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Search Beyond Google
An anonymous reader writes: "'Search Beyond Google', the cover story of the March issue of Technology Review, is one of the few current Google stories that discusses whether their technology can stay ahead of the competition in the months to come."
... or bad things ... or pretty much anything, come to an end sometime. Except Microsoft of course.
I think Google has deviated too much from searching, with their Blogger aquisition, and other stuff like that. We'll see how long they stay around.
They key for google providing relevancy is certainly eliminating "search engine spam". Almost everything that comes up on the first page for most things I search for is a referral program selling either something I'm looking for information about, or selling something completely different.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Google has had the last few years virtually unchallenged as the #1 search engine, because nobody has yet come out with anything that's better than PageRank.
But, five years is a long time to sit on an innovation without making it better. It gives the competition time to catch up. Furthermore, since PageRank doesn't seem to have seriously changed much, it's actually slipped backwards a bit as more and more people have figured out how to "beat the system" by posting nonsense sites with links to the site they want on top. Google's clearly trying to fight this, but that's an uphill battle.
Meanwhile, Yahoo now owns three distinct web-crawl based search engines, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, and Inktomi. They also own Overture, which begain life as GoTo.com who was the first to associate real search results with targetted ads. Put all these pieces together. Yahoo also has the original mega-directory site, which Google tries to duplicate by presenting the Open Directory Project on their site. In short, Yahoo's got all the resources to launch a brand with everything that Google has going for it... and when you look at AltaVista and AllTheWeb they feel quite a bit like Google already. Clearly, Yahoo's gearing up to issue a challenge to Google.
It really seems like Yahoo is making sure they have all the tech in place right now. When they're sure that they're better to Google, I fully expect to see a marketing campaign claiming that and inviting people to do head-to-head searches.
Google, as it stands now, is going to look pale in such showdowns. They've got to seriously modify PageRank so that the link spammers get downranked before Yahoo issues that challenge, or else Yahoo could reclaim the search market under it's "Google-killer" product line, and then direct people back to the original Yahoo site for their other portal needs.
Hopefully google will not go public anytime soon like they were talking about earlier. I fear that this would stifle their innovation and bring it closer to some of the other failed portals.. ie more ads in an attempt to satisfy investors.
I think it is a good idea for other search engines to step up to the plate and challenge google. It stops them from beoming complacent and spurs innovation from a desire to be #1.
I see no reason why the cycle cannot repeat. In fact, the cycle may be much like the semiconductor memory business, which has seen boom-bust cycles every few years since the early 70's. Sometimes a name will ride out for many cycles, but usually the company (and as necessary the technology) behind the name changes radically.
rather a document organizer. It gets some of its results from Google anyway and just reorganizes it. Search results have the flavor of
See books about "more stupid f---ing shit" at Amazon.
targeted organization as in targeted selling. All they want is your demographic datum.
IOW google will crush them.
...maintain their technological lead, goodwill toward them will give them some breathing room. I continued to use Altavista for quite a long time after Google came out. It was what I was familiar with, I liked it, and it worked. Why switch? Eventually, I realized that Google had keen "read your mind" powers and finally switched. :-)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
What will stop google is not their technology,
but the ossification that takes over every
large company as it grows. Changes won't be
made because it is too big a change. Changes
won't be made because it's not cost justified.
Marketing concerns will override technology.
People we get fat and happy. And unlike microsoft
i can switch to a different search engine
in a second. Yahoo is looking pretty good...
Every couple months it's "Can Google stay ahead of new competitor x?" And so far, everytime, the answer has been yes. People shift from search engines quickly when they no longer work, and people are still heading to Google.
I type something in and it spits an answer back at me.
As long as that answer is in the first page, usually the first three items listed, people simply will not care about the backend technology.
MS and others will brag about the vastness of the numbers of matching items they can find; most people only worry about finding one or two sites.
This is going to be a big non-event...mark my word.
Enough branding studies have shown that it's very very hard to knock someone off their post once they seize a certain mindshare - e.g. Coke, Windows(grin), and now Google.
So, irrespective of the technical competence, or otherwise of Google, it is going to be around and the leader, for a long time to come. P.S. My favorite missing google feature: search for bittorrent files
Google has been successful due to original thinking. It needs to ride its wave of reputation now rather than later in order to snatch up some of the finest minds to stay on top of this industry that is all about originality and fresh ideas. They seem to be on the right track by providing the work environment that they do.
