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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.
Help! I keep searching for Babes on image.google.com - but Babe Ruth keeps showing up. Yech!
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
NO, not another IPO!
Aaahhh!
Sheesh, you get a good firm and you just want to ruin it by making it go all bonkers with greed and quarterly returns.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
It's a shame that other sites don't accomodate those of us that speak sweedish chef.
That's why google is on top.
(This post -barely- passed the lameness filter)
I did a search on AltaVista which returned 10,000,000 results. I'll let you know when I find it.
-... ---
blah. Consumption Junction is the only place for serious weirdness in images on the net.
:)
The reason that Google.com is so heavy on traffic is b/c it is the only decent search engine on the net (and the fact that they power Yahoo, etc).
I love Google but it definitly isn't the place for weird images
1.You always find what you want
2.They don't try to shove ads in your face
3.It is quick
4.Everyone found out about it through word of mouth
5.It's Google! need i say anymore, the name is cool
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
Google has that nice little AdWords program. Its like a penny per impression I think. We use it and have gotten a bit of extra traffic from it. It's much better than shelling out thousands of dollars to setup a campaign on Yahoo. I think you can start as low as $15.00 on an account. That's a good deal, and that's going to make them some money. Even if they don't work, our attitude is "what the hell, it's only a few bucks".
The ads on Google's site are delivered as a text listing above the search results--making them appear more a part of the page's content. "It works so well since users seem to be under the impression that all ads are graphical in nature and written-word ad placements are still editorial," says ad buyer Jonathan Adams, senior partner at Ogilvy Interactive
I have to disagree with this part of the paragraph from the linked article. I don't see how the advertising can be confusing to a user just because it's not "graphical". Unless, I suppose, you're a senior partner at Ogilvy Interactive.
The ads stand out on the page, very clearly (IMHO). Even if the ads are not JPG's or GIF's they have the appearance of being "graphical" in nature.
I'm not sure if that makes any sense.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
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.
I also want to note that images.google.com is my favorite place in the universe to idly explore the wierdness of the net.
.. is THAT what they call pr0n in your neck of the woods now?
oooh... ummm.. "wierdness"
314-15-9265
Why would any company that is growing in the aftermath of the .boom want a parasite on the business in the form of investers wanting ever-growing returns? What do they need the extra capitol for?
science is a religion
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.
Sadly, they call this HYPE, which is what Google does not do.
Google has a product that works well. most places do not want to spend the time and monewy to grow such a product.
What is wrong with that picture?
You can waste more time trying to trying to get a quick buck...
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Google's search seems to be a little more focused on the content of the surrounding page, while Altavista's search seems to be a little more focused on the content of the image itself.
Altavista's "Similar" indexing is a really interesting way to browse randomly, or to find better-quality copies of the same image. It goes by some color-to-area fingerprinting index scheme, so a pumpkin on a black background may be seen as "similar" to a basketball on a dark brown background.
Google's database of images is not mature yet, and needs more tie-in with the stock-photo services, but it is in more ways predictable: reasonable searches often find reasonable images.
In both, and in website searching too, I'd like for it to automatically try synonyms to words I provide, perhaps at a lower weighting.
More semantic work could be done on Google, to avoid the dreaded "'how' is a very common word and ignored" phenomenon. Of course, a database table with references to all the pages that include the word 'how' would be enormous. However, if groups of words on pages and in searches were recognized and considered as new meta-English symbols, the tables of how to verb for each verb would be manageable and useful. "How to tie", "how to format", "how to derive". (Linux docs have adopted 'howto' as a word to avoid the situation, but [shock] not everything you want to find is about Linux.)
Other word groupings that commonly surround the too-common words are good candidates for this symbol-analysis too.[
Has anyone come across any really interest results for searches on images.google? One of the oddest ones ive come across these days has been searches for "bruise"
I know I can get to some of my pages through Google, and I never paid 'em a dime. They don't charge me to search for things, and they don't show me a lot of ads. Where does the money come from?
The article mentions that someone does pay Google to spider their site, and that they sell their "technology". It must be an aweful amount of money if this is how Google covers their expenses. It's a little hard to believe.
Google looks like one of those things that is Too Good To Be True. Are we gonna find out that they are Osama's piggy bank or something? ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I have to agree, Google toolbar is phenomenal. Saves me from typing in www.google.com, or clicking a favorites link etc, AND it gives more power than simply being at the frontpage of google. Being able to highlight and jump to search terms in any website more than justifies it's use.
For those who want one, here's the link. Sadly it's still only available for Windows and IE. Back when it first came out this was one of the prime reasons I cut way back in my use of Netscape.
Sellign technolgoy to do a job with fixed needs is not a sustainable business model.
You can make some large hunks of cash but wher eis the ongoing revenue? I don't see an ydiscussion of whether the amrket for their technology can or will expand.
Some plain business sense still seems a good idea when picking companies. Burn is sustained so income must be sustainable.
They have a different colored background, and say "Sponsored Link" to the right. To any person with a marginal amount of sanity, it is pretty obvious.
"The guide is definitive, reality is frequently inaccurate."
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
But it is not perfect. What about exact pharse searches? Try this search on google. "to be or not to be, that is the question" Google first hit is something about horticulture, huh?!? "To spray or not to spray?" And the rest of the hits have nothing to do with Shakespeare. Now try the same exact search on Altavista you actually get Shakespeare related sites. Google is great for topic search especially multiple topics. With Altavista it is +linux +filtering +security but Google is automatically ANDed. It is just to bad that Google's advanced search to turn on exact phase matching doesn't actually work. I tried the Google advanced search page but I got the same results as the standard page. Lycos has an advanced search with exact match and it did give the good results, so what is the deal with Google? I realize this may be redundant and others on Slashdot have mentioned this problem with Google. The question is: Is there a way around this or a fix in the works? Has anyone else experienced this?
I agree the results are the most relevant, but there's one factor I've been unable to specify in a query: TIME. Oftentimes, I'd get 40-50 results of which many were posted years ago, and it's a pain to skim through all those to find the ones that pertain to a recent development and/or announcement!
Some Ideas:
Workaround: I've tried to do something like including "2001" in a query, but it's not very selective or effective. :(
So this does indeed eliminate the advertising execs.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Business Week likes it, in part, because they think it's deceptive!
Google has seen online ad sales rise in recent quarters. The reason? The ads on Google's site are delivered as a text listing above the search results--making them appear more a part of the page's content. "It works so well since users seem to be under the impression that all ads are graphical in nature and written-word ad placements are still editorial," says ad buyer Jonathan Adams, senior partner at Ogilvy Interactive.
I'm torn! Do I tell that looser what drives people to visit the place and give him a clue, or do I keep my mouth shut and let him keep buying ads?
Nah, I'll keep my mouth shut. One day after the IPO, some greedhead is going to screw my favorite search engine. It will be replaced in about five days by an honest site. Why can't those fools just enjoy their profits and leave excellent alone?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Don't tell Jonathan Adams that, he's still paying Google extra for the text links.
I read the internet for the articles.
it's not the same thing, trust me on this. The google toolbar is very cool:
type a keyword and
- search the web
- search the site you are looking at
- search the google web directory
- search the archived news groups
- highlight occurences of the terms in the page you are looking at
In addition:
- a google button is present with configuration and links to google, advanced search and so on.
- a ranking is given for the page you are looking at
- a convenient up button is present that moves you one directory up (it's actually a dropdownmenu too so you can select any directory in the path)
- there's a button which shows you the directory in google web directory the site you are watching is indexed in (very handy for finding related material)
- and finally there's an information button which hides useful features as automatic translation, a link to google's cached copy of the page, similar pages and links to pages linking to the page you are watching
To the best of my knowledge opera only offers the first feature (searching the web). After bookmarks, the google toolbar is the single best productivity feature in my browser. It's a real time saver and it unleashes features that you'd otherwise never use because it's too much work. Often google's site search produces better results than the local site's own search option (usually some dumb altavista like engine).
Jilles
"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
Some Google pages have advertisements but they're text based rather than graphical.
However they're always at the top and highlighted as such (with a different colour background and the mention it's a sponsored link), or they appear down the right hand side of the page.
I think this is the best way to do advertising, it's effective as it's not annoying but it's still clear what is the sponsored links and the real search results.
I agree. This is not just good design, this is ethical dealing. But it's ironic -- according to the article, many people don't see these ads as ads, even though they're clearly marked. Apparently people have been conditioned to equate ads with graphic banners. So Google is benefiting from the excesses of its predecessors.
Add to this the fact that it GETS RESULTS and RUNS LINUX... you've got a perfect engine..
That doesn't make any sense. If it doesn't get results, it's not imperfect, it's useless. And preferring a search engine (or any other public web site) for the OS its maintainers choose is just plain silly.
I have a local page as my home page, it has all my favorite links. However, it does have a form at the top where you can search google.. Instructions on how to so this can be found at Add Google To Your Site.
Cute. For those of you who are math challenged, it's a joke.
-- MarkusQ
200002: 1628: 1.70%
200004: 1116: 0.92%
200005: 3583: 3.21%
200006: 3184: 5.05%
200007: 3347: 5.83%
200008: 5085: 6.89%
200009: 6216: 5.29%
200010: 9341: 7.06%
200011: 7786: 6.18%
200012: 7345: 7.44%
200101: 8985: 8.08%
200102: 8422: 7.45%
200103: 9685: 7.60%
200104: 11588: 8.56%
200105: 12983: 9.02%
200106: 11740: 10.85%
200107: 11917: 13.23%
200108: 15378: 14.06%
The percentages need to be multipled by about 2.5 to get fractions of external referers - ie in August 2001 about 35% of my traffic came from www.google.com. (Also, these figures don't include google.yahoo.com or google.co.uk or the other sites using Google.)
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
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.
Google's cached copy of Google is prefaced by: "Google is not affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its content."
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a