? I mean a text based ad, or a static banner or two is fine with me, (and if it is a product I am interested in, I would be just as likely click on a static image or text based link..) But when you have all these flashy multi frmaed .gif files all over your page(s) that always distract from the layout and artistic work gone into the design of the page, and increase loads from 30-40K to over 100K -- it is really TASTELESS...
I may be weird -- but I would like to think of some web sites as "works of art" -- and most banner ads as "grafitti"....I mean what would most art lovers think if they went to a museum and their were flashing banner ads on all of the Picaso's and Rembrandt's???
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I can't find the article/court case that provides this opinion but it had to do with meta search engines and the courts didn't like how they used and messed with other peoples content. Simular to what happend with dialectizer (although it's back up!) so now I am unsure and will no doubt look into it.
Anyone have reference to related court cases and rulings?
It seems even Cached pages (which they highlight words on) would almost be illegal, hopefully not though.
.sig --
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I'm pretty disgusted with deja, too. I liked their big archives, but hated their interface - there's nothing more annoying than waiting for a page to load, then scrolling down through 100 lines of nested, poorly differentiated text only to find one line that wasn't relevant to what I wanted to read anyway. So I started using Remarq, and got along without the big archive, unless I had to go back to deja for something old, but loved seeing 25 responses at a time. Then Remarq got bought out and are now a PAY service. Now I'm stuck with a bad interface and not enough archive to be useful.
Is there any other usenet archive service?
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
The problem with banners -- not just for Google, but for all sites -- is that no one pays attention to them, and marketeers are realizing that. They're invariably [a] ugly and [b] a waste of time, so no one cares and everyone filters them out, either mentally or, if they're savvy enough, in software.
This can't last. Sooner or later, marketeers are going to have to change their tactics and find a way to get people to pay attention to them. Rather than polluting an aesthetically pleasing site like Google with dancing gif banners, advertisers should try other methods of promotion there -- text based ads, for example, or low-key images that fit in other profiles besides 400x60.
The emphasis should be less on clickthrough rates (which will always be trivial at best) and more on brand reconition. In other words, the ad itself is the point, just as it always was in print & broadcast media. If a small handful of people actually click on the thing then that's great too, but the point isn't to draw people in as much as it is to promote the quality of a brand by planting the idea in people's heads.
This isn't anything new really -- like I say, this is how things have always been done in traditional media -- but I think marketeers got distracted by the interactive nature of the web and tried to get people to do something that no one is really interested in doing.
I don't care what you're selling, I want to do a search. If you want to subsidize that with your ad revenues, then thanks for that -- I'll admit, I don't feel like paying for it myself, but I realize that someone has to -- but please don't expect me to leave this useful site to go look at yours instead. I'll appreciate your contribution more if you don't tell me what to do.
Google has an opportunity to, once again, point to the way forward here. If they can work with the mentality described above, they might set a trend that (I can hope) the rest of the web may come to follow.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
After your advice, I just visited AllTheWeb (funny joke :-) and launched a query on Google (891000 docs found, 0.13 seconds). :-(
This therefore lacks a functionality (that Google also lacks BTW):
av.com usually gave a last checked/changed date for each URLs, I just loved this.
BTW, I am now back from av.com and it seems they also got rid of it...
What a pity.
Is this an implicit way to explain it was too much data to handle?
Could somebody tell me how to display dates in Google ?
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Finally! After hearing a song for months on the radio (never never never never never count on dj's to ever tell you what that really cool tune was they just played, they'd rather dislocate a shoulder, patting themselves on the back for being extremely funny and clever) Google found the title and performer (at illiterate mp3.com, who can't seem to be bothered with telling you who sung it, either, but gave me the full title, misspelled!)
Um, Google with cache rocks! =)
I sincerely hope they generate revenue as a provider to portals, such as Yahoo, but reserve an uncluttered home page, as it is now.
ask.com is interesting, but more often than not returns completely irrelevant info.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I think that google's main selling point for me is the lack of banner ads. I think it is great that there is a high quality search engine that can give me the pages i want without having to bog down the whole page with stupid animated pictures that are asking me to punch a stupid monkey.
:)
I also read in Time Magazine that google is getting paid per search with yahoo, and that should more than pay for the lack of advertising they have. and of course...they use linux.
The anti-salmon
I made a typo: I mean to say that this list does not contain backlinks to http://slashdot.org (without the "www"), but my fingers have a mind of their own when I have not had enough coffee in the morning.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
no matter what the topic ... the most relevant links come up first, unlike the other search engines ...
...
plus, when your home access is a 28k modem, the lightning fast response time makes it a no-brainer
AZspot
They just made a choice to :
.sig --
1. Add less clutter to search pages
2. Allow one to customize this number in preferences (10,30,100)
3. Rely on people pressing the " [ Gooooogle ] NEXT " arrows.
4. Eliminate duplicate results
By pressing "Next" it means it doesn't display the initially n pages. In the olden days if you search for 10 and then switch to 30, you're seeing the first 10 again and must scroll down. Pressing "Next" you do not see these repeats.
