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Fortune Magazine On Google Growing Up
prostoalex writes "Fortune Magazine runs a pretty long story on Google, but instead of the usual exultation over PageRank algorithm and Larry-and-Sergey biographies, we get a different message - is Google growing up, and is trouble brewing at Google? Here's Fortune's description of the pre-IPO days: 'Google has grown arrogant, making some of its executives as frustrating to deal with in negotiations as AOL's cowboy salesmen during the bubble. It has grown so fast that employees and business partners are often confused about who does what. A rise of stock- and option-stoked greed is creating rifts within the company. Employees carp that Google is morphing in strange and nerve-racking ways.'"
>is Google growing up, and is trouble brewing at Google?
And can we get a 2000 word story out of it?
An open source search engine run by a business with an open source business plan. We should trust closed source business plans as much as we trust closed-source software.
Beings aspergers AND pulling chicks... I enjoy the challenge!
"Google's foes have a much firmer hold on customers", argued some bloke who wrote a book about Google, so is an immediate expert.
Perhaps. But Google has a much firmer hold on the search technology, and at least in this market, the technology is important. Google as a business need to sort out its stuff (perhaps, we don't really know), but I'd guess that the vast majority of the planet who use search engines, use google, and that can't be bad...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
sounds like a ideal market ...
situation to invest in
any VCs out there that want
to get into da search engine
business?
Google got where it was largely because of the crapness of AltaVista, Yahoo and Hotbot et al; at least some of these have now woken up and smelt the coffee.[1] not new in itself; they've been used for dust extraction in industry for decades
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Also, anyone else noticed that Google itself is getting less effective lately? Some searches I make, the first 2 pages all go to the same advertiser's site except all the links have different domain names; I think they're figuring out how to exploit its page ranking. Other searches I get tons of 404s, especially with image search, and the images aren't cached except as thumbnails so it's even more annoying.
But that leads to the question of what Google will do during its reign. ARE we seeing dot-com arrogance? This isn't a new phenomenon - Apple suffered the same thing back in the early 80s.
Well, I look forward to the IPO and seeing where Google intends to go from there.
"All good things must come to an end."
Not that I'd hope this is the way it goes, but it's entierly possible it does. Has happened before and will happen again.
.: Max Romantschuk
Well, at least the Google translator is doing well, repeated use seems to have generated: Employees carp that Google is morphing in strange and nerve-racking ways.
3831 words... good greif!
put a few more in there and you can publish a book
"I'm googling for it"? Only in America can you 'verb' a noun!
***You learn something Every day. And then you die.***
I think Google has something very important. It is now almost a generic name now for searching. I know a lot of computer illiterate people who have heard of Google, and have no idea that there are other search engines out there, and that google IS the internet's search engine. As long as people hold on to the association of the word "Google" with "searching" they will have no problem.
Summary of the article: /might/ be doomed.
.com bubble survivors, who survived /because/ they were different.
"Oh no, there's this company here that values engineers highly, and does all sorts of wacky non-corporate stuff. How can they survive ?
They must behave more like other dot-com companies, otherwise they
"
All in all an odd article, since google is one of the few prospering
The process of fast gaining power has always resulted in growing arrogance, see for instance Microsoft.
Unfortunately it also applies to Open Source companies. Sigh.
You can defy gravity... for a short time
Hmmmmmmm.. Google turns away Microsoft. Press starts smear campaign... Hmmmmmmm..
My company has been around a few more years that Google, but it is going through a similar situation. We have expanded greatly over the past 5 years and now the company is starting to lose focus on what made it a success in the first place. Now the focus is entirely on maximizing revenue and maximizing profits with little care for future consequenses. I expect that my company will be a lumbering giant before too long, just like everyone else in our industry.
Smeghead every day of the week.
I agree. Fortune and Forbes are in general to be distrusted when it comes to reporting on technical companies. Having the best interests of big business at heart is bound to conflict eventually with developing better technology. Not to mention flamebait (search the webpage for "basements").
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
How long till Google makes a bid for the desktop?
Seems the next logical step. They're already the front door to the internet for a lot of people and if Micro$oft are going to compete with them why not strike back.
Who wants Googlows?
