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NYT On Google's Role In Internet Advertising
prostoalex writes "John Markoff and G. Pascal Zachary from The New York Times take a look at Google, its already dominant position in the field of Web search and its increasing influence in the field of Internet advertising. Google is driving advertisers away from larger advertising venues, like AOL-TW et al., since (surprise!) people actually pay attention to relevant text links and are quite annoyed by pop-ups and similar "innovations". Some interesting data about Google: number of employees is about 800, number of buildings is 4, number of servers is 54K, for which there are about 100K microprocessors and 261K hard drives. This is claimed to be the largest computing system in the world, and that also raises barriers for anyone entering the field of Web search - most of companies out there can only imagine a Beowulf cluster of these, let alone build them so that the Web searches are delivered within a second."
The REAL link to the article is this:
... and that is for Google to make a wrong move so that everyone goes "monopolist paranoia". This should be fun if it happens, think about arguments like: "these search results look rather suspicious to me".
I think that Alltheweb is a viable competitor to Google. They removed banners (only textual ad links left), and they have lots of nice touches like filtering search results in several languages (I know four, and Google allows me to see either everything or only one language), boss button for those pr0n searches, similiar searches, automatic quote adding (duke nukem 3d levels turn into "duke nukem 3" levels), etc. The only thing that Google does better is the image search and cache.
Netscape antagonized Microsoft," Mr. Brin said. "We are not putting ourselves in the bull's-eye as Netscape did. Google learns from others mistakes don't they?
Feel free to use it.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
> number of employees is about 800, number of buildings is 4, number of servers is 54K, for which there are about 100K microprocessors and 261K hard drives
> most of companies out there can only imagine a Beowulf cluster of these, let alone build
I really don't find this too big a company. Sure, it was formed on the good financing of the dot-com boom, but 54K servers, 100K... 261K... must be about $1m of capital here. And you're suggesting AOL-TW or M$ can't raise £1m of capital? Web search is the holy grail of these so-called portholes, they can easily find a way... A start-up can't, though maybe they could team up with a big-boy.
It's their other assets - the human capital. Google has a lot of very intelligent staff, and a great name association with the public. These are much harder to get, though again a big boy could crack it if they got their act together, IMHO.
Google are big, but in terms of global resources for global internet companies, they are still a small man punching high.
those servers running Windows 2000.
Well, maybe not.
..that the only ads that would work are the ones relevant to what I'm browsing or looking for? It took this long for advertisers to realise that? Sheesh!
people really do click those ads! I've always tuned them out, so I wondered if they could really make money with them. Apparently they've been quite profitable. I hope they keep things the way they are.
Well, I don't know about you, but I'm not all that fond of them filtering results based on where people are searching from.
And they take all manner of porn ads but the only alcohol related ads are for hangover cures - so exploiting messed up men and women is ok, but exploiting your own liver is not?
Oh.
Opps, $10m is more like it, sorry typo, dunno how is did it twice... :\
But yes, $10m is not a lot for big corps.
Or even $50m... point still holds.
I think it's time to lie down.
Finding money for making a search engine isn't a big problem for big corporations. The problem is the idiocy of upper management that will turn a potentially good search engine into a branded portalized piece of crap. Look at what Yahoo turned into.
and lots of those 54K servers were the cheap, 4-systems-on a-fiberboard-shelf systems. They told us they had a 25% failure rate with those. They were Pentium and Celeron based. And they dump A LOT of heat into our cage.
Then Google moved to a newer, more elegant system from These guys. Better heat dissipation as well (heat pumped up and out, instead of in all directions). And don't get me started on the wiring mess that was once Google - spaghetti everywhere, and HP switches strapped to the cabinets.
Not only are Google ads the only ones I ever click on, when the search I'm doing is for a product I intend to buy, I happily welcome the ads and in fact sometimes do a search just to see the ads.
This confirms what intelligent people have been saying for years. The problem with Internet advertising is that ads are not relevant, not selling products that anyone wants, and not even clear what message they are trying to convey. Google ads have none of these problems.
I think thats already happened hasn't it, don't you remember the Google news debacle about them putting up "press releases" manually in favour of real news. You can read about that here
In Searching the Web, Google Finds Riches
By JOHN MARKOFF and G. PASCAL ZACHARY
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.
IN the last few years, Google has risen as a force on the Internet by offering its smarter, faster searches as a free public service. Now the band of technoinsurgents who run the company are striking a blow against the business strategies of giant Web portals like America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN by rewriting the rules of Internet advertising.
Emerging as a powerful new marketing medium, Google has found a route to profitability that stands apart in a Silicon Valley that is still crippled by the dot-com crash.
Its rivals are responding by trying to out-Google Google for leadership in a technology -- searching for information -- that they once dismissed as an easily bought commodity. But Yahoo, Microsoft and others are discovering that it will not be easy to unseat Google, which has mastered an enormous private computer network that stores a snapshot of much of the Web and allows searchers to find digital needles in haystacks of data.
Advertisement
Google, a private company, does not disclose revenue or profit. But it says it has been profitable for nine consecutive quarters. Moreover, its executives have privately told the board that revenue will soar from less than $300 million in 2002 to $750 million or more this year, with gross profit margins of 30 percent, according to a Google executive and several people who have knowledge of the company's financial situation.
That cash is flowing from the likes of Ge'Lena Vavra, an importer of Italian suits in Las Vegas who is among more than 100,000 advertisers to flock to Google in the last year. Last May, she decided to pay from 21 cents to $1.50 each time her ad for discount Italian suits was clicked after a search for words like "Armani" or "Hugo Boss."
One form of Google advertising allows companies to buy two lines of text that appear above the results of each search. A newer ad program, the one used by Ms. Vavra, displays boxed text ads on the right side of a search result. Depending on popularity, advertisers pay anywhere from pennies to dollars when a searcher clicks on the ad.
