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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".
those servers running Windows 2000.
Well, maybe not.
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.
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.
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?
I've made another one:
Feel free.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
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.
Concentration of power is worrisome. But complaints should follow a problem, not a concern.
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
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.