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Honeymoon Over For Google?
scubacuda writes "Business Week has an article on some of the challenges Google faces as it gains popularity. For a while, things were looking good: unobtrusive ads, a hardware search appliance, and the fact that 'google' has become a verb (like xerox, kleenex, hoover, etc.). Now, Yahoo! has dropped the 'exclusive' part of its contract, Overture won a series of key contracts, Verity has announced a deal to purchase Inktomi's assets, and Y! announced it was buying Inktomi's web-search business. And other engines such as WiseNut, Teoma, and FAST now mimic Google's 'popularity placement technology.'"
Searchs on google
Yahoo 86,500,000
Google 19,100,000
Altavista 5,480,000
Cruise TT
I don't see Google going away anytime soon. I've never heard of those other engines and do not have any interest in them.
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
Surffast.com is just a meta search engine, the FAST that is meant here is at alltheweb.com.
...so I guess the honeymoon's still on! :)
Well, I got the following JavaScript snippet from http://wwww.google.co.nz/
<script>document.f.q.focus();
</script>
The above code causes Google to come to the front of all the windows once it load -- which is very irrating especially when I have to use non-tabbed browsers such as MSIE. Google is a very good search engine and this is about the only feature I strongly disklike about it.
Your other points are valid however.
- James
Google I believe looks at the domain entry and uses that to determine your country of origin, more than likely for marketing reasons (yes it's true)
At work we do not have such an entry so it takes me to google.com. Nothing intrusive.
The google.ca site is pretty much the as google.com except for 2 things.
#1) it is a different server, therefore spreading the load for google.
#2) it slightly boosts canadian results, as well as allowing you to search pages in canada only.
I've used it for a while with no problems. I like it.
RoundTop
[What I'd like to know is] whatever happened to Alta Vista. Remember when they ruled the search engine universe?
The relevant history can be found here. AltaVista was probably the single biggest casualty of Google...prior to Google it had the largest index of webpages. But Google did a better job of indexing and presenting the content for people's needs, then the index became the largest on the web. AltaVista lost the race, so much so that most people nowadays have never even heard of AltaVista.
Wrong; the above code causes the query text input box to get focus once the page loads, so you don't have to click it manually to enter a query. A very useful, and common, feature. document.f.q refers to the widget named "q" in the form named "f".
^]:wq!^M
- Absolutely the fastest search, period.
- Relevant results in ~99% of searches (in my experience). Consistently comes up with the most obscure stuff imaginable (and I've checked against other engines)
- Ads look like ads and they're not masqueraded as results (and yeah, everyone's copying that now, whoopi)
- Usenet archive. Heeelooooo!!!
- News meta crawler. Haven't looked at another "portal" since Google News went live.
- Privately held company. No Yahoo-style pressures for revenue.
- The Amazing Browser Toolbar. Also copied by everyone now.
- Excellent site design. Clean, uncluttered, just nice.
- The Zeitgeist (sp?)
- Cool company with a sense of humor.
Wake me up when everyone else (especially "wisenut", which I've never heard about before) gets there.Nor do I ever hear anyone say ... "Hoover up that dirt".
Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally? Because over here, in the UK, it's pretty much replaced 'vacuum' as a verb. People use it uncapitalized all the time. I frequently hear and see "Hoover up that dirt." or whatever. Maybe it's because Hoover was a much bigger brand over here??
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Wrong. A one followed by 100 zeros is a "googol". That was the inspiration for the name "Google", but they intentionally misspelled the name of the number when naming the search engine.
I like Google.ca, the canadian one.
No DMCA takedowns there.
And I am a US resident..
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
"Yahoo" does not occur naturally in the english language, whatever that really means.
"Yahoo" was a word coined by Jonathon Swift in the novel "Gulliver's Travels". A yahoo was a person in the land of the Houyhnhnms, but basically the yahoos were savages of low intellect. A discussion of the source of the word "yahoo" can be found here.
then your window manager really sucks. at least in an ideal system, there are two levels of focus - application focus and input focus. every application has its own input focus. you can switch between applications all you want. if a background window changes the input focus, the change is only for that application and you will only notice it if you choose to make that application active.
There isn't the purpose of the international Googles. It is /not/ trying to assume that you want Australian content. It is trying to comply with whatever laws exist in your country.
For example, some European countries get very uppity if a search returns sites with pro-Nazi content. Those Google pages have to filter out the things that would be illegal for Google to serve in those countries. Likewise, I'm told that internet pornography is banned in Australia. Now I don't know that for a fact, or whatever other laws there are about content censorship in Australia, but you can see where I'm going with this.
The international Googles are not so much to steer you to nationalized content, but rather to allow Google to comply with international laws.
The more interesting dynamic is what will happen after Yahoo switches from Google to inktomi which they just bought. I think this forces Google to go after Yahoo on all fronts. Google can copy Yahoo's stock chat site without much difficulty. The hosted web mail will not take much either. They already have dejanews and an interface to the advertisers. Yahoo meanwhile have let their catalog grow really stale, I don't know anyone who uses it these days except as a backup to google.
Hmmm... this sounds like a googlefight if I've ever heard of one!
So let's see who wins: Yahoo vs. Google!
Google has recently issued a cease and desist letter to Gewgle.com. Seems like their humor has run dry as well, as they no longer understand 'humor' or the concept of 'parody'.
Or, here's a quick link to a Google search of Slashdot Google coverage.
Religion is the opium of the people. Evolution is the opium of scientists.
Hasn't happened yet. And they respect robots.txt and will remove the cache if you ask them, so I don't imagine it happening anytime soon...
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
I can assure you we can still browse porn here :-) I think the Australian laws are more of a token effort to stamp out child porn and other types of extreme porn that aren't legal in any media here. The thing is, these laws are targeted at the ISPs specifically - the way it SHOULD be. It's not Google's responsibility to ensure it's following the laws of a country that it doesn't do business in.
I got a sig so you would remember me.
Yes, but there's a major difference: Google is noticeably better than any other search engine offered to date. So even if other companies can duplicate its quality, people will still use Google. That is the nature of the first mover advantage. This advantage, as so many learned, does not protect you from quantum leaps in technology. Google will fall over and die as soon as someone comes up with something dramatically better - not "about as good" or even "a little better" - dramatically better. Yahoo! is irrelevant in the current market; it's a dinosaur waiting until the end of the extinction to die off, and in any case its search engine is not only not dramatically better than Google, it isn't even nearly as good. Everyone knows it. And almost nobody uses Yahoo! any more for exactly that reason. You want to beat Google, you have to be a lot better. Simple, eh? Now go to it, kids; no whining.