Both advertising programs rely on Google's software to make the ads relevant to Web surfers' search requests. They are limited to text; graphics are not allowed, a limitation that Google says is crucial to its popularity with users, who are irritated by pop-up and video ads.
Before Ms. Vavra advertised with Google, she was selling about 10 suits a month over eBay. Then she bought 50 Google keyword ads using her Visa card. The next morning, she said, sales took off. The business has continued to grow; she now sells almost 120 suits a month. She expects to spend $60,000 this year on Google search ads.
"Our business exploded from Google, and Google alone," she said.
Google has created a buzz in Silicon Valley that has not been heard since Netscape Communications, the original leader among Web browsers, took the stock market by storm in 1995 with its initial public offering. Despite hopes among investment bankers, Google says it has no plans to sell stock to the public this year. Still, its emergence as a star (giving rise to the pop culture term "googling") validates the notion that, even during a grim technology downturn, Silicon Valley retains some of its unique allure.
In an effort to capitalize on that allure, Yahoo -- which has long relied on Google's search technology -- last Monday introduced a search tool that closely imitates Google's idea. In the future, Yahoo intends to draw heavily on technology obtained in a recent acquisition of a unit of Inktomi, once a leading Google rival.
Yahoo denies that its new initiative is a declaration of war on Google. Eric E. Schmidt, 47, Google's chief executive, also says the two companies are still allies. But relations are strained.
Google's newfound power as arbiter of much of the world's digital information, meanwhile, is posi
You have to respect a company that hires knowledgeable, intelligent, dedicated individuals, which provides a solid useful product while resisting the urge to expand at non-self-sustaining rate. They also have a very firm grasp on that strange pragmatic reality will live in and just for that it will be difficult to compete with them.
That being said, I always find it somewhat odd that a large number of individuals worry about Google's somewhat pivotal role in searching and cataloguing the Internet. Almost every article has some comment pertaining to how the company seemingly holds too much power. But, Google has no shareholders to please, no largely fragmented ownership nor fragmented ideals, no corporate megalomania, or even long history to shape their goals.
If there is anything to worry about, it is that Google's situation will change thus causing there to be a reason for concern. I see worrying about Google as it stands now as a waste of time.
Until these this article and Cringely's, i had no idea Google's sheer size and computing power. i'd like to find a reference for Cringely's article, though, but it is certainly believable.
A troubling fact about Google is that Google can exerce de facto censorship by quietly removing sites from its index. Since Google is what many people use to look for information on the WWW (I myself don't use so-called portals, and I know many people who use Google as their startup page), this may effectively prevent them from finding those sites.
Think that I'm paranoid? I'm not implying that Google would do that out of bad will, or that they have a political or economic agenda. Yet, Google is a US corporation, and US laws (on copyright, against so-called software piracy, etc...) can be used against it by corporations with larger pockets and larger legal teams. For instance, the Church of Scientology has had Google remove links to sites discussing the Church's teachings.
This is all the more vicious since the user is not warned that certain sites are censored. We can therefore rightly fear that fear of litigation may force Google to take more and more controversial sites off.
Why do companies 'need' to be big anyway? The main point of a company is to turn a profit and to avoid dying.
IMO technology development companies/teams are far better off with a smaller group of highly talented and intelligent (and flexible!) people, than a large team of mediocre talents. That is, I think that a "smaller, smarter, nimbler" development team is actually a critical asset in IT. I think growth just for the sake of growth can be the downfall of a decent IT company. People are too focussed (sp?) on size as a measure of a company.
""We are learning that old-fashioned interruption marketing just isn't working," said Hans Peter Brondmo, a technologist who is an executive at Digital Impact, a direct-marketing firm in Silicon Valley."
Classic example of an Ape escaping from a zoo and buying a suit. He didn't even said they HAVE learned, they are still in the process of learning!
I wonder if this guy ever had a kitten named "Ball".
It AMAZES and depresses me how bad most companies are at marketing, especially technically knowledgeable companies. So, it's wonderful to see Google being run so well.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these
Mod Parent UP!!!
What??? There are still pop-ups on the web? I had no idea!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Does anyone one else think Slashdot should have a Google topic icon?
Or maybe just an NYT icon....
But seriously, so many have been added lately, what's one more going to hurt, especially since it's a company/search-engine discussed here so often?
I don't know, where is it?
People are too focussed (sp?) on size as a measure of a company.
And that surprises you? How many contests, business or otherwise, boil down to size? How many are just complex ways for little boys to whip out their willies and measure them against one another?
Hell, dick-measuring seems to be genetically encoded for most men, especially when the actual equipment is substandard. Just take a gander here at Slashdot to see techno-geeks engaged in the same stupid games as men in other walks of life. They may *seem* to be arguing about some completely unrelated topic, but in actuality all they're trying to do is prove that yes, indeed, they have a monstrous penis.
Must be inspired by all the jumbo dicks they see in their porn downloads....
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
And probably not too long after they cave into marketing/investing $$$$$. They've already grabbed the right side and top portion of the screen for ads (that I'd like to scrape off). Fortunately they're smart enough to know most people hate graphic/pop-up ads.
As soon as they throw graphics in, or if I can't get them to be easily ignored by Mozilla, I'm switching to another search engine. So far they managed to only partially piss-me-off, with the non-intrusive ads on the right/top. They go the human factors down, but run the risk of loosing alot of followers if they piss-em-off enough by grabbing more of my screen or embedding graphics.
Very true :) There seem to be no limits in life as to what men will turn into a silly 'dick-size' contest. Men turn practically anything and everything into a contest, no matter how pointless and trivial something is (or for that matter, no matter how lofty and meaningful something is). I think its one of humankinds more useful traits, competition 'gets the blood going' (figuratively I mean) and spurs us on to be better and to make better things.
Don't let me be the only one here who has not only used an advertising link from google, but has actually bought something from one.
