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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.'"
"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.
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.
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.
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
Nope.
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.
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.
Other examples where obscurity is the ONLY security:
1. Code that states/federal revenue services use to flag accounts for audits. This code, in the public, would instantly destroy the revenue stream of the government. Accountants with programming skills could determine *exactly* what limits they could test and get away with. Every return filed would be for the maximum amount that the code would allow without triggering and audit.
2. Fraud detection code used by credit companies, service providers, etc. Armed with this code crackers would have free reign over credit cards and online payment systems. Exact patterns of usuage could be setup to guarantee that fraud flags would not be triggered.
3. Code that determines which passengers get flagged for pre-flight searches. Armed with this information criminals could fashion profiles that guarantee they will not be probed in-depth.
These four examples destroy your silly notion. Open Source is not a magic pill. A truly open source version of Google would be a useless tool within a matter of weeks, if not days.
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.
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.
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
We had a long discussion on this just yesterday. I don't see the point of repeating everything again today. But I don't think your conspiracy theories are plausible -- Google were trying to get rid of spam, and may have been over-zealous, but I don't think they were deliberately trying to worsen their search results; they know that will lead to a very quick death.
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.