For those of you who hadn't heard -- Google recently blew minds in the advertisng scene by being voted the most recognized brand in the WORLD -- over Coke, GM, BMW, FedEx, IBM, Microsoft, you name it.
the voters were senior advertising execs. perhaps you saw this news earlier this year. it was truly a shocker to the usual suspects (the suits), as Google accomplished this amazing feat in just a few years and with virtually ZERO bucks spent on advertising.
"This too shall pass."
Really, going public does only one instantaneous good thing for a company, raise some instant cash, and a good thing for the owners of the company, raise some more cash for them.
After that, it's a big burden, the company has to follow a whole new set of rules, publish accounts, be subject to pressures from shareholders for instant returns, etc. etc.
Anyway, maybe there is an economist out there who can explain to me why it is good for a company to be listed on the stockmarket as opposed to being in private ownerships. Is there any more to it than a one-off sum of instant cash?
Ponxx
Fortune and the author of the article is notorious for taking comments/events out of context and blowing them into a story that is not really there. This certainly fits the pattern - and account of outrageous behaviour followed by carping loosely sourced but based on what competitors (and snubbed suitors = MSFT) are saying. Can any of the "engineers and other geeks attending a conference on Internet search" comment on accuracy of the characterization of Brin's Q&A session as being like "a rock star being asked to play his greatest hit one ... more ... time?"
Remember the days when you used Altavista? --And when there were millions of personal webpages with, what did they call them. . , LINKS??? which led you across the wide and complex internet to find amazing pools of data and knowledge? Where people were required to think and explore in order to find things? Where cool and interesting top ranking, easy to find information was decided upon by pro-active linking controlled by millions of small webmasters and not some Google algorithm and the corporate advertising dollar?
The web is not supposed to have ONE main junction for data retrieval. Google is like a news-bite. It's easy, it's fast, it's incomplete, and worst of all, it makes everybody lazy, dependant and the SAME.
I am sick to death with the geek world fawning over this massive problem waiting to happen. It's about bloody time people began to realize the potential hazards with this sort of consolidation of power.
What? Because Google happens to use a Fischer Price color scheme, people think it's incapable of harm?
I am actually slightly more disgusted with people over this subject than I am with their complicity in the bullshit going down in the Middle East. If people are determined to walk around in their comfy bubble of ignorant bliss while massive systems congregate to fuck them over, then they deserve exactly what they get. You will be drafted and you will have the internet taken away from you. --And the 'best' part is that the small number of aware people get fucked over right along with everybody else, thanks to the tectonic plate-moving population masses of the child-minded.
-FL
In the last week, Google did a change to their algorithms which effectively eliminated most of the top-rated businesses from search results.
It has been suggested that they are doing this to force businesses to use Adwords so that their valuation can be increased in the IPO.
What apparently happened was that for any keywords which are actively bid for in Adwords, Google applied a filter making it very hard for legitimate businesses to get any ranking in normal search results.
Here is an application which was built to show the difference between current and previous results (before the new keywords filters were applied by Google) www.scroogle.org/.
This message has some good data and a summary of the argument.
What makes this so worrying is that Google made its reputation on objectively good search results. If they are now distorting results in pursuit of cash, they're LESS objective than search engines which have explicit pay for placement, like Overture: in those search engines you can at least see which results are paid for and which are actually real.
Farewell Google. We hardly knew ye.
need i say more?
I don't get it! At the time I found a solution to a problem that was posted, I just wanted to add that solution but could not! What's the point?
The idea that businesses are "run" is somewhat of a illusion. In fact, businesses run themselves once they get beyond a basic size, and they follow rules (like Zipf's law) which (appear to)govern their size and market position.
Of course a business has a culture, and this affects the way it works, but a culture is like a strategy: theft, honesty, quality, exploitation... all choices made in order to improve the odds of winning at what is always a gamble.
No surprise that as Google gets larger, its culture would change: it is entering new domains, needs to adapt, has many new people, each with their ideas and influence.
The "give the customer what they want" culture is very strong at Google, and is the reason for their success up to now. But it is only a successful strategy when it makes a difference. When Google find themselves needing to defend a captive market (of advertisers), fight off hostile intruders (like Microsoft), and change its definition of "customer" (from people doing the searches to people placing adverts), it will also change as a company. This is what is happening now.
