Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
"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!
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.
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
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
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.
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
That survey must have been complete nonsense. There is a very large world population that has never received so much as a single packet from the internet. I'll bet quite a few of them have drunk some Coke though.
GM, BMW, FedEX and the computer lot - yep, can understand that (though not agree). But Coke? Utter nonsense - Coke penetrates both high and low tech markets, something Google simply cannot do.
I'd be interested to see the nature of this survey - do you have a link?
Cheers,
Ian
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?
Believe it or not, there are some applications that CANNOT BE EFFECTIVELY OPEN SOURCED.
Open sourcing a search engine would 100% guarantee absolute junk for results.
Believe it or not, this would depend on HOW YOU DO IT.
I seem no reason why search engine technology couldn't be open sourced if it was approached in a sensible way from a technical viewpoint. After all, the technology of the internet itself is all open source, and yet we don't really get problems with companies trying to fiddle that software in their favour (for instance, randomly deleting packets from their competitors).
1. Code that states/federal revenue services use to flag accounts for audits.
So change the code. Stop using hard limits, which is a stupid idea anyway, and start using score-based heuristics. The weightings aren't part of the code-base anyway, so analysis of the code won't give you much. Apply a random factor so the edges are fuzzy. People are going to try and find loopholes in the code and avoid audits anyway --- let 'em. If your code is good, the only way they can avoid audits is by not doing anything that requires auditing. Which is the whole point.
2. Fraud detection code used by credit companies, service providers, etc.
3. Code that determines which passengers get flagged for pre-flight searches.
Exactly the same things apply here. Hiding the problems doesn't prevent the problems. All it will do is prevent you from knowing the problems exist. Make the algorithms public and you can see the problems --- yes, they can be exploited, but they can also be fixed far more quickly, and improving the algorithms is the correct solution.
If Google released their source code, then yes, evil people could find loopholes and exploit them to artificially boost their rankings... but non-evil people, finding those same loopholes, could work out how to close the loopholes and submit the changes back for inclusion in the running code base. The end result? A better search engine.
Think of it in evolutionary terms. The spammers are evolving to take advantage of Google. Google is evolving to defend itself from them. Open-sourcing Google would speed up the process, that's all; which means we'd end up with a better search engine more quickly.
You missed his point.
Google's "democratic" page ranking techniques, a part of which is called PageRankTM(C), are unknown entities -- the most we know about how Google ranks pages is based upon trial and error, observations, and some basics like "links from powerful sites improve your ranking". This is intentional as Google wants to avoid sites "stuffing the ballot box", if you will.
If "Search Engine Optimizers" had the source code for Google, it would be a "arms race" of SEOs battling to perfectly match whatever search boosting criteria Google uses - perhaps it wants a certain page churn, or URL length and content, or certain word choices, etc.
These four examples destroy your silly notion.
You seem to be very confused.
Your examples are bespoke systems for very specific purposes. There would be no benefit in open sourcing them because they are only used by the people that write them.
But lets ignore that. Let's say, just for arguments sake, that the Revenue Service did want to open source software that only it uses. There is no reason why it couldn't do it - you see you assume that for instance, the reveunues software would contain hard-coded rules like, "if a bar claims business costs of over 55% of its income, then flag it for investigation". Now, it is very unlikely that the software the revenue uses has this kind of information hardcoded into it. These rules would be in database of some kind. So the reveunue could releases the software it uses as open source - it wouldn't be much help to crooked accountants if they didn't have access to the rule base.
The same is true for your other two examples.
I'm inclined to agree with you, but (you knew there was a but coming, didn't you?) I recall the flap a decade or so ago over the US IRS. They were flagging people who corrected minor mistakes by the IRS and paid what they thought was actually correct (where this was higher). Seems the IRS fell into the habit of calling this the "dumb but honest" flag. Remarks to that effect were even in the IRS's codebase. I don't think Open Source would work for the IRS any more than you do, but I also want to find a way for some sort of watchdog to quickly detect such things hiding in Closed Source applications, particularly ones used by the government, but possibly including private entities where they have become trusted keystones of the society. The IRS has actually become a better agency over the last ten years or so, but it took a lot of effort by congress to weed out problems that had become endemic and institutionalized.
So I guess the question is not should Google become Open Source, but should there be some auditing process for Closed Source code used by such entities, and if so, who should become the new watchman?
Who is John Cabal?
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
If Google released their source code, then yes, evil people could find loopholes and exploit them to artificially boost their rankings... but non-evil people, finding those same loopholes, could work out how to close the loopholes and submit the changes back for inclusion in the running code base. The end result? A better search engine.
Actually your description sounds more like "a constant battle for the status quo" rather than "a better search engine". Of course I think you're tremendously understating the motivation of those who want to exploit loopholes (it is a _huge_ $ business, and one's ranking on Google is of tremendous economic consequence in many businesses), while overstating those who would want to close the loopholes (most people don't have a fat pipe, er the network kind, that allows them to "Scratch their own search itch" and run their own search engine. As such, it's unlikely that there's going to be large ranks of benevolent free programmers scouring through the Google code, apart from a passing curiousity).
Most companies can't randomly delete their competitors' packets because malicious packet drops will be handled the same way as random packet drops: the sender will route around the failure point. It would only be effective if a company controlled a competitor's only uplink.
So, it's a well designed system.
To stuff the PageRank rating, however, a company only needs to change its own pages, not to change those of its competitors. Any large company that could afford to spend time/money could potentially break the system.
You are describing a page ranking system that can be broken, so it's not well designed. I think the key is the fact that you only have control over your own web sites - if you can break the system for your competitors by modifying your own site them the page ranking system you are using is faulty.
If I had access to the code behind PageRank, I could guarantee my clients get excellent pacement. Same with other people. Honest people who just put up a website/page would be left in the dust by spammers.
So how do we know Google isn't doing just that? How can we be _sure_ that Google isn't giving favourable placement to some sites or fixing the data? In fact, there have been several controversies surrounding this. Credibility is not all that much better just because it's closed source, buddy...
The Welkin: Online Music Reviews
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.
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
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.
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
Other companies do research too.
For more information, click here.
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).
Am I the only offended by condescending tone of the article when it comes to computer scientists and engineers?
Shut up, nerd.
Time-Warner publications don't understand tech. This isn't the first time that Fortune has printed a story that was totally whacked.
I see the invisible hand of Microsoft behind this story. Google doesn't agree to a Microsoft buyout and all of a sudden a wave of negative press descends. To cap it off Gates has the gall to suggest they never wanted to buy Google in the first place!
In fact Time Warner publications are a good counter indicator. When their Business 2.0 suggested in a recent issue that tech had nowhere to go but down I became convinced we'd hit bottom and were on our way back up.
Man Holmes