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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."
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.
> 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.
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.
Not only do I click on the ads, in Google and Google alone, I ask for them. If I want cheap flights, I ask Google for cheap flights and click on the resulting ads. Since Google knows I am in .uk, it filters the ads accordingly. It works. It may be contributing to a monopoly, but hey, I'm lazy.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
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.
Regarding marketing, as I recall the interview with a Google marketing manager (at techtv?), she was saying that Google spent virtually $0.00 to advertise itself. Google is one of (small number of) companies that their product made their names. After all, that is the right way to market and make profit.
Related Article: Back in January 2003, Wired ran an article entitled "Google vs. Evil", with much focus on Google's potential for censorship and related matters.
...the reaction from the Slashdot crowd and most other forums was predictably vociferous...
Google vs. Evil [Wired Archive]
And here's the intro:
The world's biggest, best-loved search engine owes its success to supreme technology and a simple rule: Don't be evil. Now the geek icon is finding that moral compromise is just the cost of doing big business.
They even mention Slashdot:
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)
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.
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?
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!
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.
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
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.
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
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.