Zipf's Law is fun, BTW. It explains the relationship between size and power, in summary it states that in a self-adjusting system, power is balanced out at all levels. I.e. in a market, the largest business will be about twice as large as the two second-largest businesses, about three times as large as the next three businesses, and so on.
The same kind of organic maths applies to cities, earthquakes, and natural languages.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
After the IPO, Google will grow crappier and crappier, and eventually become Just Another Site. This crappiness will be mandated by the businessmen who will control the company. Since a businessman's goal is not to make a profit, but to maximize profits, Google will begin abusing its position, and in general, becoming more like the Microsoft of web searches. They'll make their site less informative, remove the "fun" stuff like the enchefilizer and Google Groups, and in general behave like assholes. That's what businessmen do!
All we can do is hope a new contender steps up. But, this probably won't happen. Sigh.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
is all it takes to replicate a smaller google until the cash starts coming.
Sadly, their niche is getting easier to replicate as hardware becomes cheaper.
If the first 50 search results for "cups" want to sell me a cup, I'l l increasingly turn to another search engine to find my information. The next wave though, is the sort of AI that can rate pages or servers based on their quality of information. \
Show me a search engine that can distinguish between an Erica Rose pic and a Mother Teresa pic, without the filename, and I'll invest, until then: it's all just bullshit and more piles of bullshit.
did you mean bullshiat?
I'd hope it would be Alltheweb, but I know they are unknown in the real world, even if their results are nearly google-level in quality.
I fear it would be a great opportunity for Microsoft to seize yet another market...
Yep. It always has been that way in the past. Superior technology has always vanquished Microsoft's clunkiness.
I don't trust this article - coming from Forbes - and that's a reporter's paraphrase, at best, rather than a quote of Brin, but that much seems a reasonable portrayal of their attitude, and an Achilles' heel. This goofy belief that some tech god will see to it that the technically inept cannot prevail in combat.
Still, I agree with a post above - having *a* search engine for the net is not something I'd be rooting for anyway.
I know I don't bother with many links these days - whats the point when I can use google to search for it, the open directory to find by category (or even on the odd occaision Yahoo). Even if I am looking for something similar I don't even have to web crawl for it - you can just Show Similar to find it.
I stating the assumption that others are also doing this - and if this is so, then won't the ability of page rank and similar link "usefulness" evaluation algorithims to produce good results degrade?
Any thoughts....?
Keep Lamb Chop On Top - SETI - The Team Lamb Chop Gauntlet
"Google has grown arrogant, making some of its executives as frustrating to deal with in negotiations as AOL's cowboy salesmen during the bubble. "
So they're frustrating to negotiate with just because someone didn't get their way?
[alk]
language is at its most useful when it is flexible. Who wants to say "I used google to search for it"?
And when the first person imagined being "zapped" with a lazer gun, I'm glad you weren't there to tell him that onomatopaeic sound descriptors could not be used as verbs.
It happens the other way to. Do you really so hate the expression "out of the blue"? Does it bother you so much to hear an adjective used as a noun?
Chill out. This is part of what makes English a strong language. Other languages do it to, and the ones that don't are less poetic.
lysergically yours
Over the last week Google has moved their corporate offices, to the old HQ of SGI (who is still hanging on in one building). Their old offices were extraordinarily crowded but had lots of character (buildings 0, pi and e). The new building sounds nice (more space, glass walls everywhere, lots of conference rooms and the usual late-90's tech boom perks and toys). But who knows what a change like that will do to corporate culture.
Also, if some business development types are being arrogant in outside meetings, that's a problem, but doesn't mean the whole company is that way.
The gapin flaw with this article is that it take the typical suit view of Google. Google's founders have one overriding principal that guides everything, "Don't be evil," which has lead to it's continued success. Things like "locking in" customers would be the death knell of Google, as it's simplistic and quick search are what attracted it's user base to begin with.
