Slashdot Mirror
How Google Grows...and Grows...and Grows
orangerobot writes "The latest issue of Fast Company has an article about how Google has managed to survive beyond its peers and develop a culture of openness and innovation. The article also mentions Google memes and spin-offs such as: Googlewhack, Googlebombing, Googleshare, Googlism and Google Smackdown."
Indeed. Are we at the point yet where we declare Google a monopoly and start rooting for a competing search engine just because?
Seriously, though, apart from the barriers to entry (namely having the computing power, storage, and bandwidth to spider the entire web) there are a wide range of ways that Google could be bested. The only reason they weren't before is that the major competitors saw search engines as a money losing proposition, and started throwing all their money behind duplicating Yahoo, making online communities, auctions, etc.
Google just seems to "get it".
They took a simple idea and kept it simple, yet making it extremely powerful.
When your company name becomes a verb (google): to search for something; I'm going to google for that computer part you know that you're onto something.
Google has survived the dot.com bubble burst because they offer a great service that people want. The natural thing for most companies (brick and mortar or otherwise) is to spin-off and leverage the successful business model into something that will grow their company.
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
I happened to use Yahoo! earlier today, since they have news on their site, and links to other useful tools like yahoo maps, and free email... It also seems to work.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
To the best of my knowledge google has never altered their search results to Rank Up advertisers. They do head the page with a couple of sponsored links, and more down the side, but the results themselves are clean. I don't think that's likely to change even if they do IPO. I don't mind a few ads, especially since they are usually on topic, and since they don't interfere with the search. (Suprisingly companies do have a right to try to make money.)
'ta
Have you tried putting "search engine" in a search engine?
Same way as kleenex,xerox and hormel(spam) have done.
All done for the reasons that want to keep the word for business use and don't want thier competitors to be able to use thier brand name as something else.
In the case you mentioned they had/have Google down as a synonym for search, a verb which cannot be protected. If Google did not protect their name they would have no more rights to use the word then Yahoo, or alta vista would to use the word.
IIRC, they finally solved the problem by mentioning that Google was a protected word of the Google corporation.
Interestingly enough, Apple has started a trend by building in a Google search widget into their new safari browser.
Imagine what would happen if MS tried this tactic and built in, say, AltaVista into the next release of IE. Popularity would skyrocket overnight ...
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
but did Google make Apple's OS?
Did Google FORCE Apple to put that widget on there?
Did Google FORCE computer manufactorers to NOT put OTHER search engine widgets on the computers?
No. It's an Internet site that does what it is supposed to and does it well.
A "monopoly" is generally defined as something like having greater than 90% of the available market share. Google might have that, but it's hard to definitively measure, whereas what OS someone uses is much easier.
Also, forcing someone to use a product is not being monopolistic. Just having a monopoly on a market in and of itself is not illegal, but it requires the monopoly to play by a different set of rules. It's when the monopoly starts to force their product upon others (in other words - preventing a legitimate competitor a fair opportunity to join the market) - that's when you've crossed the line.
Google has not done that in any way. If Google were to start inking deals where NEtscape, IE, Mozilla, Konq, Opera, et al, were to make google.com the default home page in their browsers, that might become an issue. But that's just a hypothetical example.
well, in IE if you type something random into the URL bar it does a search on MSN already and I don't really think that MSN search is that popular.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
Just because it's a good product doesn't prevent it from being a monopoly.
Correct, monopoly is defined as somebody who can block normal competition by financial means or market position.
And although Google basically "owns" the market, I just can't see how Google could "block" somebody who would want to compete.
After all, it's the customers who choose every day to go to Google without any manipulation from Google (apart from a good service).
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Car manufacturers?
IBM-compatibles ?
There are loads of examples of companies making almost single products that doesn't patent their work. Patenting stops growth, the PC wouldn't have taken of unless other companies were allowed to start making IBM-compatibles (though it weren't completly IBMs will ;-)
Look at the compact disc, the only successfull cross-media medium for the last 20 years, why ?
It was a standard not a patent and sony shared it with who ever wanted to use it...
So? AOL search, which is now Google, used to be #1 simply because AOL has 34 million users.
Market share is market share, whether the user types in the search engine URL or it's the default.
For more information, click here.
Just because it's a monopoly doesn't prevent it from being good.
From the article: ...without alienating neophytes who type in "amazon.com" to find . . . Amazon.com. (Yes, people really do that. Google doesn't know why. )
I can tell you why. Because I have done it. (Well, maybe not to find amazon.com. But typing a URL in the Google search box.)
I wanted to find the google cache of an article that was slashdotted.
I had hoped that Google's interface would be clueful enough to include pages whose URL was an exact match for the search string - bringing up the index page with a link to the cache.
No dice.
The google front-page interface doesn't give an obvious way to get from a URL to the cache entry without knowing the content of the page you're trying to find. And cache links themselves include magic numbers, which implies that you can't just come up with a default conversion of a URL into a google cache link.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The privacy implications of these features are laid out very clearly in the configuration page, in plain English, right next to the button that allows you to disable them. I don't know of any spyware that will give you any information on what you have unwittingly allowed them to monitor outside a near-incomprehensible EULA, and I don't know of any spyware that will allow you to turn off its monitoring "features" easily.
The only thing I can really fault Google for is its treatment of the Scientology search-blocking issue, but it seemed to me they were only trying to follow the law and not get burned themselves; the issue was more the DMCA's fault (to keep your rights as a common carrier, you must remove materials which are alleged to be copyrighted immediately upon notice).
Regarding the GUID, Google keeps track of users' clickthroughs and uses that as a Pagerank modifier. The GUID prevents someone from simply querying Google and clicking through to their own page lots of times - basically stuffing the ballot box. Slashdot does something similar for its poll-voting code; it tracks the IP (which is as close as you can get to an Internet-wide GUID) and I don't see you complaining about that. Google isn't perfect, but they don't act like Microsoft either.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.