So, set your preference to '30' and use the NEXT feature when you want to see more results.
--
if you look at the advertising link on google -- http://www.google.com/adv/intro.html, you'll see that the banner ads are rather interesting. they're just plain text, not jpgs or gifs.
i find them rather pleasant as ads go. i suppose some people might complain that they can't filter these ads with junkbuster, but at least these ads won't take forever to download, and they won't blink annoyingly.
-ajd
> But don't you think one of the biggest reasons
> for their success was their affirmation of "no
> advertisements, ever"
No. I, for one, never knew about that.
> and simply but effectively designed UI (=fast).
> At least I started using Google because of those
> reasons.
Yes, Google is great because they have the best search engine. Personally, I don't mind ads (for banner ads I use junkbuster anyway). As long as they are fast and work, I am happy.
That main reason I stopped using altavista was well 2 reasons. i
1) They announced that they would start allowing companies to "Buy position" ie pay for keywords so that they could get ranked higher (thus allow companies to pay money to make my search results less relavent...nice) - whether they did this or not...well their search results are bad enough now that it seems they may have
2) Google was better, ffaster, and more likely to come up with relavent hits. Thats gone slightly downhill. Maybe because I search for different things than I used to, but I no longer "Feel lucky" these days. On the whole...usually google has good results.
Ads I don't mind. Allowing companies to buy keywords such that they are at the top is fine...if they put them in a box that shows clearly "these arn't really search results" (I believe they do that or did that for a while? was that someone else).
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
If people are this upset about Google taking banner ads, how will they feel a year or two from now when all the IPO money for highly speculative Internet ventures dries up, and all the good "free" stuff on the web either disappears or gets absurdly commercialized, portalized, and Time-Warnerized? Look around you; it's happening already.
We've gotten used to good stuff free, but it can't go on forever.
-
-
Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
"But in Slashdot's case I think a lot of us founding members" have drifted away (or tried to)."
:-)
/. posts based purely upon the (voluntary) user nicks listed on posts. Where did people like BOredAtWOrk go?
I agree with you sentiment, but man, try to restrain the ego a bit. User ID 24,021 isn't so much a "founding member" as an "early inhabitant"
Seriously, though, I also remember the days when I could filter through
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
with the two guys that founded Google? There's a rather interesting Time article about them.
Dear my! What are those things coming out of her nose?
Spaceballs!
Think about it. When you are searching 10 billion pages of text finding 891000(google finds "ABOUT 2,230,000 which if you trust all the web is off by a million or so) hits in less than a sec is pretty impressive. Ranking 1-891000 in less than a sec is damn near impossible and all the web ranks them all. Google on the otherhand with it's default settings stoped for me at 134 and woudn't display more untill I removed the filter. After doing this I could go to 100 pages of 10 hits per page or 1000 hits at which point you could go no further. All the Web you can look at all 891000(actully 891075) hits.
Searching for one word in 10 billion pages you are going to get hits no matter what you type(fo example I typed "sdfhk" into All the Web and only found four hits but still random letters...)
JOIN !LINK CLUB!
What I thought he meant was more along the lines of - if I do a search for buying Saabs online, I will get hits that look like the page was just that, but in reality it is some sort of company that makes it look like a site has content like that, then when I click on it, it sends me to something unrelated... like a gambling site.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
So then how much would those options be worth...or perhaps he meant that Yahoo gave Google some options.
Well, I have set my browser to ask me if I want to run any JavaScript I find.
But Google recently has started to introduce candy JavaScript in their main page. It's not so fast for me now.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Since we are bitching about slashdot (well since you are and this has a high score)...
F /...
Anyone know if there has been any status change on when kuro5shin is coming back up? kuro5shin was much more efficient at giving me my geek fix without having to wade through tons of post about CmdrTaco's love and bowel movements (always browse at -1)... that and two missing moderation pieces that slashdot screams out for in agony everday.
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Solaris/FreeBSD/Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
About the only thing that would make me happier with Google, is if they switched their crap-ass Linux stuff to FreeBSD. I'd be really happy to see their search even faster :)
Actually, I've heard rumors that they're switching some crawler machines to FreeBSD, way to go google!
Hi, I'm a .sign Virus, put me in yours :-)
.sign supposed to be .sig, or am I not getting the joke?
Is
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
Nothing new (or at least, not all that new) -- altavista has offered link: searching for a much longer period of time.
See: /syntax.html
http://doc.altavista.com/adv_search
BOO HOO.
You know something? I can't find any music on 8 track, and it's amost impossible to find a convenience store that sells leaded gas. The next thing I'll find out is that my parachute pants from junior high school don't fit anymore. What's this world coming to?