Their successful advertising initiative likewise mirrored the message. People don't like being treated like a commodity to be "locked in", especially not the droves of nerds on the internet. I'd be highly suspect that ANY of the "competing" search companies would steal away any of google's userbase, as they will all try and do things for their own benefit that will ultimately make them seem worse in a head to head comparison against google.
"Give away the stone, let the oceans take and transmutate this cold and faded anchor." - Maynard James Keenan
take a look at this and tell me one single company that has such ideas, technology and momentum as google. This article talks about google as if Google is planning to stay as it is for the next decade, ofcorse not.... they might be stupid(which i doubt), but they have so much ideas and "know-how" in their heads they can re-revolutionize (i cant say that word again :)) the web search
technology.
The lunatic is in my head
...it's a slow day so let's FUD google into oblivion.
In a year I'll be crying after google fails to deliver, and I'll go back to the internet archive's time machine. Then I'll be puzzled by the 2001 google not working.
The main rational for going public, from the company's point of view, is the fact that employees will be more motivated by the fact that their share options have a cash value set by the market, rather than by the company. There is a secondary reason, which is that having publicly traded shares creates a currency for acquiring other companies.
This logic works best when you are dealing with a company that does not generate dividends. When you have dividends, then shareholders get their rewards from these, and so there is less of a need to go public. The problem is, it takes time for companies to mature to the extent that they pay dividends, and everyone involved is generally too impatient to wait.
Having said that, it's usually the shareholders and the management who decide to go public, not the workers. The main reason for an IPO, in reality, is to allow venture capitalists and management to cash in, generally by capitalizing on market hype. This was the pattern for the nineties - everyone involved in taking the decision is in favour of the IPO: VCs and management want the cash, and the investment bankers and lawyers and accountants want the fees. And the press wants an interesting story. And, sadly, the investing public (including their so-called professional advisers in the mutual funds) seems to be willing to buy into all of this.
There have been suggestions that Google is worth $25 bln, in the press, who generally know nothing. Even if it's half that, then it's still valued at more than 10 times revenue. Just to give you an indication, my company will be criticised by its board, and the analysts, if we pay more than 2 times revenue for a company.
So you are right, that the main interest is a one-off sum of cash, plus the hope that you will be able to attract good staff with options, even though most of the upside from options has already been appropriated by the early movers. And that you might be able to use your inflated stock to buy other companies. It's known as the "bigger fool" theory of company valuation - you might think this is a silly price for our company, but we're sure that you will be able to find a bigger fool further on down the line.
Feels like I am back in the day with all of the crappy link pages and ads.
I am looking for another SE
I'm surprised that no one has pointed out a pattern I see here in these 100 incidents:
000) About 2 months ago Microsoft executive Jim Allchin said condescendingly: "Google's a very nice system, but compared to my vision, it's pathetic."
001) Microsoft may have offered to buy Google right before it is set to go public, but Google turns them down.
010) Google changes it's program in an attempt to get better weighted results and gets bad press from business about it.
011) Word "leaks out" that SCO may be planning to sue Google for not paying them the "license" tax.
100) Fortune publishes a negative article about Google's management.
All this happens just as Google is about to offer it's IPO and just as M$ is starting it's own online search engine. Tons of negative press for Google, lots of praise for M$'s "forward thinking" on search technology. Coincidence? I think not...
Davey B. This eCS-OS/2 (Warp 4.52) system uptime is 14 days 06 hrs 42 mins and 22 secs
Exactly.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
True, it works like that now. And while I'm not a big fan of Google, this restriction actually is a good thing. It greatly reduces the meaningless trolls or misplaced posts that thousands of abusive or clueless googlers would otherwise be posting in response to various ancient Usenet threads. No one wants to see some newcomer resurrecting a 1994 thread in a busy newsgroup, no? Thus Google Groups draw the line in one month. If you want to answer to older post this should certainly be possible via another newsprovider, where the troll population will be considerably lower and no restrictions have taken place.
Ok, then. why not do the most efficient thing and disallow posting full stop. That should get rid of meaningless trolls and misplaced posts.
What people seem to overlook about google, is that it brought searching out of the stone-age, and forced everyone else to improve greatly, or die out. No longer are searches riddled with links to unrelevant material like porn, link-farms, etc. (Well, there are some, but still only with rather uncommon search terms). If google dies (like many very good companies have before) it will certainly be a sad day, but we can all move on and not be much worse off.