I find that thse links off to the side actually aren't annoying. They are off to the side. They dont interfear with my search when I'm not looking to spend some money, but when I do search for something to buy they usully come in handy. At the very least, it indicates that the store has some income with which to advertise and is not being run by monkeys. Just my $.02
My UID is prime and so is this number: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
It is not a beowulf cluster, it is a distributed set of systems. In a beowulf cluster the memory is shared between hosts over "fast" networks connected to all of the peers. 54k is an awful lot of servers. How many SGI Origin 4000's running 512 CPUs per cabinet with it's high bandwidth I/O subsystems (disks and networking!) would it take to do the job of Google's cluster? Would there be benefits to managing 20 1048 CPU single-OS systems versus 54,000 linux machines? Other than the obvious fact that Linux tends to get you lots of press where as conventional well engineered unix systems don't? Archive.org also uses a similar distributed model, adding servers as their archive grows.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
Wasn't there some controversy about Markoff vs. Mitnick?
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
i for one don't see either yahoo or msn being real competitors with google for the simple reason that they take them selves too seriously. Really. Imagine anyone that could be considered a founder at msn being photographed for the nyt on a segway (that is what he's on isn't it?) with a red and yellow background.
The culture there insures that people like their job, which means that the talent will stay. You will have a hard time competing with that.
Now if anyone from msn or yahoo can give proof that your corporate culture can compete, please do, but I don't imagine that will actually happen.
BTW, if you want another reason, think about this: almost every linux browser defaults to a google search. Kazaalite now gives an option to search google directly, and there are a lot of similar examples I could give. There are links to google almost everywhere, and they have a very liberal linking policy. That helps too.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
The censorship is wrong, but alcohol is much worse that porn. Alcohol causes real physical damage, addiction and death. Google is being entirely ethical here.
54K Servers and 800 employees that is is around 68 servers for employee. But you figure not all 800 people are System Administrators other people Sales, Management, Development and R&D, So lets figure there are 700 Sysadmins. That is basicly 77 Servers per sysadmin. Which seems to be about right. Lets see windows admins get those ratios. My experence one Windows admin can do 25 servers. So next time those people take this into account they should use google as a more prefered system configuration settings.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Following the link to New York Times online, opens a pop up. Maybe they should read there own articles and learn something...
>> Had I been going to bed earlier every night? Have I been sleeping later? Has Tyler been in charge longer and l
For all the power it may hold, Google still strikes me as a 'mom&pop' organisation (albeit a rather large one) instead of a powerhungry monopolist (or in this case, oligarchist).
As the article states, they're popular by virtue of being good at what they do: no hassles, good results. And they add extra services which make sence: images, news, all building on their strenghts as data miners.
I just hope they never go public; that would entail some kind of 'responsibility to the stockholder' (unless they somehow get to dictate their own charter)...other words for 'we have to make profit even at the cost of making a shitty service which you have to pay for'.
But asd it stands they're a shiuning example of business done right.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
And don't piss off your customers, either.
Yahoo is another bunch of knot heads. They upgraded their chat software, and locked out the old version. I've spent the last few weeks installing "new-yahoo" for little old ladies.
The reason they couldn't do it for themselves is the huge number of popups generated when clicking the link to download the new version. Most of the popups were buried anyway. To all the advertisers who paid for that, suckas!
MSN is the same.
...and you know what happened? I passed out and woke up in hospital.
So, if my competitor is running Google ads, why don't I write a script to click on those ads on a regular basis? That might cost 'em a pretty penny. Is the billing smart enough to recognize repeated clicks from the same IP?
If so, it might be another business opportunity for the spam-meisters: paid Google ad-clicking from multiple unique IPs, to run up huge advertising bills against a specific company.
I actually had the privilege of having someone from Google come to my college campus and show us "around" the Google facilities and it is actually quite amazing. He also talked about their purpose; to be the best search engine out there without the fluff. And that is exactly what they are doing.
--If only there was a license required to use a computer.
i havent rtfa'd yet, but just seeing markoff's name pisses me off. He's the bonehead reporter who hyped
up the Mitnick case to OJ Simpson levels.
http://www.freekevin.com/news-012300.html
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
The second pro-Google argument is that doesn't reorder results in a naughty way. Yet countless articles provide evidence of results changing from moment to moment, pages appearing and disappearing. In some cases, censorship of sites has occurred.
Encompassing the above argument is that Google doesn't put sponsors higher. Since almost all the big companies employ "search engine optimization", the only difference here is the technique a company must use to get listed higher. The small but relevant web sites who don't spend time "marketing" with good keywords / spamming with duplicate sites still find themselves lower down.
The most irritating pro-Google argument is that it is innovative. No it isn't. It merely uses techniques that were being developed in the early 90s but omits all the later intrusions. Google is not a technology company, but it has excellent marketing staff who realise that "intrusive marketing" doesn't work. That's all.
Try searching for open source and have to go through 10 pages of proprietory software to get to any relevant site.
Err -- the first three results are the OSI, GNU and SF.
Any centralized search engine will be subject to such problems as censorship. They'll have to give in to litigation threats, threats by police, and even threats from organized crime. Things may become censored without their knowledge. A government agent (or mobster or script kiddie) may break into their network and delete entries.
This is why projects like Freenet are important. Maybe such projects won't solve all the problems, but I think they will make censorship more difficult. The problem is oppressive governments (or corporations, cults, etc) go after developers (sometimes users too), and try to shut down the project / stop distribution. However, it is likely those who have free governments (are there any?) will still be able to use and develop the project without problems. (but watch out for trojan horses.)
I would like to use and work on Freenet, but not only does my ISP have a restrictive policy using virutally any two way communication program--they call almost anything a server and ban them--but also my government has a very restrictive policy on "exporting" sekret coding systems--even putting the program on a web page could get me arrested, and they see Freenet as only a tool for evil childpron and criminals.
To block the google ads, add this to your usercontent.css in mozilla:
TABLE TR TD.ch {display:none ! important}
P.e TABLE TR TD SPAN.f { display: none ! important }
P.e TABLE TR TD TABLE { display: none ! important }
P.e TABLE TR TD FONT A.fl { display: none ! important }
The porn industry is selling information - you know, a string of ones and zeroes? The alcohol industry is selling death. While I agree that the pervasiveness of pornography on the internet is abhorrent, I find the very real physical damage done on a daily basis by alcohol is much worse. It has been argued that porn turns people into perverts. I'd suggest that more sexual crimes have been facilitated by alcohol (with its inhibition-lowering effects) than have ever been encouraged by pornography.
Another intresting factlet is that google has 8 datacenters as shown as Google Dance
rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
... are not quite as high one would think. Competing in the search engine business does not require having the largest network on the planet.
For that matter, you don't even need to have the largest index. Not all sites are created equal -- an index of even just 10% of the web would satisfy most people, as long as it is the right 10% and is searched effectively. There are some advantages to being complete (non in googlis est, ego non est) but for common place searches it isn't necessary. While indexing the entire web may be very expensive, indexing a small *useful* part of the web is much less so.
The largest barrier to entry is simply the problem of coming up with a better way to search. Google has a very effecting algorithm, and they've got lots of smart people.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Are used in their PigeonRank (TM) system?
id's always had a policy of staying small. As a result, they don't have very high costs (which means that they don't have a huge amount of presure to produce or go out of business). They're fairly flexible, and developrs have a large amount of say within the company (which is why we get Linux releases).
May we never see th
And when you go to the article
AN orbitz POP-UP ad...
I sincerely hope you go down in flames for the way you treated Kevin Mitnick.
You probably cost him 3 to 6 additional months of his life in a federal prison.
I hope you suffer the most humiliating informatic accident of history, which should ideally terminate your career and cause the whole world to instantly erase every memory it has about you and everything you wrote, while you're still alive and forgotten.
Shame on you.
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
Beowulf is a very specific clustering implementation, which is suitable for some things and not for others. The word doesn't mean just "cluster", as the story poster seems to use it as.
May we never see th
No one's stopping you from making your own search engine. The only particular influence Google has is that they're very, very good.
I'd be more concerned about security issues -- think how much information about current issues and plans in your company leaks to Google in the form of keywords.
May we never see th
Unlike most sites, where I am assaulted with an offensive animated GIF banner ad (I don't see pop-ups anymore... thanks to Mozilla), Google has very intelligently targetted ads. I was doing a search on LED flashlights just to learn more and ended up buying one from one of Google's advertisers. The advertiser was someone that I had never heard of before, and wouldn't have come up high in the search results on its own, but they had a nice non-offensive placement right where I needed to see it (and I did see & click it). The combination of less offensive ads and better targetting is actually of great value to me and I am more likely to click those ads.
/. go to a similar system? I was blocking /. ads until they put the images on the same server as the regular web art and now I just ignore them. Please go to something less intrusive like Google so I can help pay the bills.
When will
http://www.google-watch.org/bigbro.html
This is not that much of an inside look at Google as it is a guess, they don't know what hardware Google is running on, they are guessing and spreading rumours.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
The REAL link to the article is this:
No, the real link was in the story (which works just fine thank you) - what you are using as a backdoor that the NewYork Times doesn't want people to use. If enough twits like you keep posting that like they will remove it.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
...should be Yahoogle!
And then I did a Google search for the name and found it had already been taken... doh!
A physicist is an atom's way of thinking about atoms
54k servers? 100k microprocessors?
And I thought I had a fan noise problem.
Google is not a corporation. Google is a privately held company. Notice that there's no "Inc." after Google's name. This means that "Google" has not been incorporated into a legal entity, and as such, the owner(s) could be liable for the actions of the company. This is a tradeoff: do you incorporate, and have a ton of silly shareholders dictating your course, or do you not, and leave yourself liable? I for one am glad they haven't. However, this does mean that they might "fold", as you say, a bit easier than a corporation.
That being said, Google does not censor anything! Removing a listing from their directory is akin to the phone company removing your listing from the phone book (like people with unlisted numbers, for example). Just because one directory doesn't point to you doesn't mean that people can't get to you; it does diddly squat in allowing/denying access. Just because Google decides to lower or remove entry X in their directory doesn't have anything to do with the accessability of X. And, if you'd gone and checked, a search for Scientology on Google yeilds Xenu.net, one of the main anti-Scientology sites, as number two. Clearely, as you might remember, Google initially removed the results, but has since re-instated them after considering their options.
Give Google a break. They're doing the best they can in a world full of corporations with lots of lawyers sitting around just waiting to sue someone.
...except for Google News and that Google Groups, invaluable for technical troubleshooting.
More than mere navel gazing.
In case Google gets /.'ed, here's a mirror.
fsck -u
.. I can now say "Imagine a BEOWULF cluster of these" without any fear of redundancy? :-D
All the stuff you mention is legally mandated by some country or another. Porn ads online in the US are not generally regulated. Alcohol ads anywhere are closely regulated. Note that you won't see a porn ad unless you are searching on porn-related terms.
In some venues, search results are regulated. If Google pulls something from the German site, (for example) it's often because they got a nastygram from a German court. Note that it's still available to searchers in other countries.
So unless the proposal is that Google should go lawless and take on all the world's governments at once, their behavior is pretty understandable. Hey, I don't like driving below 65 either, but I do it! (At least when the cops are watching.)
That crazy reporter's assertion that they're doing it manually is just him muckracking; I'm pretty sure that Google does not have a team of people checking all 4500 news sources 24/7 and redoing the news page every 10 minutes. (How many people would that take? How much would that cost? Vs. doing it automatically which Google is demonstrably good at.)
Also, I don't see what the problem is with the press releases. Among the 4500 news sources are CNN, NYT, Arab News, Al Jazeera, RIAA, EFF, etc. etc. Diversity of opinions. It's not like they marked some press release from the RIAA as gospel; they marked it as a press release from the RIAA. I've seen them do the same with the EFF. Hard to see how calling a spade a spade can be so awful even if you hate spades.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
I had the opportunity to visit Google during a class trip to the Valley last month. We had the opportunity to meet with some interesting and highly intelligent people. I liked a lot of things about the company and the culture.
