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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).
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
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?
Ah yes, a search engine company attempting to "find" itself. Maybe they could just goo... never mind.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
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?
It actually depends on the expectations of the shareholders, if an IPO leads to the death of a company. Normally a company is expected to be worth a certain multiple of its earnings (or better, the cashflow, because cashflow is difficult to forge). A normal multiple would be 10, which gives me a 10% return rate (I buy the company for 100 and get 10 out of it every year). If google has USD 100 Mio of earnings, it's worth would be USD 1000 Mio, if valued this way. This of course would be a fair value, because it enables them to pay their investors an annual dividend of 10% of the stock price, even without any growth. In this scenario, they could stay in their search-engine-business, something they can (obviously) handle successful. The problem is, google will not aim at a valuation of one billion, they will aim at a valuation that is about ten times higher. And that means, they will have to grow a lot in a short time, something that will propably kill them.
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
Although 'The Economist' can be thought provoking [good thing] its economic analysis is trash [bad thing] - articles brush over facts, present dodgy one sided (and often politically biased) analysis and present conclusions as fact. So draw your own opinions from the article but do not take anything from The Economist served on a plate.
-- Alchohol is a hard drug. Cannabis is a soft drug.
define google -- look at the top listing where it says: Web Definition.
Google has a couple neat things I never knew about like definitions..
define linux
define irc
It also has a calculator and unit converter:
1.21 GW / 88 mph
1 parsec in lightyears
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.
My own two cents on why it won't happen.
Microsoft hasn't been a big enough fast-follower to take over Google's stranglehold. Microsoft was quick enough to get a browser out there while the internet was still in the process of popularizing itself.
Given that you can get search results from Microsoft's website content quicker through Google than through Microsoft's own search engine, I think it's too late for them to edge Google out short of buying it.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Paraphrase: "Its going to be a success or failure"
No shit, Sherlock
If you're going to frame this as an "on the one hand" and "on the other hand" situation, Netscape vs Ebay or Amazon is wrong. It should either be:
Webvan/Dr. Koop vs Ebay or Amazon (web companies with viable models vs web companies w/o viable models)
or
Netscape vs Intuit (people who got in the path of Microsoft and were destroyed vs people who got in the path of Microsoft and did just fine)
The two axes are totally orthogonal -- all kinds of combinations are possible.
I think it's safe to say that Google has a viable basic model: provide high-quality search, sell placed ads. It works. So the questions should really be: are they going to make stupid mistakes while being crushed by pressure from Microsoft, like Netscape, or are they going to keep their lead, like Intuit, who's resisted all attempts to be destroyed by MS?
My prediction: if the smart people stay running it, they'll stay ahead of MS. This is where the IPO comes in: in a public company, majority shareholders can take control and replace the smart folks with someone else who they think will do the job more like they'd like it. And it's easy to see what could happen then...
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Google is the same way and they are expanding the breadth of their content like Amazon. If you want to find something on the web, newsgroups or news, you go to Google first.
I don't see how anyone else can easily overcome the economies of scale that Google has already attained.
Is Howard Dean's candidacy doomed?
Your search - Apple - did not match any documents.
No pages were found containing "Apple".
Did you mean "Microsoft"?
I didn't say there was no room for improvement. Just that it would be unreasonable to count on maintaining their current market share regardless of the quality of the product. They'll have to find new markets.
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
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."
I personally have trust in Google for right now.
I have next to none. I have firsthand experience with how they treat objectionable content... they simply refuse to index it.
I have a site that I haven't even bothered working on anymore because of this: holocaustnow.org. Shortly after it was first created, I was both indexed on Google and archived in the WayBackMachine.
Then, about three months later, I was dropped from both sites. Queries to both organizations went unanswered. Subsequent attempts to have the site re-indexed proved futile.
It can't be an issue with the virtual hosting my service provider uses since Google had indexed it in the past.
And why the WayBackMachine would ever deign to remove something it has already archived makes no sense to me whatsoever.
So I am eagerly awaiting the day when Google falls. I see now that altavista is willing to index the site; this is giving me the incentive to come out with the badly needed version 2. The more diversity there is, the less likely the new Google's will try pulling shit like this.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Depending on how Google plays it, they could still do quite well.
Netscape lost their position because MS not only integrated IE into the OS, but also because Netscape 3-4.x series was unmanageable spaghetti code, resulting in an inferior product. IE during that time made matters worse because it was improving in leaps and bounds. Sadly if only that last part were still true...