The reason we can live without Google, is it's legacy... Other search engines like Yahoo finally invested the money in improving their own search engines, so that they get results almost as good a Google. Unfortunately (and the reason they can't possibly beat-out Google) their goal is only to match, they could have done a bit more work and been better, and innovative, rather than just imitators.
So, google may go away eventually, but their legacy shall remain, and we are all better for it.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Not being able to reply to an old, archived news message in Google Groups doesn't seem so strange/bad to me:
Google groups is basically only an interface/archive to the existing internet newsgoup mechanism. If you'd reply to a year-old message in some newsgroup that got archived in google groups... you would be sending a reply to the newsgroup itself, thereby giving the whole readership of that newsgroup (let's say some 200 people) an answer to a year-old question.
Seen in this light, I wouldn't count this against google.
Reinout
Reinout van Rees
Ok, then. why not do the most efficient thing and disallow posting full stop.
That'd do the trick indeed. But I believe the main reason for that self-placed rule was what already said: to prevent people from responding to years-old threads. This has happened sometimes, and it does no good to anyone. For example, people using their ISP's own newsserver won't probably see the article that GG user is responding to. Don't know why Google put the limit as low as one month though.
Employees carp that Google is morphing in strange and nerve-racking ways.
Google is growing up and right now it's in that phase where there's a lot happening to its body that it doesn't understand.
Since I taught Sergey when he was an undergraduate at Maryland, and have done some consulting at Google, I can offer some insight on on Forbes article.
The Forbes article is right that Google is very selective in their hiring, and puts a premium on intelligence over experience. However, the claim that you need a degree from a top-10 university is bogus. Actually, one thing that helps a lot is a graduate degree. I believe the current situation is that they have more people on the engineering staff with PhDs than with BS degrees (and more people with Masters degrees than either).
One of the interesting things about the Google engineering team is the number of people who had previously done research in topics such as compiler optimization than have no relation to Google's business. They just hire smart people.
I understand that a number of people are upset by recent changes in Google's ranking scheme and the fact that it isn't public or open source. The thing you have to understand is that Google will be forever in a war with the people doing "Search Engine Optimization". These people don't care about having Google return the best result for "ceiling fan", they just want their web site selling ceiling fans to be on the first page.
The initial papers on the Page Rank algorithm assumed a web that was unaffected by the page ranking algorithm. Now, with Google being a dominate search engine, a substantial part of the web is designed to influence Google's search ranking. Figuring out a search ranking algorithm that works well in that context is very hard, and would be impossible if it was public or open source. The SEO people would 0wn it in a moment.
A problem I've noted with Google in the past few years is that a search for anything that people are trying to sell, like "ceiling fans", mostly returned links to web stores selling that product. The newest ranking for "ceiling fans" includes other links as well, such as informative web sites on installation, manufacturers and energy conservation. So it seems like an improvement to me.
Clearly, managing a company that is growing like Google is growing is a challenge. But I'm not sure anyone else could do it better.
Exactly! It's the same situation as it was with AOL when it was big (And maybe even so still...), people thought/think AOL is the equivalent of the internet, because it's the only thing they were exposed to. It's an interesting case.
Am I the only offended by condescending tone of the article when it comes to computer scientists and engineers?
..."It's a distraction from pure technology, which is what I love...." ....Brin will become a billionaire. Make that a multibillionaire. So to hear him pining for the good old days sounds strange--
...wrote off SCO as a bunch of sleazebags and went back to playing live-action roleplaying (LARP) games in their mothers' basements, or whatever it is they do when they're not writing device drivers and complaining about clueless end users.
I suspect these people are merely shocked that someone without an MBA degree and who doesn't walk around in a $2000 suit can call the shots in a company, and greatly exaggerate the degree of "arrogance"
--engineers and other geeks attending a conference
Yeah... all those weirdos
What? There are things more important than money???!!!
roller-hockey-obsessed doctoral students in computer science
Computer Science gradstudents must be obsessive, right?
an unspoken caste system has emerged. At the top are the engineers, people in the mold of Brin and Page.
They have people who actually make the product at the top????!!! Why can't they be like every other company and have all those TPS report-demanding MBAs at the top.
From Forbes... linked to in another posting
....And watch Google turn into AltaVista.
Bowie J. Poag
--Shoot, I get annoyed when somebody resurrects a ONE-year old thread on the Knoppix help board. It's ancient history by then, start a new thread.
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
Forbes dissed Linux. Forbes doesn't understand anything about technology. Therefore, you should boycott Fortune -- a different magazine than Forbes.
Crawl back under your bridge.
Given the right 6 coders, that's true. Good luck finding them.
Why do you think Google is trying so hard to hire all the top eggheads coming out of college?
Also, text searching is a patent minefield (which is one of the reasons MS's search technologies suck so bad).
Forbes is not the same magazine as Fortune. Please don't use Forbes's name to slander Fortune.
Learn to take criticism. Fortune printed a contrarian view to Google's next-big-thing hype. Rather than trying to rebut the article line by line with snappy comebacks like a Usenet troll, perhaps you should examine your conceptions of Google. Personally, I agree with the article: Google is the most overhyped company since Netscape, and its IPO will rise and fall with similar magnitude.
For more information, click here.
I know many of the people involved in starting AltaVista, as well as Inktomi's search engine. These guys aren't stupid! But their emphasis was on the brute force of using scalable systems to index huge numbers of pages in the first place, and they didn't "hit" on the better ranking algorithm.
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
I posed this to someone from Google at a conference, and he said they have policies against such things, recognizing their position if such a thing got out. But seriously, how could it get out? Heck, I could pose a query and find it blasted on a screen at the next World Wide Web conference during a Google hiring extravaganza.
If Google, or any search engine, mines the data they get from the millions of queries they see, they can potentially find some needles in haystacks. (Example: filter all the queries to see just what people at Microsoft are asking them.)
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
"Google's a very nice system, but compared to my vision, it's pathetic" - Jim Allchin, Microsoft
Yeah, well that's vapourware for you. Compared to my vision of "software that just works"(tm) todays computers are all pathetic.
All thanks for the engineers at google for making something really hard work really well, while Jim is still waving his arms around.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Are you kidding? Google is already evil, you dupe. You fawn over Google because of its search results while ignoring the numerous signs right in front of your face.
Few Internet companies can say that. AOL/etc. can't. Yahoo can't. The new telecoms can't. Microsoft can.
Google as a business has no real need to go public, because they don't need cash. Going public is a dumb financial decision for them, because they'd be overpaying for money they don't need.
The founders could buy out their initial investors in a leveraged buyout and go private. That's a tough deal to set up, and the VCs would have to agree, but it's another, and perhaps a better, option.
As if Google needed more publicity?
Hey, CmdrTaco and friends: time to implement a topic rationing system among the top-level articles, to spread them out? Or is this merely an indication that you have so many posts about Google, or so little about everything else, that it merits this much attention?
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
Are there more than 5 countries in the world calling this product as Coke?
Real engineering work on hotbot stopped when lycos made a buyout offer.
Very few people heard of google when hotbot was set up the bomb.
Daniel Brandt, is that you?
I didn't know you had a Slashdot account!
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Forgive me Brin, but Microsoft have made heaps of money without problems by selling technically inferior products. Users forced to search on MSN will experience the problems but the vast majority of them will not migrate from the Microsoft solution.
Why IPO Google at all? Keep it privately owned and to hell with the SEC and having to jump through hoops.
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
I've seen it happen.
It only took a few weeks after my 50+ person dotcom moved from our cruddy you-store-it space to a full floor of goregeous windowed offices that everything ground to a halt. Layoffs in 3 months. Everything over at 8 months.
Am I the only offended by condescending tone of the article when it comes to computer scientists and engineers?
Shut up, nerd.
Come on now people. Do you honestly think Google would run two pages of ad-like search results?hb
That's not Google. That's scumware. Check your hosts file and/or run hijackthis to clean the scumware off your box. You're being fed ads by a third party that's stealing your Google-bound queries. Check your urls, and I suspect you'll see that you're not really at google.com.
GoClick.com is one known source of this sort of scumware.
Walmart is a huge conglomerate that, through its sheer size, can easily dictate the terms under which suppliers will operate - including their business practices, margins, etc. Despite the immense pressure for lower-cost goods, many suppliers see business with Walmart as a double-edged sword - they won't clear the margins they'd like, but it's likely that the volume will make up for it. Nonetheless, they grow dependent on their business ties with Walmart, as it often ends up representing a significant portion of their revenue.
Google has the same level of control, it seems, over those who rely on placement for their business. Play by Google's rules (which are subject to change), and you may end up OK. Try to make an end-run, and it may be a very costly mistake.
Yes there were SEOs (third party optimizers) for Alta Vista back then too.
Then came Lycos. Then came Inktomi. Then came Google. Google has stayed on top a long time by their regin must end - sooner or later PageRank will be totally cracked by SEOs and their algorithm won't provide decent results anymore.
Search is a well researched and well understood problem. What Google has is a better API and API business model.
...as a result of the Overture acquisition
You should see these Google employees walking around like they are king shit. I work at Intuit, and the way they walk around the area with such a swagger, not caring about cars that they are in the way of, with their stupid Segways and scooters, its infuriating.
They way they think they own the road during their lunch hour is just plain rude. "Yes, I know you're a car, and yes, I am taking my time crossing the street, but what are you going to do about it? I'm from Google."
Thank God they will move from these buildings. Their sign on the old SGI HQ is up so it's only a matter of time.
I've scroogled for the following:
- world conquest (0 missing)
- pr0n (0 missing)
- evil (0 missing)
- microsoft (0 missing)
- computers (16 missing -- all crap)
- end of the internet (4 missing - 3 crap)
- lpetrazickis (0 missing)
- deviancy (0 missing)
- PNG 256x256 icons (2 missing - all crap)
- jargon file (0 missing)
- bofh (0 missing)
- unix humor (1 missing - all crap)
Excuse me for not crying.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
Noone (well, apart from you) decided that search engines were not allowed.
Well, it's a good think nobody listened to Mr. Noone.
Yes, it is offensive, but it's hardly surprising. Corporate suits are the grown-up version of jock bullies in high school. In fact, a lot of them are the exact same people -- business degrees are the favored choice of people who want to get "an education" but don't have the brains to study something that takes an effort to learn.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
"A rise of stock- and option-stoked greed is creating rifts within the company. Employees carp that Google is morphing in strange and nerve-racking ways."
Kill it QUICK!!!
Everything that has a beginning has an end.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I don't get it! At the time I found a solution to a problem that was posted, I just wanted to add that solution but could not! What's the point?
Too bad I'm posting AC and my post will not be modded as high as yours--dumbass.
You just post a message to the SAME group with the SAME subject, and Google will decide it belongs in the SAME thread.
Don't thank me, Just Doing My Job.
-Obviousman
I have whiplash!
Look. Google is a useful tool but if nobody minds, I'll still be keeping my skills sharpened on alternative surfing methods, and my webpages well linked through other means. If Google decided tomorrow to cut you out of their search engine, what would happen to your business model?
May never happen, but before Google, this wasn't even a possibility of a problem. Now it is. And with Google wanting to make money. . . I'm glad that some moderators have the brains to recognize the inherent dangers here!
But then others have modded me down like a bunch of thoughtless, reactionary monkeys upset that their favorite search-engine through which they somehow define their meagre self images has been bad-mouthed. Whatever. If you'll excuse me, I'd just as soon the web were not set up in such a precarious manner.
When all the fish school off into predictable masses, that's when the trawling nets feast.
-FL
Google is Dying!
So what? We are on Slash-Dot!
Let's bash Microsoft!
The next step on the road to destroying an art form is to write it in 1337.
... of getting links to expertsexhange.com in half the Google searches I make anymore.
If I want to pay $20/month to find answers, I'll use something besides Google. They seriously need to quit linking to pay-for-support sites, or at least charge them for sponsorship.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Let me be a "usenet troll" and address your post point-by-point.
Forbes is not the same magazine as Fortune.
An you didn't get modded +5 insightful?!!!
Fortune and Forbes cater to the same audience and are very similar in content and purpose.
