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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.
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:
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.
some may simply be hard-drive-swapping monkeys,
. html
According to Cringley, they don't replace bad drives at Google. see http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030410
for this quote:
These are not racks and racks of state-of-the-art blade servers, just el cheapo PCs. So the magic must be in the software.
Now here is the part that sticks in my mind: the fault tolerant nature of the cluster is such that if a machine fails, the other machines simply take over its functions. As a result, whenever a server fails at Google, THEY DO NOTHING. They don't replace the broken machine. They don't remove the broken machine. They don't even turn it off. In an army of drones, it isn't worth the cost of labor to locate and replace the bad machines. Hundreds, maybe thousands of machines lie dead, uncounted among the 10,000 plus.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.