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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."

5 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. Re:NYTimes registration. by BrookHarty · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I dont know why its so hard for you guys to create an account, and have your browser just autofill it each time you visit. I mean, if you use it daily, or at least weekly from a slashdot article, why not use a real account?

    I mean come on, they let google index articles off news.google.com.

  2. Re:Well there's just one thing missing right now . by seizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  3. Re:Google aren't big... by afidel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Um, let's see $1,000,000 / 54,000 = $18.50 Hmm, for dual cpu, 4GB ram, rack mount machines I think you will need a bit more than that =)

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  4. Re:no kidding by error0x100 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  5. Dont let me be the only one on /. to say this.... by I+kan+Spl · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

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