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Why Google Rocks And An IPO
Soothsayer wrote to us about the recent BusinessWeek article that profiles Google, its rise to the top, despite no marketing dollars, and tries to explain...well...why Google rocks. Oh, and some small mention of an IPO. CT I also want to note that images.google.com is my favorite place in the universe to idly explore the wierdness of the net.
site is slow, movies are only up during certain times, and there are no descriptions. I would rather the time it takes for CJ to give some information and decent speeds.
Is Eric Schmidt the guy to lead Google into new markets, expand their business, and take them thru an IPO? Personally, I'm a bit worried about him as their CEO. Granted Novell was already on the way down when he took the helm, but to have negative market growth for the 4 years you were in charge? I'll admit I never followed Novell, nor do I know much about him, but his past performance bothers me. Was Novell too far gone for Schmidt to make a difference (although he had 4 years to do something)? Is Google too golden to be affected by him (ie could any bum off the street take Google thru an IPO)?
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
Honestly, have you seen what my prior favorite, metacrawler (now goto.net) has become? One of these horribly busy, what's what, 10-minutes-to-load, feature glut, sensory overload type pages.
It's noce that success hasn't put a bunch of crap on google's front page like it did for ICQ, Netscape, or Yahoo.
It's also good to know that the #1 result spot was not there because it was purchased. They're good about making that clear.
Add to this the fact that it GETS RESULTS and RUNS LINUX... you've got a perfect engine. Of course, I'd like to know what they're doing with those cookies and click-through data, but that's just the privacy freak in me talking.
+++ ATH0 +++
And it's all about relevant results.
Google is great for many of the same reasons that Yahoo was great (and still, more or less, is great). Early search engines all used the same ranking scheme (if they ranked sites at all). The more often a term appeared in a page's META tags or body, the more relevant the page must be. This was quickly taken advantage of by web page creators.
Yahoo might not have been the first to deviate from the traditional search engine, but they were the first raging success at it. Web surfers quickly learned that searching Yahoo's directory yielded more relevant results because the sights were screened beforehand to make sure the sites contained what the site creators said the sites contained. But soon the directory became bloated, many sites simply went away causing broken links, site creators all began their site titles with "A" just to push up to the top of the alphabetical listing and corporations trumped them all by paying for top billing.
Enter Google. The ranking algorithm works something like this: A site is crawled and it's contents indexed. A check is made in Google's existing directory to see if any other sites point to the currently crawled site. If there are many sites pointing to the current site, then obviously the current site has some importance and deserves and higher ranking. If one of the "big sites" (i.e. AOL, MSN, etc) link to a site, it must be really important. I believe there are other factors involved but I can't remember them at the moment.
Google's ranking system provides the most relevant search results of all the current search engines. As a bonus, it doesn't try and clutter the interface with unneccessary "portal" features or too much blatant advertising. Fast, powerful and smart. That's why it rocks.
My sigs always suck.
The main benefit of issuing an IPO is the massive amount of cash that is immediately infused into the company. The company usually has some sort of business plan that includes the spending of this money through acquisitions, research, and general company growth. The company will be able to do things that it could only dream of without that money. A company going IPO without a reasonable plan as to how the money will be spent is not a company that you want to be invested in.
Of course, with this newfound money comes new responsibility. The company heads become beholden to the shareholders and the never-ceasing demands of the market. If the principals make one bad decision, a barrage of lawsuits are bound to rain down. An unlucky company may soon find itself making decisions that bolster the short term stock price instead of making decisions that strengthen the company for the long term. The lucky company, though, may make it past its first few years and into steady cash flow well enough that it can take gambles that other companies both public and private could only imagine (Microsoft, anyone?).
Dancin Santa
"oh google fantastic it got me the results I needed"- researcher
"oh the libraries fantastic they showed me the indexes and then I went and got the best book"- researcher
this is the old way of doing things not anything new
its called Impact Factor this is how often a paper is cited by other papers in their bibliography (an equivalent in a home page would be links section). This then determines how good the paper is and so a journal with a high impact factor is seen as better than one with a low one because people use articles from it a lot. In turn journals then demand more money from the library to buy it or advertiser if they run adverts.
But get this some high brow journals cost $10,000 for a years subs that every library in the land has to stock because they have such high impact factor.
On top of this if you want to publish where do you publish? In a high impact factor journal because your work is going to be seen and often you grant is linked to impact factor. So researchers are so desperate to get their money they give copyright of their work to journals .
And of course this self perpetuates with the best work going to high brow journals the winners are the Publishers not the people doing the work or the libraries that hold the research.
What is needed is to break the cycle is for researchers to publish online to a respected website and to keep copyright of their work and for funding companies / governments to acknowledge these as having an impact factor (may be based on unique viewing of page I suppose ) and the libraries to stop paying them!
Please encourage you local libraries and governments to do this !
Regards
John Jones
Libraries had this a long time ago? Man, have you ever done a research for relevant papers in a library? Even with all their CD-Rom and online catalogs it still sucks, because it's still keyword based, like Altavista.
That changed with citeseer, a search DB that specifically links publications and calculates their relevance based on common citations.
Great for doing research, check it out.
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.