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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
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 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.
"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.
--
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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.
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.
Founder's Camp
Founder's Camp
News for non-Nerds. Stuff that matters.
I'm wondering how many people know this..
www.raging.com
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.
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
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...
10^100 is a googol.
10^googol is a googolplex.
And this site can help you imagine that.
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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
That's the one thing that annoyed me with searches on deja.com.
It always assumed you wanted to buy something, so you could do searches and get a response on "Click here for books on KILLING YOUR PARENTS on Amazon.com!"
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
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
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 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)
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
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
It will be really hard to organize this with 14M hits per day.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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.
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.
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).
I think people are confused about greed and money. People often misquote the biblical "money is the root of all evil". The full quote is "the love of money is the root of all evil".
So, wanting to get wealthy is not wrong. Wanting to get wealthy to the exclusion of all else, placing the desire for wealth at the center of your life, screwing people over just to make a buck. That's what's wrong.
Morality is in the attitude, not the bank account. After all, if there were no money, we would be reduced to using an inefficient barter economy, or breaking society down into little self-sustaining collectives that would never be able to unite and produce the way the free market does.
Plainly, money is a good thing. Here's a challenge to all those who say money is evil: take a vow of poverty. Find a monestary or some similar sort of collective society that will allow you to live without money. You might have luck with this at Intentional Communities. What? No takers? I didn't think so.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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
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 ?
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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 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
Or do what many other people (including myself) do: /etc/hosts (or C:\WINDOWS\HOSTS, for Windows users like myself) to resolve to 127.0.0.1, and then run a program to listen on port 80 (have it accept connection and then immediately disconnect; that way, you don't have to wait for connection to time out in your browser). All you get in your browser is an empty box with either an "image not loaded" icon or a "broken image" icon.
Put the adbar sites in
-- Sig (120 chars) --
Your friendly neighborhood mIRC scripter.
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
> 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.
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
The problem of making a living providing free content or services on the web is pretty much the same as figuring out how to make a living writing free software. Even the most altruistic programmer, writer, artist, or musician still has to put food on the table and pay the bills.
Micropayments, despite the support they get from web gurus like Jakob Nielsen, would probably kill off most web sites. Imagine how popular TV would be if you had to pay a nickle every time you flipped channels or a new show came on. Wide-scale micropayments for general content would kill the web -- people would get sick of being nickeled & dimed to death very quickly. Like broadcast television, most web content will continue to be advertiser-supported for the forseeable future.
This is not to say that micropayments are a bad idea -- they do have their place. Reusable electronic content like MP-3's or video clips are obvious candidates for a micropayment system.
Besides advertising and micropayments, the only other really viable method for generating revinue for content producers is a subscription model. Red Hat is a good example of a subscription web site -- paid subscribers get access to their priority FTP web servers. You can get the same content from the public servers, but the priority servers let you get it faster and you get tech support if you have problems with the stuff you download. In order for a subscription web site to be successful, it must do two things: offer substantial free (probably advertiser-supported) content, and offer paid subscribers a tangible premium (no ads, faster servers, tech support, etc.) Subscriber-only content is generally a bad idea; if a prospective subscriber can't get a pretty complete picture of the content the site offers, there is no real incentive for him to become a subscriber - particuarly if you have a competitor that offers similar content for free.
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
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!
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
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.
Even then the cacheing function is useful, as it will show you the page exactly as the googlebot saw it, and so you can see why it's being indexed this way.
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bgphints - internet routing news, hints and ti
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?
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
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.
I'm sure that if micropayments were available in a generally accepted way, then only those sites which would benefit from them would adopt them, and other sites would remain on either free or subscription basis.
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.
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+&x
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.
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The harder you look the less you see. That's what we're up against.
Try Deja News Classic. (Yes moderators, this is -1, Redundant)
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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.
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.
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.
At least in my copy, the quote is the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil which is not the same thing at all.
I miss MEEPT. I remember thinking, "what the fu...?!?" And the responses from Bill Gates were usually pretty funny.
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.
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.
Yes, I expect people to provide content for free...Snip...I expect musicians to provide music, mp3.com. I expect sites like this to provide news.
Excepting academic sites, usually hosted by Universities, which make money off students and the research they produce, how do you see these sites that provide these services paying for themselves? Accepting for the moment that the propietors of the sites don't want to get fantastically weathy off of them (Some or even most probably do, but we'll leave that alone for now), it costs a fortune just to keep a high traffic site running. Anywhere from dozens to hundreds of powerful computers, a high speed access line (probably at least two for redundency), paying people to program and monitor the site (don't tell me about free software here, a site like Slashdot or Google has to be monitored 24/7. I know very few few people who will answer a call at midnight to fix broken code RIGHT NOW! out of altruism.) These are pure web players here, they don't produce anything except "free" content. How do you propose they pay for the service they give you, much less make a profit?
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
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.
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
"When a cartoonist licenses his characters, his voice is co-opted by the business concerns of toy makers, television producers, and advertisers. The cartoonist's job is no longer to be an original thinker; his job is to keep his characters profitable. The characters become 'celebrities,' endorsing companies and products, avoiding controversy, and saying whatever someone will pay them to say. At that point, the strip has no soul. With its integrity gone, a strip loses its deeper significance."
- Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin & Hobbes
I agree with the above statement, and it's been demonstrated many times with strips like Peanuts.
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!
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Just lurking, thanks!
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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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Hmmm... perhaps there is a way to profit from this... advertising companies make ads so annoying that people will pay the free content carriers not to display those ads. The advertising agency then takes their cut of the "no ads" payment.
You obviously have a right to want to pay to not see ads, but there would have to be a critical mass large enough for the content provider to be able to take such an option seriously. (For example, if you were the only person interested in such an arrangement, it wouldn't be worth Google's time to setup the whole bookkeeping, credit card processing, ad tracking thingies, etc. needed to these micropayments.) So I wonder how many people would need to commit to this to make it worth while for Google (or any company) to offer that as a viable solution. And even if it were viable, would any company offer such a solution? Wouldn't such an offer piss off the advertising companies? Piss them off and they wouldn't do business anymore with the site, and then you wouldn't have to pay to not see ads... everyone would win (well, except for the content site that would go under...)!
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
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
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
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.
Last time I tried Google they pulled up a few million hits (the top ones were good, of course, but there were still several million).
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
What is your definition of being self-sufficient? Is the US able to support itself agriculturally without imports? Certainly it could do that but the goods are produced cheaper in other countries. Does the US have enough natural resources to handle transportation of the populous as well as handling the power of homes? Yes, the only thing is that we can get oil and other stuff cheaper from other countries. In actuality the US can be self-sufficient but in an open market capitalist economy it would not be.
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
Lot's of people I know still use the term "dozen" (10^1.0791812) and a few even say "Baker's dozen" for 10^1.1139434. Score is in daily use for 10^1.30103, while 10^2.158362492 is pretty gross.
You do have to watch out for tricks like 10^2 is a hundredweight in the US but in the UK you need 10^2.049218023 (because of the barrel).
PI, of course is notoriously irrational.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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
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
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.
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
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