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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:
... and that is for Google to make a wrong move so that everyone goes "monopolist paranoia". This should be fun if it happens, think about arguments like: "these search results look rather suspicious to me".
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.
Feel free to use it.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
those servers running Windows 2000.
Well, maybe not.
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?
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
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.
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 =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
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.
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
My UID is prime and so is this number: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
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.
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.