If Google wants to keep the crown against the likes of MS, they are going to have to fight hard, fight well, and never rest on their laurels. They're also likely going to have to play some hardball with MS too - keep in mind MS has not only the OS and browser, but also content sites such as MSNBC and a number of others.
Either way Google folks, best of luck to you!
I think you've just proved the origninal point.
Say Google has at present a 95% market share. It is going to be a lot harder to increase that share than it will be to lose it to anyone who, say, implements phrase searches before Google or who have better search or robot algorythms.
Even if Google continue to improve their basic product, that is to say searching, then logically there will be fewer searches made as people find what they are looking for sooner.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
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.
is it going to be the next eBay or Amazon
eBay has been a resounding financial success from day one, just incredible. You can't say that about Amazon, whose foray into profitability is somewhat recent, and nowhere near eBay's margins.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
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.
+"to be or not to be"
That requires the phrase to be on the page. Otherwise it will sprinkle in 'good approximations'.
If you don't get what you're looking for, the plus sign can help narrow things down.
I`ve just been to your site. Here`s a choice quote -
Can we be certain that marijuana is the cure for cancer? No, but we can't say it isn't either
Erm, yes we can. You`ve restored my faith in Google. Keep saving up for that brain transplant pal.
I guess someone didn't bother to read the Google Manual before using it.
Google has an excellent Phrase Search capability. You just need ".." quotes.
Even before Deja was acquired by Google I was willing to pay a subscription fee for access. Deja's (now Google's) technical USENET/newsgroup archives alone are invaluable and will only grow in value as time goes on. So part of their new business model can be a subscription system.
Can a hosting provider create a robots.txt file outside of my control?
Well, yeah, they can do whatever the hell they want (though some things might alienate their customers). Keep in mind that your hosting provider could also just have firewalled away the Google crawlers. They can also try to block them by User-Agent, but just I checked and they don't appear to be doing the latter. From the looks of it, they're not that competent, anyway.
re-checking now I see no such file exists
That's not what your web server says, according to the HTTP protocol it claims to be following.
When I request http://www.holocaustnow.org/robots.txt, I get a 302 redirect to http://64.202.166.210/index.html, which returns 200 but says "Page Not Found" in the text (it should return 404 if it means to say "Page Not Found").
That is silly, and non-standards-compliant behavior, and the resulting page is totally unparsable as a robots.txt file. Basically your web hosting provider is saying to the robot that robots.txt does exist, but it's over there, and its a big blob of incomprehensible HTML.
Now, of course, I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if well-behaved robots (i.e. not grub) found this behavior to be confusing, and decided therefore not to index the site just to be safe and avoid stepping on any toes.
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.
Damn.
So the scenario is this... my hosting provider once upon a time returns a 404 on robots.txt, Google says "OK, I can index the site", and so it does. And I see that it's indexed it, and all is right in the world.
Then my piece-of-shit hosting provider decides to redirect everything that doesn't exist to their piece-of-shit "page not found" page, and Google says "fuck this."
But because I'm a dumbass and I don't know what's going on, and because this happens at almost the same time as the WayBackMachine cancels their archive of my site, I instantly go into conspiracy mode, which, as you might be able to tell, I can do really well.
This makes a lot of sense. I could kick myself, I spent so much time investigating the virtual hosting angle, it never occurred to me to check out robots.txt. I didn't want to restrict access, so I didn't think I needed it.
I am putting a robots.txt file up there now, and resubmitting the site.
Thank you.
(and finally NOW I understand why my piece-of-shit hosting provider is offering a package for only $29.95 a year that promises to optimize my site for search engines. What they mean is that for $29.95 a year they will cease doing redirects on robots.txt. And I've just searched their entire site (using Google, HAH!) and they don't say word one about the problem.)
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Netscape has a long and sad story, a company that once made the worlds number 1 browser and supported a lot of (at the time) cool features, made a mail program, and also a html wysiwyg editor. Then MS decided to improve IE. Then MS include IE in Windows. Then MS decided to make IE part of Windows and at the same time Netscape decided to stop improving Netscape to compete and now IE is really the number one browser for Windows and Apple machines (although Safari is coming along nicely on the Apple side) Now Netscape is just kinda like a lost cause a portal without any of the subscribers companies lie Yahoo have.
