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Will Google Become Another Netscape?
kaluta asks: "The Economist has a typically clear and concise story about bringing Google to the stockmarket. Basically, is it going to be the next eBay or Amazon, or will it 'simply be the next overhyped share sale to make its founders rich only to wither away miserably, either for lack of a sustainably profitable business model, or, like Netscape, because it finds itself in the path of that mighty wrecker, Microsoft?' Cool picture too."
This quote from the article is the key issue I think. (The IPO is rumored to be for a total of $15 billion)
Google is doing great, but they can't expect to dominate internet searches any more than they do. In fact, their business plan should allow for their market share in that area to decrease significantly. Each time a the next great new SE comes along, it quickly takes a big bite out of the market as Google itself has done most recently. Where might they expand their business in the future? (And how much revenue and/or profit do they need to justify a $15 billion market cap, anyway? I know it's alot more than the profit numbers in the article).
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it still provides a good search engine with no ads it can't become another Netscape. If it becomes too bloated on the main search engine page it'll still be a good search engine. However, if they change the search engine code so much that it no longer functions efficiently and smoothly without problems (the way it does now), it may become a failure.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
Google is so immensely popular, it is practically "a must" for most web surfers now. It is hard to imagine Google losing advertisers any time soon, and easy to see Google using its new money to pioneer further innovations. In the least, you would expect Google to expand more into other markets, with a portal like Yahoo, more appliances, or even web hosting (host on Google, get a bump in your search rating?).
I'd like to see google stay small and private. An IPO opens google up to stockholder pressures, and all sorts of not-good things. Besides, part of the appeal of google, at least for me, is that it is lean and has few ties, obligations, or partnerships with EvilCorportations.
Google holds way too much power. MS buying them would taint the brand and encourage people to seek out alternatives, which have been busy narrowing the usability gap. Diversity in the search engine space would be a very welcome development.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
The real problem is it being overvalued.
From what I've read they're going to generate anywhere from 20 to 45 billion during the IPO. How can a company that relies on ad revenue and provides only a search engine (albeit a very good one) be worth that much?
Google is now more than a business: it is a cultural phenomenon. But where will it be in a few years?
IF THE ultimate measure of impact is to have one's name become a new verb in the world's main languages, Google has reason to be proud. When they founded the company five years ago, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, friends at Stanford University, chose a word play on "googol"--the number 1 followed by 100 zeros--because their ambition was to organise the information overload of the internet in a transparent and superior way. These days, singles "google" suitors before agreeing to a date, housewives "google" recipes before cooking, and patients "google" their ailments before visiting doctors. Dave Gorman, a comedian, even has a popular show, the "Googlewhack Adventure"--a Googlewhack being what happens when two words are entered into Google and it comes back with exactly one match.
As search engines go, in other words, Google has clearly been a runaway success. Not only is its own site the most popular for search on the web, but it also powers the search engines of major portals, such as Yahoo! and AOL. All told, 75% of referrals to websites now originate from Google's algorithms. That is power.
For some time now, Google's board (which includes two of Silicon Valley's best-known venture capitalists, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital) has been deliberating how to translate that power into money. They appear to have decided to bring Google to the stockmarket next spring. Bankers have been overheard estimating Google's value at $15 billion or more. That could make Google Silicon Valley's first hot IPO since the dotcom bust, and perhaps its biggest ever.
Will Google go public?
Feb 21st 2002
That alone is enough to have some sceptics whispering "Netscape". Now that the worst of the dotcom hangover is clearing, they wonder, will Google become one of the few valuable internet survivors, joining Amazon and above all eBay? Or will it simply be the next overhyped share sale to make its founders rich only to wither away miserably, either for lack of a sustainably profitable business model, or, like Netscape, because it finds itself in the path of that mighty wrecker, Microsoft?
The search for profits
Google, naturally, is determined to avoid Netscape's fate at all costs. This was why it made Eric Schmidt its chief executive in 2001. Mr Schmidt was 46 at the time--Messrs Brin and Page were in their twenties--and was the boss of Novell, a software firm decimated by Microsoft but given another lease of life under his leadership. He seemed suitably "adult" to turn Google into a money-making machine.
Mr Schmidt understood that the key to monetising all those customer searches (now 200m a day) was to place small, unobtrusive and highly relevant text advertisements alongside Google's search results. Advertisers like this system because they pay only if web surfers actually click on their links. And consumers either do not mind, or even learn to love these commercial links for their relevance, just as they appreciate the Yellow Pages.
Google did not pioneer this "paid search" advertising. That honour falls to Overture, a Californian firm bought this year by Yahoo! which still has about half of the $2 billion-or-so market. Nor did Google's founders readily embrace the concept. Mr Page was once heard to say at a trade show that commercial exploitation was "bastardising" the search industry. Mr Schmidt made the concept uncontroversial at Google, thereby helping paid search to become the fastest growing part of the advertising industry today.
The next step is to take this approach to advertising from the results pages of search engines and on to other web pages. Increasingly, web publishers--from hobby bloggers to small businesses--allow firms such as Google to crawl through the content of their pages and place relevant text advertisements in the right margin. Once page visitors click on the links, the webmasters share
I think that it is inevitable that Google will be swallowed up by MS for the simple reason that Google has a terrific hardware/software search asset and MS has 50 Billion Dollars. This will cause other services companies such as AOL and Apple to devise cluster computing farms of their own to provide internet search and data computing services. After Google gets swallowed another of the many search engines in the market will try to become top dog but the internet will become more and more of a .NET internet and everyone else comes third. Eventually their will be a MS/Intel internet and everyone else. Somewhere along there I will no longer have much interest in using the internet anymore as it will resemble the great wasteland of repeating garbage that now describes television and radio.
