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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:
Feel free to use it.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
Opps, $10m is more like it, sorry typo, dunno how is did it twice... :\
But yes, $10m is not a lot for big corps.
Ok your are EXTREMELY far off. You may be a banker but you seem to not have experiance with technical situations. A company like google could end up spendind a million dollars on one person. Remember that to run an entire building is expensive. They have to pay all the people who many of which are expensive techs. Each server probably has thousands of dollars of equipment between the multiple procs and hig performance hard drives. The computers had to be setup of course which im sure costed a bundle as that would be no small task. Maintenance of the equipment would be a bitch. I doubt anyone could do what google has done with less than $100 million.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Hey, people do click those ads, they do respond to spam. Look at Iwon.com, they are still in business and they pay people money to use their search engine!
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.
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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
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!
I think recently this happened with an article on the register, where they coined the phrase googlewashing. Almost all the sites that subsequently used the term linked to the registers article but its place on googles rankings fell very quickly defying logic. The register mentions it at: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30195.html
Concentration of power is worrisome. But complaints should follow a problem, not a concern.
... 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
Besides being rathar Shady, I doubt your trick may work.
The advertiser can set a limit where Google stops placing their advertisements, hence stops any click thrus...
Tracking IPs is pretty much standard for Click Thrus pricing.
Billing is done thru CPM, which means amount of views / 1000, so as long as you don't exactly match the stopping point, the advertisement will get more views, lowering the cost of the ad.
Adword Pricing info
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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.
Chock full of bad assumptions.
So the net result is you gain almost nothing by powering down a bad system, except the ability to add a working system. If the cluster is not overloaded, there's not much ROI on having that extra power. So its just a math problem.You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.