Please don't use Forbes's name to slander Fortune.
It slander if its its untrue. But I just cited several examples to prove, that didn't I? Where's the slander?
Learn to take criticism. Fortune printed a contrarian view to Google's next-big-thing hype. Rather than trying to rebut the article line by line with snappy comebacks like a Usenet troll, perhaps you should examine your conceptions of Google. Personally, I agree with the article: Google is the most overhyped company since Netscape, and its IPO will rise and fall with similar magnitude.
Learn to read my posting before criticising it. I said that Fortune and Forbes always speak condescendingly about engineers. To make that point I cited several examples. However, since you were so awed by this article, you obviously don't believe that an article needs to back up its assertions with facts, so that point may have escaped you.
Let me respond anyway. The one good point I think the article made was about people showing up late for meetings. I think that is disrespectful and unprofessional, especially if they don't pay attention when they're there.
Other than that everything they point to is not a "contrarian" view, but an inability to understand a different corporate culture... especially one where money is not the #1 priority. I refuse to give credence to any of the quotations from "unnamed CEOs"... we aren't talking about some middle manager afraid of getting fired for criticising the company or getting harassed by coworkers. If you won't let your words attached to your name, I don't want to read them.
.. I wish I'd thought of it. :o)
I do far less "surfing" than before, and Google is my first port of call for most obscure things.
Basically, they would be getting a massive upset in their S/N ratio.
Maybe Wikis will be the cure? Or soem measure on the overall quality of linking...
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Google is rapidly becoming useless as a web shopping search tool. Which is more than annoying, as I haven't managed to find a useful replacement.
Yahoo Shopping. Sort-by-price. Cross reference merchant ratings with BizRate if in doubt.
Da Blog
An interview at google...
Google Manager: What did you do for your last company?
Canidate: I created an application that started a sucessful new culture that made XYZ corp. $50 million last year.
Google Manager: So did you go to to Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, or an Ivy League school?
Canidate: No...
Google Manager: Your job search did not match any of our openings.
Google needs a dose of reality. The google xmas party in LA about two weeks ago reminded me of AOL. There was an open bar, all you can eat lobster, drunk executives and dimwhited customers. Google used to be seen as a dominant company due to its technology. They now look like an arrogate dot com before the bubble burst. The fact that Google is having management problems within the ranks of their executives is not surprising. Growth is easier said than done. Google is up to 1,200 employees. That's 1/3 the size of of Yahoo and 1/20th the size of M$. If Google can't manage 1,200 employees then they will fail before competition takes over. It will be interesting to see if google can prioritize profits over ideals and still manage their business effectively. Google stocks are going to turn people greedy (see AOL) and Google may fall apart when that happens. On the other hand there's MSN and Yahoo - both seasoned verterans that know how to operate a business, please customers and shareholders.
Let me be a "usenet troll" and address your post point-by-point.
Okay.
An you didn't get modded +5 insightful?!!!
"And" is the appropriate word here. Your excessive use of punctuation is not welcome.
It slander if its its untrue. But I just cited several examples to prove, that didn't I? Where's the slander?
As a lawyer, I must remind you that you are under oath.
Learn to read my posting before criticising it. I said that Fortune and Forbes always speak condescendingly about engineers. To make that point I cited several examples. However, since you were so awed by this article, you obviously don't believe that an article needs to back up its assertions with facts, so that point may have escaped you.
I disagree. I have been reading Fortune for over 20 years, and in that time there have been many articles that praise the work of engineers at companies including Google. These articles may be purchased at a cost of $2.49 each in the archive.
Let me respond anyway. The one good point I think the article blah blah blah they're there.
Good point.
Other than that everything they point to is not blah blah blah to understand a different corporate culture... blah blah from "unnamed CEOs"... we aren't blah blah harassed by coworkers. If you won't let blah blah them.
Good.
For more information, click here.
None of those were search terms which generate substatial Adwords revenue.
They only put the filters on terms that will generate them more cash.
...has a long and chequered history of selling your info off... and what they don't sell off deliberately gets vamped by bored St Petersburg teenagers at irregular intervals and sold to spammers for pennies a record.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing