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."

Comments

The Link

[spoonist]

The REAL link to the article is this:

In Searching the Web, Google Finds Riches

NYTimes registration.

[termos]

It was starting to piss me off, so I created:

Login: sladotter
Password: slashdot

Feel free to use it.

Re:NYTimes registration.

[Odin's Raven]

It was starting to piss me off, so I created:
Login: sladotter
Password: slashdot
Feel free to use it.

I think this comes up every time a NY Times article is linked. Okay, my turn to remind people: If you don't want to register with their site, don't bother creating bogus accounts. It's a nice thought, but it's really not necessary.

Instead, just go to their archives section, where the articles are available without the need for an account. Just replace "www" with "archives" in the link. Example for this article:

http://archives.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/technology/ 13GOOG.html

Re:Google aren't big...

[packeteer]

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.

Re:concentration of power worrisome? censorship?

[n__0]

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

Re:concentration of power worrisome? censorship?

[More Trouble]

This is all the more vicious since the user is not warned that certain sites are censored.

Nonsense. Search Google for "scientology+leaflet". Scroll to the bottom of the page. Note the warning. Note that the warning links to the list of removed links.

Concentration of power is worrisome. But complaints should follow a problem, not a concern.

:w

Re:Well there's just one thing missing right now .

[mindstrm]

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.