Why don't you try using a real browser? Internet Explorer is AWESOME if you use Windows, but even if you don't, there are several options such as Netscape, Opera, and Mozilla, (or derivatives).
</RANT>
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Google is OK. I tend to use MetaCrawler most, then Alta Vista.
More than just pretty girls...
No Laughing Allowed!
What do you use the web for? I expect accademic sites to provide journals. I expect musicians to provide music, mp3.com. I expect sites like this to provide news.
Will I put up with banner adds on Google? Yes, until I find someone who will not pain me that way.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I've read similar things from Scott Adams many times over the years, and while I can appreciate his honesty (he makes no qualms about doing it), I find that his willingness to do nearly anything for an extra buck is hardly commendable. IMHO, the credibility of his strip suffers a bit as a result.
Bill Watterson he ain't...
Google is unlike other search engines that rank sites as being relevant to a user's search request by counting how many times a keyword is used within a page, or by domain names. This system can be commonly abused, and it has been demonstrated time and time again by pornographic and celebrity fan sites.
Google on the other hand, works on the principle of democracy, not in political terms, but by the definition derived from "the majority of the people". Google ranks sites as being relevant by counting how many other sites link to it.
It is a democratic search engine because it counts each external link to a page as a vote by other users who have linked to it because they think it is important and or useful. Hence a popularly linked site, in Google's eyes must be also relevant because it has been judged to be so by the Internet community as a whole.
This is what is so unique and revolutionary about Google and hence why it has an almost uncanny ability in providing search results containing both the official sites and the most popular/relevant third party ones at the same time.
MashPotato - Mobile Array of Support Helpers for Potato
-- "I can't tell the future, I just work there." -- The Doctor
Google has ads now. They aren't banners, just light little hypertext links at the top of the search site. Try searching for MP3 on Google - the firstlook.com link at the top (but below the google logo) in the blue box is a bought and paid for ad.
I've actually found some interesting sites because they advertised on google. These are the ads that google will sell more of - not banners.
-Merlyn42
The audience doesn't care if it's hard.
Back then they were proposing that their aim is not to index the whole web, but the "best" 20-30 percent of it. It looks like something has happened suddenly so that the whole strategy of the company changed. Very strange. I can't find what I am looking for unfortunately, I began using metasearchs. Alltheweb.com also seems pretty good and fast.
Baris.
Plurals are for any value greater than 1.
1999-08-25 thru 2000-08-25 is more than one full year.
1998, 1999, and 2000 are three different years.
Using "millennium" logic, if you have been using Linux for just eight months, you have used it for DECADES -- both the 90's and the 00's!
--
--
I mean CmdrTaco is a real "guru," but does he really live up to "savvy?"
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
get drunk
For a really general query like 'Linux' news
stories are quite appropriate. It's clear that
the user wasn't looking for specific information,
so giving the option to find out about recent
developments on the topic makes a lot of sense.
Alex.
If your technology is good enough in its own right, there's no need to clutter it with so-called "content" to keep bringing users back.
/. and such, are please with simple solutions. People like my parents are going to continue to use Yahoo and Altavista etc because of all their little 'features'. A cluttered web page filled with links means an advanced powerful site to them, i.e. lots of buttons = lots of options = lots of power. The savvy tech people may understand the importance of elegant design, but the hordes of psuedo-computer literate people do not. No matter how often I explain or show Google to this sort of person, they continue to use the big names, or worse whatever the 'search' button in their browser brings up. My father is absolutely convinced that search engines reside on the local computer and that the only one availabe is the one that comes up from the search button. This leads to hilarious statements like: 'The search engine we have at work is much better.'
In an ideal world, or more correctly on an ideal internet, you would be correct. However, I'm afraid the truth is slightly different. Power-users, the sort of tech smart people who read
peas,
-Kabloona
Heck, if the ads are that much of a bother, just use an ad blocker. JunkBuster can be installed on just about anything, and WebWasher works well on Windbloze.
http://www.junkbusters.com
http://www.webwasher.com
Try this.
Google is for primary search site. But I rarely use "I'm Feeling Lucky" because I'm such a ninny. Are there any he-men (or she-women) who use it on a regular basis? How often do you find it works? Other thoughts on getting lucky?
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
Andrews, the Internet industry analyst, said it is unclear what direction Google will travel in the coming years. While Google has carved out a niche in providing searches, he said, that is a relatively limited business.
Yeah, thanks a lot. That's exactly why the web is going to end up as a big mess of banner ads and blink tags. This stupid commercial attitude that everything has to grow bigger and crush the competition.
I mean, Google is providing a great search engine. Someone with a brain would now say, "wow, that's fine, we can even make a living off it", but the first thing the analyst sees is "we've got a core product, how can we put on a ton of crap to make more money out of it?"
That's why you can't use deja.com nowadays, that's why yahoo.com is unusable und altavista.com is on its best way with every new layout change.