"Google is doing great, but they can't expect to dominate internet searches any more than they do. In fact"
Yes they can: there is room for improvement:
1) Phrase Searches. Google still can't do them: if you want accuracy, you have to elsewhere. If Google fixed the bugs (where sometimes 1/5 of the results do not contain the asked-for phrase), no more need to go elsewhere for accuracy.
2) Sloppy Meta Search Engines. I sometimes go to alltheweb to see what Google missed. If Google did this same kind of thing, another reason not to leave Google.
Exactly. What is the Economist saying?
"Google is going public, just like another company once did! Are they that company?"
Uh, why would they be Netscape?
"Sufferin' succotash."
If I wanted free email, I go get free email. If I want to play java games, I go play java games. If I want to read news, I go read news. If I want to search the net, I search google.
It's simple, plain, and to the point. Sure, it has a bunch of features-in-testing that are full of maybe less than useful, but it still keeps the Search Engine aspect of Google a priority.
A logo, text input box and a couple of buttons is all it takes.
I will keep using Google unless it starts cluttering itself up with too many useless features on its front page.
- shazow
...when they're making the kind of money even Google makes? The two founders of Google must be making several million dollars a year (if Google's profits of $150M a year are accurate).
I'd collect $10-20 and then go find something *interesting* to do. I'm sure running google would be interesting, but there's a whole huge world out there to be enjoyed, and $20M would make it very interesting indeed.
From the article:
Yes, except the one element that matters most: the relevance of the search results it returns. It's what makes Google's paid AdWords useful instead of annoying: at Google, even the ad results are (usually) relevant! If Yahoo can't match Google's relevance, people will still have a better experience going to Google. No matter that Yahoo has a competitive "pay to place relevant ads" service.
Actually, they'll probably have to do significantly better than Google. Teoma, as someone pointed out here yesterday(?), is nearly as good as Google at returning relevant results, yet it remains a niche player because "almost as good" or even "just as good" doesn't give people a compelling reason to switch.
It is a pretty bleak view of the future, but one that I could see happening. This should be insightful, not flamebait.
Information wants to be $1.98/lb.
How about the Google text ads? A lot of sites, slashdot being one of them, run these ads. Instead of a banner, you get 3-4 text ads that use Google magic (tm) to make them relevant to the content of the page. These are the only ads I ever click on, since these are the only ads that ever have anything to do with that I'm doing. As far as I know, Google is the only company that provides context sensitive ads. Running ads that people will actually click on seems like a very good way to make money. Plus Google also provides fee services to large companies, and they keep adding new stuff all the time. As long as Google remains as innovative as they have been, they'll last a very long time.
The U.S. virtually dictates drug policy throughout the world, owing to our military and economic might.
All you have to do is look at our present efforts at deterring Canada and England from pursuing medical marijuana to understand this.
Moreover, most of the research being done worldwide is at the behest of pharmaceutical companies, who have no interest in seeing a plant that can be easily grown by anyone forming the basis of any kind of treatment regimen.
There's too much money involved here to let that happen.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Back in the late 1990's Altavista was king of the search engine. Then Google came along a replaced it as king of the hill. I don't even remember if Altavista is still around, but the point is, it won't take much to replace it.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Netscape's problem wasnt MS. If they had put out a better product (more stable, mostly), they could have retained their lead. I personally switched because I was tired of Netscape crashing every five minutes, and taking all my other browser windows with it.
Add to that its unwillingness to use many of the Windows-native APIs (printing is a good example), and you have a recipe for disaster. MS built those APIs for a reason; just because Netscape sought to reinvent the wheel doesnt mean other people need to finance it.
Their innovation stopped with Mosaic; Mozilla was them relinquishing control because they were personally beyond the limits of their skill.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
i'd be happy to use alltheweb instead of google had it not been for one simple thing that if alltheweb changed it'd make it just as good.
in google the ads are on the right of the page so that my first search results are there right where i want to see them or expect to see them, time after time, my eyes can just be on the same spot i expect to find the first answer. on alltheweb they put the sponsored ads first which vary in number and length so it always means i have to scroll down, either visually with my eyes or by clicking the scrollbar a few times, sometimes a page down and sometimes a few lines to find my first search result; these unpredictabilities as to where the first search result might be on the screen and the need to visually scan to find it and if need be make a few extra clicks, plus the need to ignore the sponsored search results which are similarly formatted, whereas in google their format is different and i know where they are spatially that i don't need to worry about them, all add up to make using alltheweb a little tedious to a degree of giving me a slight headache of being somewhat annoyed.
it's bizarre and somewhat foolish of alltheweb to do that, especially that if they adopt the google way of not putting things in the way of people they'd be able to cram in some more search results down the page. All it takes for them is to change this one simple thing and i wouldn't care too much about google, except of course for the newsgroups and media news, plus seach, all in one place.
google has just the convenience of usability. i really suggest they have a new tab, like those for images, groups and news.. etc, for blogs and RSS feeds; that way they'd prevent regular search results being contaminated by such often useless stuff.
one other thing; filter band names! too often recently whenever i search for something on google the first result i get is some sorta kids band that happen to have that word in their name; it seems with every kid now wanting to be in a band there's almost nearly as many kids bands as words in the english language.
Gooogle is the only provider of ads that are useful. Primarily because its the first stop when I want to buy something. Google is not as good as yahoo at filtering out non UK sites but it does provide ads for UK sites when you do a UK only search, which is pretty good when google provides info on what has been made and what is available in europe.
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer