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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.
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)
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'm wondering how many people know this..
www.raging.com
10^100 is a googol.
10^googol is a googolplex.
And this site can help you imagine that.
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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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
"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.