All that shows one of the core problems with the dot-com-hype, every company that goes public suddenly transforms its goals from "providing the best <xyz>" to "reaping maximum profit". And, contrary to popular American belief, this is not the single reason for the existence of business. Personally, I know lots of people who work in small software companies, and all they care about is producing the best product while getting paid a decent salary, not getting rich, or world domination...
So, thumbs up for Google, and while I wish them success, may their IPO be off a long way!
--
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind.
Its teaching, therefore, should be
As far as other engines, I haven't checked lately, but don't these places always encourage you to put their search box on your web page? Why not just create your own page with the search boxes for all your favorite engines? It would load fast and be as clean as you want it.
"dressed in European grey"
:)
brings up some Ultravox pages on Google, too.
AND AN AD! (for a music site)
I think some people need to learn what "selling out" means. Just because a business becomes profitable or popular doesn't mean the owners are selling out. One of the great tragedies of open source zealotry is the mindless bashing of anything that makes a profit. At the same time, any topic about The Simpsons, The X-Files, or any mass market Hollywood movie generates huge discussion threads. Similarly, many people have no problem buying new video cards twice a year. Food for thought.
First, your 8-track analogy fails because Lynx can handle HTML like most browsers. 8-tracks players can't play any media that's currently in production.
Second, most web sites that are non-functional under Lynx are so because of the incompetence of the designer. Using javascript when it is not necessary (e.g. for basic navigation) is a sign of being an idiot, not of being up-to-date. Checking the client and refusing anything other than certain versions of certain browsers is also a sign of mental retardation.
Lynx is still a viable option for browsing, and is my preferred option despite the fact that I have others available. Most of the headaches experienced by Lynx users are purely unnecessary and are the result of unskilled web design.
Of course, I'm sure you already know this. I follow the Slashdot troll scene and am somewhat familiar with the tactics. I suggest that when you troll in the future, you do it from a less blatant account. People might take you more seriously.
Have a nice day.
-- My comment is above.
"founding members" Founding what?.... go found somthing else would ya?
Shall we compare user ID's?Dante (3418)
FascDot (24021)
Well at least you did not use the "royal we"
Do not presume to speak for me.
"think of it as evolution in action"
Popularity isn't all bad. After all, why would I be here right now typing this message on one of the most popular sites in GEEKDOM if I thought it were? I fell in live with Google when the first time it took me to some rare information in .05344 seconds. I know I was hooked when I even found MYSELF by doing a search. Now I don't want to overestimate my (omniportance)(?), but that was a revelation. I learned things that were long since erased from the molecular soft drive throbbing between my ears. Anyone want my autograph?????
"Oblivion is just a click away." -Aazz
Can you dig up any reference to their "no ads" quote? It'd be useful to pull out an article from a few years ago and show the world what exactly the Google folk said and whether they lied.
The only thing I vaguely remember is that they didn't want to have banner ads, but I don't remember anything about no advertising whatsoever, and I don't know where I read this.
Projects like CYC invest a great deal of money, time, and effort into creating these patterns, these networks of information. Even so, you just cannot pay enough people enough money to do this.
Google, on the other hand, has a million people a day supplying them with precisely this information. If they watch what you search for, and then what pages you end up selecting; or how you refine your search to get to what you really are looking for -- then they can truly build patterns of knowledge for free -- it's likely that they'll find a way for people to pay for the priveledge, even.
I don't actually expect that they are archiving their search clickstreams that way and for that purpose, but if they were it might explain why they are not so hung up on this profitibility; and why they've worked so hard on making the system so damn fast. The more people use the system, the quicker they can tune and refine their searches, and the amount of times that the search finds the right page; the more useful information is available.
Think of it! Millions of people volunteering to increase the potential intelligence of your AI every day! For free!
Of course, I don't want to be around when the AI created at the end of this process finally understands the connection between Natalie Portman and hot grits -- it's likely to turn it's back on humanity forever at that point.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Cutting that cost by 2/3 just might help a bit. I'm not complaining, just saying. And today I got laid off from work, so I guess the real world is calling to folks all over.
--
+&x
"Sadly it is still impossible to search an expression containing a minus"
Yeah, their analysis uses words, not punctuation, so you can't really use Google to search for minus signs or C#. But it seems like the other search engines do the same thing... I don't know of anyone doing a full text search on the whole web.
Copy this into your location bar (snip out any carriage returns...) and when you hit "go" it should instantly render a minimalist google search form.
o rm method=GET action=http://www.google.com/search><INPUT type=text name=q size=31 maxlength=256 value=\"\"><input type=\"hidden\" name=num value=100><INPUT type=submit name=sa VALUE=\"Google Search\"><br><font size=1><i>nitro powered google search © pete setchell 2000</i></font></form></body></html>");void(close( ))}
javascript:with(document){write("<html><body><f
I've got it as my browser home page so a fresh browser is instantly ready for a search. You can get to it quickly by clicking the otherwise useless "home" button that seems to appear on most browsers.
I wrote it myself, so feel free to send hate/fan mail if it makes your life easier etc.
Enjoy.
+++++
+++++
The harder you look the less you see. That's what we're up against.
The number 1 googol is very odd. How can you have 1 googol if it is the number 1 followed by 100 zero's It should be the number 1 followed by 99 zeros. Think about it. One Thousand is three 0's with a 1 in front. million is 6 0's with a 1 in front. So in order for you to have one something (as in one thousand, one million, one billion...) you would need to have the number of zeros before the 1 be a multiple of 3. So one goolgol would have to be 99 0's with a one in front of them. While 100 0's with a 1 in front of them would be 10 googol.
"I don't know of anyone doing a full text search on the whole web. "
I should clarify, I think the search engines are all looking at the full text of the page, but the search is based on words, not arbitrary series of characters (or even better, regex!!). They're indexing the web -- essentially creating a big list of URLs for each word -- and not grepping all the docs every time you do a search.
I refuse to follow ads that simply say "Click Here!" My time is worth more than that. If you give a description of what you're selling, and it's something I'm looking for, I'll give it a look. Why can't advertising people figure this out? Tell me what you're selling!
Services like google have to be paid for. Who do you want to do it?
Your initial answer might be "someone, anyone else!" which makes sense, in a way. I'd rather have the dollars come out of someone else's pocket, too. But then whose interests will google be serving? If they're being paid by advertisers, they're working for them, and they will strike the most profitable balance between flooding you with ads and keeping you coming back. It's happened to every other search engine, and it will happen to google.
However, divided amongst all us users, the cost of google is next to nothing. If everyone who uses it sends them a few bucks per year, they'll have plenty of money to keep things exactly the way we want.
But isn't there an advantage to being a freeloader and being the only one who isn't paying among a group of millions? Don't you get all the service with none of the cost? Perhaps not.
If only some of the people are paying, and this money is their sole revenue source, then google should ignore the wishes of all the people who don't pay. So payment buys you a privileged position as a relevant person.
This is the logic behind mass market busking. Take control by paying your fair share.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
... try Topclick. It uses the Google search engine but without the use of cookies, profiling, banner ads or any kind of tracking. Excellent searching and privacy protection...
Anonymous Coward? Or just cautious with my privacy? What's it to you anyway?
The article states in just the second paragraph that they get 40 million queries a day. So the math really is:
40,000,000 * (10 / 10000) = $40,000 per day
assuming ~30 days in a month:
40,000 * 30 = $1,200,000 per month.
Now I don't know any startup that wouldn't mind getting an extra $1.2 million a month. Not to mention that google's banner ads could be very targeted based on the query the user submitted, so the CPM would most likely be much higer than $10. I could easily see them getting closer to $30 CPM for targeted ads with the kind of traffic they get.
But of course I along with every other user hope they don't go this route and add banner ads to their site, but if it comes down to banner ads or shutting google down forever, I would not think twice about what I would prefer.
Google doesn't match phrases the way Altavista does, I think. For instance, say there's a page called "Nifty Cartoons by Spike and Lee". I can't remember the URL. So I tell Google to search for +"Spike and Lee". It says "Oh, you don't need to have the word AND in your searches. We do that automatically." So it gives me a billion pages about film director Spike Lee. So this time I search for +"Spike and Lee" -"Spike Lee", which should eliminate pages containing the phrase "Spike Lee". Nope. As far as Google is concerned, the two strings are identical.
Still you can add me to the list of people who migrated from altavista to google in the last 2 weeks.
grep -ri 'should work'
Just click on the cached google link and you are good to go.
Filtered@Work
google made it's money by letting other portals/search engines use it as a back end. So it's hidden.
If you want to put up 'Bob's 'leet search page' and run a huge bob portal.... and use google's search engine as a backend, you can... you just have to pay google.
I remember seeing that nick show up again about a year ago but I don't know if it was the same person. Apparently they are less bored now. Or out of work.
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Actually, user IDs have nothing to do with it. I read Rob's Chips and Dips and I've been with /. since it first went live; however, my user ID is 6890. You see, when user accounts first came along, I was too lazy to get one. In addition, I was rather busy with other things at the time and it was several months before I finally started reading /. again. At that point, I finally got a user ID. In FascDot's case, I think he was somebody else first, then got a new account for some reason. Not sure, though.
I miss MEEPT. I remember thinking, "what the fu...?!?" And the responses from Bill Gates were usually pretty funny.
Google.com is really just the calling card/flagship site of Google Inc. It's proof of technology, proof of goodness, proof of pudding.
/them/ and to their advertisers. You feel like you're being served up to Lexus as "eyeballs". You feel like they want you to sit down and stay a while, whereas Google just wants to give you your search and send you on your way.
They can make money by selling their tech to Yahoo, MSN, whatever. Even by selling their tech to us for our small sites (like Excite did a few years ago).
Advertising is FUNDAMENTALLY anathema to a good user experience. Google provides a very good user experience. Fast, direct, simple, unconfused, and best of all, USEFUL. Their utility has tremendous value for the customer. Specifically because it chooses ONE THING and does that one thing very well.
Sure, their results are better (usually) than the other engines, but I for one mostly use it because it doesn't try and get me to sign up for a calendar or a horoscope, and therefore it loads quickly. The other engines are swamped under the weight of desperately trying to be portals.
When you're on Excite or Lycos, it FEELS like the site has tremendous value to
There are alternatives to advertising for making money online. It seems that Google has been using them. Here's hoping that they continue to do so.
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Mucous membranes are the part of your brain that, like, make you think about mucous. --Beavis
"Years now"? Google has only existed for a year and a half.
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Patrick Doyle
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
This is the type of adverstising I wouldn't mind: when you search for something that is obviously a product or service, Google would put up an ad in your search results for that product or service or related products or services. Keep the main page clean and ad-less for those who are searching for generic things. If you are doing a specific search for some product or service, or some page concerning a product or service, then, like Deja, stick in a *relevant* ad. I don't mind that all too much. What I mind is totally irrelevant garish ads distracting my eyes with flashy colors or half-nude women. I think they could do targeted ads tastefully. For example, like Slashdot has Open-source on-topic sortof ads.
The next thing that I might allow, is customization of google...say, create a *simple* profile that allows google to track the *general* type of searches you do, and organize a custom subtree of more relevant sites that it can use to search first or give more priority. I find myself searching for the same things over and over, so this would actually be useful.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Furthermore, this phrase was mistranslated (or perhaps, the King James english is not understood). The original Greek meaning of the oft-quoted phrase is "all evils," which is to say, "all kinds of evil."
Google is (also?) colocated at Exodus and GlobalCenter; I just walked by their Borregas cage, in fact. The Rackables are now up into the thousands of CPUs (a friend of mine who works at Google built 1200 machines in a single afternoon; yes, they're identical, yes, it's done by DHCP and on a private VLAN). Finally, the chef doesn't cost much relative to their programmers (mostly Stanford and UCSB almost-PhD's).
Google is hella cool and both of my friends that work there, love it. They do work pretty hard, though. Still, when you love what you do...
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
What's more, if you add "&btnI=lucky", you get the "Feeling Lucky" option, going straight to the top match. So you never see a page by Google! Now that's lightweight!
I rarely use that, preferring to see the 10 top choices, but it's neat. It might also be a problem for Google if everybody did that, but I doubt it: they have my undying love and attention, and that will translate to $$ somehow or other.
Here's the bookmarklet code (Slashdot wisely won't let me put javascript in a comment):(works with IE, a slight alteration works with Netscape, see bookmarklets.com for how to make one).
Google's Cache, however, has some interesting legal issues. Even if a judge orders an ISP to shut down a web site, that site's content (at least, its text content), will remain on the web in the form of a Google cache.
Is Google then liable if they don't also remove it?
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
I do wish Google would get these, as they really let me thin out the garbage: I usually append "and not (homepage or jumppage or links or "link page")" and remove about a zillion wastes of my time from any search.
www.eFax.com are spammers
It's a good business model, offering a cheap free service to the public while making money off of big contracts.
Another good company that operates this way is Maxim who makes analog semiconductor devices. They will send you two of almost anything they make, free, here, which is a great thing for hobbyists and students (I saved over $100 on my latest project :) and yet it's a drop in the bucket compared to the money they make off of manufacturing contracts. It's great advertising because a EE student who has used Maxim ICs in his projects will be much more likely to use Maxim in the future, when designing in the corporate world.
Plu shameless plugs from guys like me.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
I thought the primary objection people had with google was that it is based on a software patent that prevents other search engines from doing ranking based on the number of links to a web page. So, for example, you can go to google if you want ranking based on inbound links, but, thanks to their patent, they don't have to care about service enough to offer, say, AltaVista-style boolean expressions, because they make it illegal for anyone else to offer the combination of boolean expressions and ranking based on inbound links. Imagine if every search engine business patented every new feature this way. Technology would advance much more slowly. That, I believe, is the complaint that people have about Google's business practices.
I would be curious to see how many people added the google slashbox to their /. homepage after reading this article. Not that I did it of course...
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"
>A question: Given the way ad servers work, is is feasible for them to
:) I've also seen text for ads in netscape.
>supply text alternatives to images?
It must be, for the simple reason that I've seen it done
If nothing else, text could be placed such that the image would overwrite it, or as the text label for the image.
hawk
As it stands they are competing with their paying customers.
They needed google.com initially to become famous as the best way to run a search engine. It worked. Now, google.com has become a liability, a free service that hurts their customers.
Why on Earth would Google, as a for-profit business, continue to run their ad-free direct interface?
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Speaking of funny Google searches...
more evil than the devil
Check out the search results below the first one to learn more about the origin of the phrase.
-- This
i use tool and it get's me straight to the results page....
scratch "ad-free"
I meant that they're not choked with ads like their customers (yet).
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Not exactly real numbers, but a study on kids using the web which I found through Jakob Nielsen's site found that many just tuned the ads out (details under Behavioral Observations).
Recently, I participated in an inteface study for google.com, where they tested out some beta features. I hate to say it, but more and more it looks like google is going portal. The feaure they tested during my session was a "web directory" that looked a whole lot like Yahoo's main page. Furthermore, in a previous session in which a friend was participating, one of the test items (though they tried to make it seem minor), were text ads that came at the top of the search results list. Thought you might be interested in these developments.
But really, I'm not complaining. They're still the best site for my search purposes (quick and reliable). Heck, they once cached a web site of mine that I didn't want be public (unfortunately, was housing the web site at a Stanford server for I swear a total of maybe 2 hours) .. .asked them nicely to take it off and they responded promptly. And they gave me $20, a T-shirt, some stickers, and pizza for participating in the 1 hour session! I got a (albeit very small) piece of their VC money :)
By the way, they seem to be really interested in hiring people (like most SV firms). We spent a lot of time during the study going over their recruitment links/homepage.
That was the first thing that crossed my mind as well. :)
Obviously, the journalist for the SF Chronicle just doesn't get it. Google isn't the one that needs to grow up. Google is one of the few mature web sites on the internet. Google has learned that spamming your users with millions of advertisements reduces your user base more quickly than it adds to your profitability. By keeping their site clean and fast, Google saves money and wins over users who are fed up with sites that take tens to hundreds of seconds to load. Being rated #1 by users makes it much easier to win where it counts, in selling their search engine service to portals and other companies.
Jason
But if t you want a google-like search engine, check out Raging Search by Altavista. It's faster, smarter and cleaner.
-Håkan
http://www.deja.com/=dnc/home_ps.shtml -- same as it ever was.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
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Just lurking, thanks!
Think of how annoying the in-movie commercials are getting these days. Did you see the pepsi-ad scene stuck in the midde of The Thomas Crown Affair?
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Dunno if this is old news, but this is the first time I've noticed that YAHOO! has a banner ad for Google.
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Something I also notice is that they just changed their "affiliate program" revenue from 3 cents per search to 1...
SSL Certificate
The search engine is the purest environment in which targetted advertising can be offered while still preserving privacy.
Why target somebody with a wine ad who only drank one glass years ago? The more logical way would be to target somebody with a wine ad who is looking for sites featuring wines at this moment in time.
I like how google doesn't make use of graphical ads -- only text, almost like the web used to be like .. anyways .. So long as the ads aren't conveyed as search results, great for Google! I can still enjoy my favorite search engine without the hassle of determining the legitimacy of my search results.
TANSTAAFL was invented by a SciFi author (Heinlein if I am not mistaken) and used in his fiction. Hence, the parent of this thread was a QUOTE and as such is totally exempt from grammatical rules. If you have a problem, take it up with the original author (but you'll have to hold a seance to do so:-)
Doubleclick is fantastic. It's the best thing since sliced bread. I wish all the major web sites used doubleclick, instead of just most of them. Why? Because doubleclick is incredibly easy to ignore. Drop ad[1-20].doubleclick.net in your host file with a loopback IP address, and all of the doubleclick empire disappears.
The thing I hate most of all is when banner ads are stored on Akamai, because Akamai is also used for legitimate purposes. The loopback-address trick thus doesn't work very well; Junkbuster or similar filtering-proxy software is better, since you can mask out particular URLs with regexps.
Does the engine only count one link PER DOMAIN, as a vote? It must, otherwise their engine could fall victim to the same kind of attack as the porn sites use on altavista, et. al.
Instead of using a specific word multiple times, they would create pages (indexed by google) that link to the site multiple times.
The best case scenario is for it to only count one per domain. However, even if it does that, a company that owns many domains could use the same technique, spread across all their domains... thus being able to elevate their site ranking in google.
hmmm
-thomas
"And like that
I think it would be perfect if they'd just add 2 or 3 "70,000 free hours of AOL" banners, and have all of their search results link directly to merchants instead of the current 40%.
Adding a news ticker wouldn't hurt either!
Until it becomes the only thing...
Seems like this is the trap so many companies and other organizations are falling into - seeing only the bottom line, to hell with their customers...
I support the EFF - do you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Maybe if web sites used META tags (which my website is lacking in - need to put some in), then somehow set it up so that you had "regions" on the web (which may or may not be coupled in some manner with geographic regions) - maybe there could then be a hierarchy of web search servers - with each being able to be queried by a higher one on the tree (hard to describe - just imagine like a world search server, national search servers, state search servers, county search servers, city search servers - someone could search at any level, and each would pass on the search to others at lower level if needed).