Google on the other hand doens't make a browser. They are a search engine with a minimalistic interface and a tons of great abilities and scalability to their service. MS doesn't really compete YET - i'm sure they do have plans too since they want to rule the world. Still Google makes it's money from 1) companies buying ad space and 2) companies buying it's technology to use for inhouse - Netscape sold a browser, which eventually wasn't worth $20
Will Google's search software continue to be worth whatever their price is? MS, IBM, Oracle, all make DB's and compete, but they aren't going to put eachother out of business because IBM and Oracle continue to make a better product - if Oracle decided not to update after 10g after 4 years they would be gone - a victim to whatever MS and IBM had come out with.
(yes Netscape did update, but they didn't have the stability, features, or function with websites that IE now has...
Ave Molech Setting
Funny how Microsoft has the potential of crushing and/ or "embrace, extend and take over" anything that's worth big bucks, but that it has no power over el-cheapo stuff, which is probably also the reason why M$ has to use the "anti-capitalistic behaviour" dogma too often.
:-)
:-)
"Free as in GNU" is just an extreme example, however, as shareware is just as uncruncheable to Big Mic. The secret is the money required to run the battle. M$ has an awful lot of money to burn, but that's nothing compared to being able to run the battle without any money at all, if needed.
I can't imagine Google not requiring an awful lot of money to run. Think about it: while webhosts still bills at the Mbit and Mbyte, Google seems to have no problem to store a complete, indexed local copy of just about the entire 'net. I mean, for crying out loud, why shouldn't we all just host our website in Google's cache? (Hey, that's not a bad idea at all
Anyway, now maybe if we're able to P2Pize/ SETIze google, so that every search is traded for some caching and calculation power (or something like that), maybe we can reduce the total cost of running the best indexer in the world to a number too low for Microsoft to catch and crunch. Just imagine the costs of maintenance to be reduced to paying a webhost and do some volunteer programming
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
That source code is not worth diddly without thirty or so million dollars worth of computer power to run it on.
I think that the article conflates two separate issues. The first issue is whether Google is going to IPO at some obscene valuation that quickly declines to a more realistic level as nmore shares reach the market. Yep, probably the case unless Google have the foresight to do what Gates and Balmer did when Microsoft IPO'd and talk down the launch price.
The second issue is whether Google will repeat the Netscape business history. This is completely separate and there is no reason to think it will.
Mosaic Communications Corp (Netscape) started out with a business model of give away the browser and make money selling the server. That model started to show its weakness when Apache started to appear. People were just not as excited about a Web server with the latest kewl feature as Netscape thought.
Netscape deliberately gave away the browser in order to take spyglass out of the market. Spyglass was charging for its browser, Netscape was giving it away to most users. They did sign some for pay deals but these were usually loss leaders for the server code.
The other problem at Netscape was that they were selling themselves as the cutting edge of Web technology but they systematically alienated the Web Developer community. Netscape simply did not bother to show up to standards working groups, they thought that they did not need to, they would set the standard by shipping the next release. That did not work so well as Microsoft started to gear up. Microsoft did try to do some of the same tactics initially (marquee tag anyone?) but quickly realised that Netscape never showed up to standards meetings. Microsoft did, and that is why they got most of what they wanted from the HTML4 standard, Netscape got diddly.
The final nail in the coffin was when W3C got its PR machine worked up and started to promote Tim Berners-Lee as the inventor of the Web. Journalists who had been told Marc Andressen was the wunderkind were somewhat annoyed they had been lied to. Add to that the fact that Tim gave much better press availability and the history was substantially rewritten - correctly this time. Marc became just the face of Netscape, not the face of the Web.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
This is so cool. Try any of the following:
:-).
1 nibble in bits
1 byte in nibbles
1 kilobyte in bytes
1 megabyte in kilobytes
1 gigabyte in megabytes
1 terabyte in gigabytes
1 petabyte in terabytes
But, for any of you loking for the 'right' answer to that age old question, you're SOL.
P.S. - tan(pi/2) is finite
There are other search engines?
Yeah I agree...
Google could be losing some serious market share in the 'music to fish to' demographic!
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
I asked a coworker of mine who works for Google part time about blogs. He says they regularly get complaints about blogs, and it's not hard for them to adjust things to respond to complaints, but the thing is the complaints about blogs are evenly split. Half of the people think Google rates blogs too highly, half thinks they rate blogs too low. They're thinking about a -noblogs command or something like that. trip
"TV is great! Every New Year's I make a resolution to watch more TV." - Ann Coulter
Assumption is the mother of all fuckups...
Read this, search for "complete access"