None-the-less, I don't think that Google is a place that I would want to work long term. I certainly would never put my own money into it.
Google does not have a sustainable long term revenue model. I agree with the Google CEO. The company has a lot of infrastructure built up arround search. It will be difficult for competitors to duplicate this capacity. What Google has faile to consider is whether structured languages such as XML will be able to lower the barrier to entry for search applications. XML is deliberately designed to simplify search by adding structure.
I had the opportunity to ask some of the executives regarding whether they viewed XML as a strategic threat. I received a partial answer that even with structured markup languages thee would still be plenty of unstructured information that would require classification. What this fails to consider is that Google's revenue is almost completely derived from advertizing. These are the market segments that will be the first to adopt XML, with potentially devastating effects on the company's revenue stream.
The company is welcome to sort all the unstructured information it wants, but without a revenue stream
Certainly not! Google's ads are the one example I can think of, of a useful and relevant service (the rest are in-your-face crap, of which 99+% are filtered by Junkbuster). I don't filter -anything- on Google, since all of the stuff on the page is worthwhile.
Latest example: I'd never heard of headphone.com had it not been for Google. They got -revenue- from that ad. Two days ago.
But I am an advertiser at google. People here seems to be complaining about the ads at the side.. etc.etc.
Looking at advertising at the top pay-per-clicks (Overture, Google, Findwhat), Google is the only one that has Instant Gratification. We created an e-commerce site and were able to start driving qualified traffic to it in about 15 minutes. With Overture or Findwhat, we would have had to wait for several days to a week, and to top it off, they might have rejected many of our listings through their brain dead editorial process.
Google at least is fair in the way how they reject listings... they have editorial guidelines, so you know upfront, and secondly... if your listings suck for relevance they get automatically booted.
I think the NYT writer fails to take into account the instant gratification factor, which IMHO is the greatest advantage to using Google. Because you can test your business model right away. If it sucks, then you can take your business model offline before it gets too late.
Finally, because of Googles contextual ads (some of which are shown on Slashdot), they have really co-opted advertising on the web. Because of this, Overture's stock is in the barrel and I think they will become a no-player in the near future, simply because of pending moves by Yahoo and MSN, their largest search suppliers. Even though they've bought Altavista and Alltheweb, when was the last time you saw traffic coming in from those searsh engines into your Apache server logs?
My only fear with this, is that Google can become too powerful (see Microsoft), and can then call the shots with advertising on the web in general. We saw that behavior with Overture, just before Google launched their program.
Don't laugh, we revel in Google's friendliness, relevance, and geek cred right now, but I hope they don't go public too soon. I hope that Page, Brin, and Schmidt hold on to the reins tightly for the time being... because once Wall Street steps in, the ride for the consumer is over guys!!
Newsfollow.com
That may be true but it also means putting all your eggs into one basket. What happens to the company if this small group ceases to exists, because of an accident or them being pissed off by the working conditions and deciding to quit all together?
And they are dirty about it too. They use popups in img tags which exploits a somewhat-old bug in gecko to get around its pop-up blocking. Here's the bug:
2 24
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=126
Get Firefox!
It shouldn't surprise anyone that google's ads are so successful. After all, aside from the benefits in the article, the bottom line is that it just makes sense for the user/consumer... After all, when I'm SEARCHING for information is when I would be interested in hearing someone's pitch. When I'm looking for the weather, I don't want to see big blinking flash banners promoting the latest model of cell phone. But maybe that's just me...
----
Not to be confused with Col.
In every last article on Google they always talk about when they might go public.
For the life of me, I can never figure out why this is a good idea for Google, or for users. A stock issue gives up ownership of the company for a capital infusion. If Google has enough cash to operate and invest (and it sure seems like they do from the article) what is the point?
Once they go public, Bill Gates can gobble up their stock and take them over, or any other big investor. Then, under profit pressure from non-geeks, they can dictate the new direction that Google may take.
Remember that all the accounting scandals that destroyed all those companies such as Enron, Worldcom, Global Crossing and the rest? All of them were primarily concerned with destroying the company to keep the stock price up to satisfy both the outside investors and the stock options spread for the executives.
Google going public could be a disaster. They seem to have enough capital to run the company as they want right now. I'm missing the upside to this. Anyone care to speculate?
Never confuse feeling with thinking.
The linked article states they filter results based on location for LEGAL reasons. What do you want them to do? Lose the ability to do business in other countries?
The mere fact that they COULD adjust results for some other reason, based on location, just speaks for the sophistication of their system.
Alcohol ruins a lot more lives than pornography does.
1. Build straw-man
2. Tear down straw-man
3. Watch the controversy unfold
4. Profit
Seriously, if MSN and Yahoo are really competing with google, they're doomed. Compare the results of Yahoo with google's searches.... methinks Yahoo is using google's engine and data.... Yahoo is on track to become google's biggest customer!
Second, google's success was built on the tail end of the dot-com boom... Kudos to them for keeping the innovation and financial success flowing, but the article makes it sound like they just came up with the idea last month and moved into number 1 position in that time. Google's been around for years, and has been getting more and more popular since. For me, google became my primary search about 3 years ago.
Overall, it's a good, informative article. But, really, there are some misleading statements that just make the story sound so much more like a faery tale.
----
Not to be confused with Col.
261K hard drives? That sucks! My hard drive is 80G!
You do realize that XML isn't going to help anything when it comes to full-text searches, don't you? This was actually the great promise of SGML some decades ago, which actually (unlike XML) at least had the SGML user groups attempt to make some useful standards instead of BS "meta-markup." It didn't pan out very well (structured information retrieval in general has very limited applications compared to full-text searches).
Google already exploits structured data much better than XML can in the form of hyperlinks (XML's biggest failing - not providing some kind of standard for linking non-hierarchical documents). The reason they're not paying much attention to XML is exactly because they have "highly intelligent people" working there. Chances are pretty good that the whole XML bandwagon will fall apart (much like SGML) before any significant percentage of those documents that do benefit from structure (which is an insignificant amount compared to plain written text) are converted to XML. Then again, because XML is structured, it is not very difficult to add support for it on relatively short notice. You also have to consider that most data that benefits from structure is probably in the form of financial transactions and such, which are private and already have adequate search systems designed for them.
In the great CONS chain of life, you can either be the CAR or be in the CDR.
Here's the link
v en t.asp?rid=1680
http://www.researchchannel.org/program/displaye
For some reason my editor can't paste this link properly, omit the space in "displayevent".
This is a dramatic result of the purest censorship. The majority of the millions of people who connect to the internet are forbiden to serve by their stupid ISP. Even the IP4 space has room for 16 million. With IP6 there is no reason anyone whould ever be given a dynamic IP number again. The real censorship is one of deciding who can serve.
This primary censorship makes other kinds of censorship trivial. If you don't like someone's opinion, you can shut them down. A good example of this is Al Jazeera. This would be impossible to do if anyone and everyone could mirror content or simply have their own say with their own computers.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I joke from time to time that if a woman has a strange compulsion to wash her hands very often, she either hides it from others and/or consults professional help.
Whereas it's conceivable for a guy with the same problem to brag about how many times he washes a day (an hour even), argue about the best soap and hand treatment to use, maybe even form a club or special interest group of like-minded guys.
As for why do some companies need to be big? Coz the bosses want more money. Money is one of the popular ways to keep score.
As it was explained a few years ago by Inktomi's CTO, the basic idea is that you install machines in clusters of 100 or so. You check out the cluster, and then take it live.
Then you close the door on the room and never touch it again.
As machines fail, they are cut out of the cluster remotely. When some percentage of the machines have failed, say 20%, the entire cluster is replaced.
This eliminates maintenance-induced failure, which is about half of all failures. It also cuts way down on the number of people required. When all the machines are running the same program, this is a very effective way of operating.
Alcohol has a great deal of health benefits especially for the portly folks out there. People (especially thin ones) otherwise taking care of their heart are less likely to benefit.
Research Channel
Unfortunately slashdot is not the place to say anything that might be slightly perceived as google is not great. Google is doing a great job on relevance, but most other SEs out there are catching up, esp. since google is devoting most of its energies on the text ads market. Their index doesn't refresh as quickly as before, and more than once I got error messages from them during the last month.
I wouldn't say that Google is not innovative. I've never seen anything like the relationship google has with the press. And marketting and PR are much more important on this area than technology.
... highlighting the risks to google's business. It seems to me maybe they just want to try to frighten up a google IPO so they can get in on the $'s.
Yahoo denies that its new initiative is a declaration of war on Google. Eric E. Schmidt, 47, Google's chief executive, also says the two companies are still allies. But relations are strained.
Is he being diplomatic, or is just in denial. I wasn't that impressed with Eric's performance at the helm of Novel (IMHO the mere fact that he took the job showed incompetence). And why did Serge Brin choose Eric Schmidt as CEO? 'cuz it was the only candidate that had been to burning man'.
As Marc Andressen said, once you are big enough, you appear in the radar scopes of the big guys, and your true mettle is tested. So far the comments above from Eric Schmidt and Serge Brin give me little confidence....
Admining googles' server machines is waaay different than admining user machines. There are a lot of things that make this simpler:
- less variety of hardware. No Geforce 8 to download drivers for, no 1394.
- Lots of machines. Actually, they could have one person specialize on each exact type of machine they use (not like they'd be substatially different though)
- All machines run the same software. No registry hacking, just copy a master image onto the drive. No funky firewalls needed, no custom networking config.
- No data recovery. No accidently deleted files, no missing icons; even trashed drives can be put into the dumpster.
- No time penalties. Got 10 machines to fix? No "bob in marketing is sitting on his hands until you fix this", a broken machine could sit a month with no ill effects.
So, a rough estimate: Assume a MTBF of 6 months (kind of low, but this has to include scheduled upgrades), and a mean fix time of 1 hour (find the server, unrack, swap parts, reclone [done in parallel], bolt back together, reinstall, and test), a single admin could handle 1000 machines. And remember, they probably have all sorts of methods to optimize problem detection, isolation, and fix time. (or, like the cringely article, they may not really fix machines)
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Google is exploding that strategy by taking advantage of the basic strength of the Internet: the ability to go instantly from one place to any other at no cost beyond the basic connection.
Well, at no cost besides yer personal info, like your income +/-5K, age, gender, zip code, job title, and an offer to get spam from yesmail. Imagine if every new site you browsed to ask for this -- yikes!
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Google is a private company. Can't say I ever noticed they don't advertize booze. Can't say I ever noticed any of their adds.
Anarchists never rule
I've known of the following that has worked since Oct 2002:
:)
Login: loginssuck
Password: loginssuck
Its easier to remember.
This is rated "5" at the moment. Now think for moment:
Our CAGE is next to theirs? The remote "cage" where Google keeps 54,000 machines ??!! (As opposed to the 4 Google-owned buildings in the text of the original post?)
I don't know, but I suspect that the title of the high-rated post to which I am replying ought to be "AstroTurf Ad from the folks at Rackable.Com"
Hell, 50% of their searches are probably FOR porn, why would they filter it out? And as for alcoholic filters, they are a private company, they may do as they wish.
I could not agree more with the last paragraph. If Google had gone public too soon, the usual bozos and spin doctors would have taken over and ruined it.
It's nearly impossible to concentrate on longer term business strategy or try risky new innovations when stockholders and VCs scream constantly for obscene profits this quarter. Sometimes the extra capital is a Faustian bargain and private ownership is better.
With business development. 54,000 servers is necessary because of their ridiculous traffic. The search engine could start out with a much smaller size of servers (say...1,000) to handle the initial launch and scale if/as traffic and popularity grow.
