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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."
When was the last time anyone visited another search engine? I can't remember when I did.
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And google information-about-users-surfing-database grows, and it grows... :)
Is that all? A dozen comments will give you the most excellent GoogleFight, no doubt. Googleshng deserves an honourable mention. Enjoy.
Click here or here.
It is interesting to note that Google has been the only major coroporation to be successful while employing an 'ethical' policy. Unlike other search engines their page ranking system is 110% fair as they do not accept 'payments' (read bribes)to increasing ranking scores, they have not adopted widespread advertising (although most people would be happier if they had never allowed advertising on the site at all), and they have released all their search algorithms to the scientific community which has been a boon to people reaearching in Mathmatics/Computer Science.
Finally they used Linux when most of the other web businesses were running Windows. Their example has shown that a business running linux can suceed, even though it can be more difficult than running windows.
Replying to my own post, I know, I know...
But anyway, as an example of a googlewhack:
placating counterbombardment is currently a googlewhack. As soon as this page gets indexed by google, it will cease to be so.
Interesting that no one has purchased Fuck Google yet. It has been for sale for a while.
Click here or here.
Any simple search engine that has become basically a cultural icon has to be special. You don't search for anything any more, you google for it.
Google was a good search engine in the beginning. It gained popularity, which made it a better search engine, which let it gain more popularity, which made it an even better search engine, ad infinitum.
It's not an exaggeration to claim that, right now, Google has earned itself the enviable position of becoming the first (at least nearly) definitive search engine.
-- shayborg
I was just wondering how many people use Google as their home page. It seems to be the sight I use the most when I am trying to finish real work. ( I spend more time on Slashdot, but that dosent make it useful... its like taking the newspaper, or LJ to the bathroom...) Does anyone know of a listing or poll of homepage settings. Would slashdot like to run one...
Very pointless, but yet somewhat entertaining. Someone set up a site where you can quickly perform a googleshare calculation on terms. Here are some of the results that I found kind of intersting.
'microsoft' has a 24.44% googleshare of 'anti-trust'
'linux' has a 62.64% googleshare of 'open source'
I'm beginning to wonder what percentage of new Slashdot stories deal with google. Google seems to be a topic just as active as Microsoft. Maybe it is time for a Google section?
Maybe you should educate the morons of tomorrow so they'll stop believing the leaders of tomorrow. - Dogbert
In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly called "As We May Think", detailing the first account of a hypothetical hyperlinking system. In it, he writes of a system that keeps track of where a user surfs (not the terminology he uses), and the user is able to make comments about connections about different pieces of media. The more a user traverses the same path of connections between two documents, the heavier the link becomes, so to speak. I just reread this article a couple of weeks ago and was shocked at the parallels with Google; particularly how they use established links to figure out the ranking of a page, and then thinking about how they bought Blogger (presumably, so people could make comments about connections on the web). Perhaps Google's success comes because they have created a system that so successfully mimics the way that we think collectively.
Yeh, Googles great an' all, but that doesn't mean it can't be better.
All the main keywords come up with heavily text focussed sites because text is what Google can index properly. They need to be better at rating image sites and annimation sites.
Then there's the 'multi-domain' spamming - sites set up across multiple domains pretending to be different but all being basically the same, simply for the link bonus.
If Google detects that several domains are really the same site, then it should treat all links between the sites as internal links in a single site, and all the sites corresponding pages should get the same PR value, since they *are* the same page, just on different domains.
At the moment it seems to assign the PR to one of the sites and drop the PR on the others. I can understand that they don't want a big cluster of sites dominating the index, but shouldn't it simply treat the sites as one great big site and return only 2 entries from the whole group?
Also how about using geography & time to detect when weighting the value of a link?
Suppose 2 DNS entries are registered at roughly the same time by the same person in the same address those sites are more likely to be the same site so links between them should have a lower rating.
Now suppose 2 sites are registered by different people, but in the same town. Links between those two sites should be downgraded slightly, since there is a slight probability of collusion.
Same with domains that cross link at and were created at the same time but in different locations by different people. Much more likely that those people would be looking to link exchange and so the links would be less about content and more about exchange.
So the maximum weight would be given to a link that came later on as a site became more popular, from a site that was registered at a different time from a different person in a different location. In this case the chance of collusion would be very low so the link could be trusted more - its much more likely to be done for content reasons.
I LOVE Google! I thought it was the best search engine out there from the day I first saw it in beta. It is fast, clean, and the results returned are usually right on the mark. They used comodity computing hardware and Linux (I think, or BSD) to get the most computing power for their dollar. What worries me, because I have recently come face to face with the status quo, is that Goodle, and FAST/AllTheWeb/Inktomi (possibly including LookSmart) virtually OWN the entire web seach business. There are two or three corporations now that run the backend seach engines for the top 20 web search sites. That alone would not necessarily be a problem. But have you tried to get your site listed in a seach engine lately? Google and AllTheWeb now tell you to expect 4-8 weeks to be listed. On most you can pay money for an "expedited listing." Back in my day, the search engines WANTED URL submissions and they would crawl your site quickly because there was a lot of competition to build the biggest indexes on the web. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Google, and other search engines are incredibly important to the web. When search engines started out, they didn't accept pay for placement or expedited listing for a fee. Serving such a central role on the web, this trend is not the direction I'd like to see search engines taking.
"Hey Albert, Good luck exploring the infinite abyss."
Thanks to CEO Terry Semel, Yahoo is actually making money again. So in what way did they over-reach?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Stock market hype types keep talking about Google "going public". They're more likely to go private; the founders may buy out the venture capitalists.
Apparently Google is now selling the ability to have their text ads pop up on other web sites. Now you can buy advertising through them on other places.
Now their purchase of that blogging stuff makes a bit more sense, huh?
Y'all can mod this as a troll all you want, but that's totally not my intention.
These are the facts (who knows why):
(1) Google usually takes you to the information you want.
(2) Few months back, last time google got lots of big press, for about two months my searches stopped taking me where I wanted to go and started to take me to more dubious places. Around this time there was a whole lot of press about google monkeying with the Page Rank system, how they wouldn't discuss it, etc. All I know is, during that time, the quality of my searches decreased dramatically.
(3) After a while, the quality of my searches went back up. Again, who knows why.
When I say "quality of my searches went down" I mean that instead of going to the DEFINIITIVE source of some information I searched for (unless I was extremely specific, like you used to have to be pre-google), I was much more likely to be taken to some large-scale commercial and less-definitive source of information. It might not have been google doing it specifically, but whatever, I came damn close to saying google has "jumped the shark."
While in English we just have "japanese" I have counted 4 conjugation forms for this adjective in Russian. These forms differ by suffixes, so, google isn't the easiest choice for such searches.