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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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A google search of two terms that only results in one hit. Unfortunately observing and documenting a googlewhack on the web usually results in it losing it's googlewhack status.
Google just seems to "get it".
They took a simple idea and kept it simple, yet making it extremely powerful.
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.
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
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
You mean... You mean... a Google just for pr0n???
Oh, you mean that googlewhack!
Erm... Hem... Uh, never mind. Carry on.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
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...
I use google, but I find using niche search engines to be much more useful. Google is great for getting a bajillion returns, and the first 2 or 3 pages worth are mostly relevant, but for specifics I use some of the niche search engines. A good one is diysearch and sites like Outersound for finding indy music and other resources.
Yeah, it takes a bit more work to find these niche search engines/resources, but they are out there, and the noise is much much lower.
Just my $.02
sad robot making broken music
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
I hope this is an idea which catches on. Think what mankind could achieve if engineers were free to be creative, unhindered by the mindnumbing shackles of management and beaurocracy.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
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 have watched users do this, and it is pretty obvious why. To the neophyte, there are just these boxes where you type in stuff. It is not clear that one is part of the browser and one is being generated by a web page. Advertisers take advantage of this same misunderstanding when they have ads that look like dialog boxes. Which reminds me, I don't know how to tell you this, but, your computer is not optimized for downloading!
> Funny that the article didn't mention the fact that Google's lawyers recently
> asked [linguistlist.org] Paul McFedries to remove the word 'google' from his
> excellent wordspy [wordspy.com] lexicon. A company that 'gets it' indeed.
Erm, thats odd, because that never happened. Did you just make that up on the spot or did it take you a while to prepare?
Google asked them to change their definition of 'google' from "To search for something" to "To search for something using the google search engine"
But they never once _DEMANDED_ that they remove the word google.
The wordspy.com listing was clearly incorrect.
Google simply corrected them.
So no its not too funny that the article didnt mention lies and FUD. Its a refreshing change actually.
What I _do_ find funny is you even link right to the article that proves me right and your own statements wrong! Did you even read it?
Direct quote from the article you linked:
> we want to make sure that when people use "Google," they are referring
> to the services our company provides and not to Internet searching
> in general.
The email then ends with:
> We ask that you help us to protect our brand by deleting the definition of
> "google" found at wordspy.com or revising it to take into account the
> trademark status of Google.
Hell, even keeping the clearly wrong and incorrect definition would be OK with google if they simply added a (TM) mark after the word Google from how their email reads!
Can I be a slashdot editor now?
Not a single misspelling in your post. Sorry.
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."
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.