Thus I think the writeup's assertion that the server farm size is a barrier to search engine starup isn't true. I think you'd need at most a couple million for 1,000 servers and a few years of management, not the implied 50,000,000 it would take to purchase and manage 50,000 servers from the get-go. And in the funding world, there is a huge difference between 2 mil and 50 mil, especially these days
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
Doubleclick poisoned the Internet advertising well.
The advertising industry has always been a bit of a black art. There is the action - an advertising campaign. Then there's the reaction - increased sales. And then there's a lot of theory how the two are associated.
This is where the "black art" comes in to play - advertising is not an exact science. There are campaigns that fail. There are campaigns that are remarkably successful - even becoming cultural icons. There are campaigns that become cultural icons but ultimately don't lead to increased sales... and thus are ironic failures. There is no guarantee any advertising agency or department can recreate any of these failures or successes at any given time.
Doubleclick promised a Holy Grail in advertising - quantifiable success. Internet advertising would be different. A Doubleclick ad could be immediately tracked. No more publishing a phone number and waiting for the phone calls over the next month. No tracking sales from distributers and guessing which advertising campaign was responsible for any increase in sales (assuming it was actually one of the current campaigns). You could tell an advertisement worked because it got clicks. And thus you could justify your budget spent on advertising with Doubleclick.
Everyone bought in to the idea. Money flowed. That is... until the click-throughs failed to live up to the expectations of the industry.
The problem is that advertising does not change with the medium used. One does not immediately rush to a phone to call 1-800-ABC-CARS when that hot, new flashy car shows up on TV. It doesn't matter how sparkling the soda looks, we don't run down to the vending machine or out to the store the second we see its image advertised. Nor do we immediately interrupt our busy day to browse a new business product even if we may be in the market for what it promises to offer. Conventional advertising knows this and a large part of its theory, and its black art, is based on strategies based on a more long-term behavior.
Internet advertising should have followed the same concepts and sold itself as part of an emerging, widely-accessed media. Not the deliverer of a Holy Grail.
NYTimes and other websites that require a free account have begun limiting the number of people that can be logged in to a single account at once.
Do me a favor and double it!
From the linked article:
Schmidt recently had to scramble to convince them that there was no immediate reason for Google to enter the space-tethering business, a popular techie idea for low-cost space launchings.
Certainly visionary, but people might claim it is part of a plot for Universal domination.
Google may be good, Google may be bad, but you don't do yourself an ounce of service by using Seth Finkelstein as your only reference for an argument claiming the latter.
Seth is a psychopath with no equal. He stalks, he harrasses, he badgers, he archives every word that was ever written about him (even these - you can guarantee he'll be monitoring this thread for a week after it and all it's reponses get moderated to -20 'We Hate Seth'.
Finkelstein got his EFF Pioneer Award by force. He badgered and harassed and begged and irritated them until they finally gave him what he wanted just to make him go away. He didn't earn that award, he did nothing to deserve that award
Slashdotters often rail against laws that see people like Dmitry Sklyarov rotting in prison without charge on dubious claims of hacking or piracy or such things. Those laws were created for freaks like Seth FinkelStein.
Do what you like, but don't use that psychopathic freak to justify a claim that Google is bad. Google is the Queen Mother compared to Finkelstein.
Posting as an AC, 'cos I don't want to join the ranks of those who have been Stalked by Seth"
The 4 buildings probably house the employees. The machines are all hosted at Exodus .. in cages as the OP says.
Well, I don't know about you, but I'm not all that fond of them filtering results based on where people are searching from.
Not sure I buy the first part of his theroy. I see some screenshots, but when I do the search myself, I get no results.
One should question anything from an internet stalker like Seth though.
Okay, so there was no link in parent to check out Alltheweb. Before I knew what was happening, I had Ctrl+Nd a new window, typed in google.com, searched for Alltheweb and then clicked on the Alltheweb.com result. I sat blinking as I realized what had just happened.
If that's not ingrained, I don't know what is..
Time to go metamod some moderators i think..
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
This is rated "5" at the moment. Now think for moment:
Our CAGE is next to theirs? The remote "cage" where Google keeps 54,000 machines ??!! (As opposed to the 4 Google-owned buildings in the text of the original post?)
Hold off before you start your self cangratulations. I didn't read the article, and I don't know if Google hass 54,000 machines in four buildings, but they definately have thousands spread out among dozens if not hundreds of datacenters world wide. I beleive my own eye's over those of a journalist's, any day, even a technology journalist. They can butcher a lot of facts while dealing with something they don't understand; most likely Google's staff is spread among 4 buildings, and they computers live in 3rd party data centers like Abovenet, Exodus, and however else has managed to survive. This lets them use geographical load balancing to keep the response rate up, spreads the data flow out, and offloads a lot of the network upkeep on others. (Outsourcing :^)
A "Rackable" system is .5 U, a rack hold about 60-70 plus needed switches, etc. A typical install in a datacenter might be 10 to 20 racks, so maybe 500-1500 "systems" in a datacenter. Of course, they likely scale an install to the area as well, so there's proably quite a few centers that are just a rack or two.
While I never saw the original systems the first poster refers to, I have seen several of the Rackable installs. They are a thing to behold.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
eg do you think I can find a team list for the Italian Men's basketball team that participated in the Sydney 2000 Olympics. One guy in that team had a name that may or may not have been censored on USA TV eg I thought it would be good for the censorship slashdot thread, but I can't find the team list. Fucka. Fucka, Fucka The search engine that routinely gets my business will be the one that produces the most relevant link for what I'm trying to find. In the meantime I will continue to use many.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
Then again, I once heard that door-to-door solicitors often try to go to houses with NO SOLICITING signs on them, assuming that there are people who put such signs up because they know they are weak-willed and can be talked into buying things. I don't know if it's true. I have a no soliciting sign up, and I block pop-up ads and the like, because I find them annoying and am not interested.