Maybe a distributed net approach, where clients send back where they are going on the web to the city level (or whatever the lowest level is) search servers, who in turn trickle it up the tree (such an approach would be opt-in only, and maybe would allow for the ability to deny certain places the user is browsing to to be sent in - privacy concerns and all). Such a system would be able to rank sites by popularity as well...
Interesting concept when you start thinking about it...
I support the EFF - do you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
At work (Windows) I use InterMute (now "AdSubtract") and at home (Mac) I browse with iCab. I haven't seen an ad on the web in weeks...
Simpletoneity, n. -- The phenomenon of many people all doing the same stupid thing at the same time.
I've used Google ever since I was it a few years ago, I believe it was on Slashdot, and it was being hailed as a search engine "run on linux". Finding that interesting, I tried it out, and it worked really great, and super-fast. Since that day, I've hardly ever used any other search engine, and I'm perfectly happy.
;)
:)
Now I am a 56K user, so speed is important to me. I hate waiting for pages to load, and hate it when more when I'm waiting for a search engine to load so I can wait for other web pages to load! The point of a search engine is to "search", and not display several banners ads in front of my face for me to simply ignore.
Google eliminates this wait greatly, and http://google.com loads in less than a second for me. Searches are also fast, and always produce relevant finds. And if the site that is linked is down or gone, it's great how I can just click on the "cached" link to get a copy of it. I use this feature way too often to be good.
I've introduced many people to google including friends & teachers at school, and coworkers & bosses at work. They all love google and they have many reasons to do so. They in turn, tell others who tell others, and this leads to google's popularity, and continued growth.
About the future of Google, I don't care about banner ads or whatnot. If typing in http://google.com loads a search engine in 1 second for me, with banner ads, then I'm fine with it. If it takes time, then I mgiht start consdering, but reading about google's morals and goals, that should't be happening anytime soon at least.
I like google. Like the hundreds of other's on here, I just like it. It suits all my needs and wants perfectly. Heck, searching for my name brings up any postings I have made to mailing lists or web boards in the last few months, and that's scary.
Google is an excellent search engine, and I think it's here to stay, and most importantly, improve. Way to go google, and keep up the great work and service you have provided for the past few years! If everyone in the online community dies suddenly, you'll still have one person using the service (and heck, imagine the speed then!)
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Scott Miga
suprax@linux.com
Linux Journal has an interview with Sergey Brin this month.
(Table of contents here. The interview isn't online, though.)
Google has 5000 computers now. About 80% are performing searches, 10% are for R&D, and 10% are crawling & indexing.
I am a devotee of the google search engine, as I really like the Linux and university restricted search, and the fact that all search terms are automatically ANDed.
I also like the simplicity and quick load time of its austere interface
Anyone who runs Linux can't be bad!
My point is that there are some people in this world who take security/encryption to unnecessary extremes. If I'm dealing with money and transferring 10,000 dollars between bank accounts, yeah, I would want reasonably high security. If I'm posting to Slashdot and a few advertisers from Andover.net want to know that I'm a Linux user in my early 20's (well, duh), I could care less. Let them have the information.
I take it you're the kind of person who encrypts all their emails to mom telling about the kids?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
For quite a while they were underwriting NPR (National Public Radio) programs. Almost certainly cheaper than advertising anywhere else but still advertising.
It's a scaling dream. An application that is so easily distributed that you can have thousands of computers all running the same code which don't need to communicate with each other, except in daily batch jobs. Scaling is infinite and redundancy comes along with the package. Websites that rely on one centralized database are a scaling nightmare. One word: Ebay.
I think the coolest thing I came across on Google was the way the "related sites" feature will, when fed Google itself, return a bevy of their own competitors. That went a fair ways to convincing me that they really are in this with the intention of doing the best job possible.
The "googlet" javascript you can store as a bookmark is also very handy, and saves you having to go to the main page before entering your search text (tailored to the scripting quirks of your browser, too).
-- Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. ~ Robert Doisneau
I remember first using it when it was still on Stanford's servers. Of course I can't remember exactly how many years ago that was, so I guess that doesn't help much
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"It was people! People soiled our green!"
...checking on google...
Hrm, most people agree that the acronym, at least, is from Heinlein. I guess I always cofuse the origin of this with Niven's TANJ (There Ain't No Justice)
Well, looks like Heinlein used the Justice phrase first as well, but Niven used the acronym as an expletive.
Sheesh! google kicks ass!
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"It was people! People soiled our green!"
The thing is, google's ranking method nearly always eliminates this sort of rubbish anyway. I'm very impressed by it.
If you find it doesn't work exactly, check out the advanced search form.
http://www.google.com/advanced_search.html
No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.