It may be easy for another free search engine to take Google's place in the current climate, or should I say the climate up untiI about 18 months ago. I'm not sure that it is actually true right now (we'd need google to go bust to check). But more to the point I'm thinking about the bigger picture of content economics, where there is no reason to believe that because it has been free in the past that it will be in the future - and I think Google can probably make a go of charging for access.
Overall, despite the neterati's classy line in sloganeering ("Information wants to be free"), more money changes hands for content now than ever before. Have a look at the history of TV - who predicted that people would pay a subscription fee for cableTV in the 1960s? Why would you pay for what you can get for free?
The answer, as Rupert knows, is that the "information economy" content properties can be (and increasingly *are*) owned by media conglomerates who'll charge your ass to see it. Regularly, becuase content is no longer a product but a service, costing $x/month. Read Clay Shirky (shirky.com) for lots of insights on that. The content service comes with a service contract which places increasing constraints on what is or isn't acceptable use of that content.
Now I don't want to get into a conversation about whether that's a good thing. What I'm suggesting is that content is increasingly becoming part of a chain of business relationships from producer to intermediary to end user. Google knows this, which is why they're recently advertised for a business development manager for their news division. My guess is that Google News will become the subscription online news channel. They'll be able to make it work because they are the only entity capable of providing a single consumer front end to all the subscription news services out there. They'll lock up licenses for most of the pay archives fairly quickly I expect. I guess I'd probably pay $20/month for unlimited searchable access to major media organisations across the world. More if I could get work to pay for it
Now a question would be: what if many of the major content providers across all areas (newspapers, media cos etc.) sign a licensing agreement with google to say, "you are the only search engine we're gonna let search our content". We're going to block deep linking based on referrers from any other search engines. Users can pay an extra $5/month to your ISP to have "Google access". The ISP might wear the charge in the first few months but eventually they'll pass it on to their users, who will pay. Who wants a web without google? Remember that the other search engines will only take you to weblogs, slashdot, a few academic institutions, and other non-branded stuff mainstream media consumers don't want. I can see Google making plenty of cash in this way. Because they're nice people they might give free google access to IPs in third world countries.
Anyway, as murdoch found with soccer, if there's something most of the world wants, you can put it behind a wall and make people pay for it. Everyone in online content's been talking about the cable MSO charging model but no-one's had a big enough proportion of the web's content to make it viable. I reckon the ubiquity of Google now makes it the first company capable of making a for-fee internet. Not the ISPs, not Yahoo, not MSN, not AOL-TW have had this position. Interesting times ahead.
The Grub project is a distributed method of crawling the internet. You download the client and you help Looksmart( their search engine wisenut is pretty good but not the best ) crawl the web.a a2b3b639ab6f4b92965e132a1418df9
In my opinion it is better to help contribute your spare bandwith and cpu to help make sure more of the internet is crawled and more frequently instead of something more pie in the sky like SETI. Grub has a more down to earth use. Help make sure all of cyberspace can be crawled.
Download the grub client:
http://www.grub.org/html/downloads.php?PHPSESSID=
There is a linux version. Get crawling, forget Seti and that distributed.net crap, helping crawl all the internet is more of an attainable goal.
Google washes whiter
... ..."So a story that coins a phrase, and that dozens of others link to, should be pretty near the top."
...
...
"Google has made its own statement on the 'Googlewash': by making The Register story that coined the phrase disappear from its search results."
"Not all the search results, mark you, but a very specific one. When you search for the word "Googlewash" (as at 9pm Pacific Time last night) around a hundred results are returned by default. Our story, which is where the word was coined, isn't among them."
"We found it, eventually, but it was very difficult."
"Here's what the snapshot looks like now. It's a fluid situation, but as we write, a search for Googlewashed returns 108 results. (Earlier on, it was 111. The number varies, but the end-result is the same, as you'll see)."
"Clearly, somoene at Google doesn't like the word "Googlewashed"."
"Now then. Google hasn't quite concealed the origin of the Googlewash phrase. If you search for Googlewash, or Googlewashed with the parameter, site:www.theregister.co.uk, you'll find a cluster of four pages with the original in fourth place. So the story itself has not been deleted from the index."
"What's happened is that PageRank has hidden it out plain sight."
"Now we must remember that Google, based in Mountain View, California is a private corporation, and it can do whatever the hell it likes with its page rankings."
There isn't a search engine in the world that isn't susceptible to some kind of pressure, payola, gaming or otherwise."
If you have a problem with this then fight google. Start using search engine like Teoma, Alltheweb, and Wisenut. Google is dominate in a large part to timing. The alternative search engines I mentioned are pretty darn good, but I must admit I do still think Google is better. But if these companies had the resources of Google they could probably crawl more of the web, attract better talent, etc.
When Google eventually IPO's, it'll be driven down the toilet by the need to increase share value like every other publicly owned internet entity.
this annoying banners and popups. I pay more attention to this Text-Links than to blinking banners. It would be nice if google would publish some click-trough-rations...
i have to run a 30 million page search engine on one machine, and people always complain why it is slow compared to google. At a pretty modest rate of 20 searches/sec per machine that translates to 1.7 million searches a day per machine which translates to roughly 120 "groups" (a group is a bank of servers used to service a single search) of servers to serve 200 million searches a day which translates to about 450 servers (54000/120) per group which translates to an average of about 6.7 million documents per server (at 3 billion total docs). and they're hardware is probably better than the crap i have
Agreed, but there is a difference in danger between alcohol and water. This doesn't mean it should be banned - I'm in favor of legalizing all drugs - but it does mean it is entirely logical for Google to ban alcohol adverts but not porn. They can chose to ban ads for substances which cause any level of harm they like, and porn causes less harm.
Anyone who has attended a USENIX conference in a fancy hotel can tell you
that a sentence like "You're one of those computer people, aren't you?"
is roughly equivalent to "Look, another amazingly mobile form of slime
mold!" in the mouth of a hotel cocktail waitress.
-- Elizabeth Zwicky
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