But no more stuff like that Friendster wannabe site.
I'm utterly fed up with eBay with the bloodymindedness of their "enhancement" and roll-out policy. Holding a near strangle-hold on the online-auction market, they are blind to the aggrevations they inflict upon users.
Radical changes to a familiar interface shouldn't take place without dire need, unfortunately some people think it's fine to dust users. Google is all I want in a search engine and it works very well. The only reason I'd seek another search engine is if they (Google) drive me away.
BTW, did you know there's a calculator? I found it when I did a search for 'stones to pounds'
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I've always been a google fan, but this article is essentially dated on its release, given the fact that the Yahoo! switch has already occured.
I do hope Google can continue its innovation, and reduce much of the annoyance of bad results through blogs.
I'm suprised more attention wasn't given to the Google IPO, and what affect that might have on the "relatively small" 1000 person company.
-m.
for a p2p distributed transparent encrypted indexing system with voted super-nodes.
You can't handle the truth.
welcome our new search engine overlords. No, really, I'm serious.
Google is awesome, and is by far the best search engine out there. Google became the best by being the best. I use it because it works, and it works well.
In order to be dethroned, a search engine needs to work BETTER than Google. I welcome any search engine that can beat Google, as it has to be DAMN good to take that title. Microsoft search flat out sucks. If I look for articles on linux, I get articles about linux alternatives (mostly M$ content). If I google for linux, I get real linux stuff. This is just an example, but it's true across the board. I have yet to see a search engine superior to Google, and I welcome any tool that can prove itself better.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Forget about Yahoo and Microsoft. If I was google I would keep an eye on booble. No way they can compete.
Exactly. When Google falls behind, you'll know it because you'll be using something else. This kind of "Entity XXXXXXX may suffer setback YYYYYYY any day now" story isn't reporting at all, it's speculation and ghost stories.
That's what technology is, isn't it? The constant search for something better than what's available? And the approach of many companies (insert any NASDAQ 100 company here) is wait-and-see. See how the poineer does it, do the same, but throw some more bells and whistles in, or just market it better.
Google has a brilliant algorithm, thanks their 60 PhD's. But there's plenty of other PhD's out there, some of whom I'm sure are just finishing up their newest, succeeding algorithm. It's a constant game of king of the hill.
I'm a heavy google user, but I still miss altavista's ability to search for stems. For example, an altavista search for "slid* rul*" will get 'slide rules,' 'sliding rulers,' and plenty of other variations. Google does support whole word wildcards (try "miserable * failure") but stems are even more useful.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
.....in that everyone uses it, and everyone HAS used it for the past five years, or longer. People trust it, and that is something that just doesn't vanish. Plus, they HAVE done new things, such as google news.
After just a quick bit of playing around with Teoma (mentioned in the article), it seems to be better than Google. I was surprised ...
People seem to think Google is simply a place to find HTML pages. You type in your words, and poof, you get some relavent sites. Could this be replaced in 3 months? Google has a huge index, a very good search algorithm, and works for most people, but (in theory) someone might come up with a working alternative in that period. However:
And more. Babelfish translation? Caching like a billion pages? Simple design, with text ads that are actually relavent? In 3 months.
Yeah, right.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Someone should invent a search engine with regular expression support. *sigh* A world with regexp-enabled search engines... That would be a wonderful world to live in.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Google's market position when they IPO has nothing to do with their technology. It has to do with their brand. "Googling" for something is the effective equivalent of going to get a Kleenex. Noone asked for a tissue. The market is going to be buying faith in the Google brand, and it's loyal userbase.
-- http://www.criticalassets.com
It would be the rebuttal to Google bombing... searchers could fight back by giving the crap a thumbs-down. Of course, then you would have the bombers voting down all the ligit sites. Dammit.
The Philosophy of Liberty | lewrockwell.com
I kinda like this one, but not enough to not slashdot them. A cool pun, a funky gui, what more could you want in a nextgen search engine.
Todays search engines work a lot like information sieves, or panning for gold. The idea seems to be to take a bunch of stuff and wash away the un-needed, leaving behind (we hope) what we were looking for. However the very nature of the web provides the opportunity for looking at the relationships between ideas, the synthasis of knowledge as opposed to just collections of information. While the 'tricks' from the microsoft research projects look promising; only a true 'learning machine' will be able to go beyond the information and delevop a 'meta-interpretation/representation' of the raw data in order to support a 'meta-understanding' that is traversible and navigable in that we can not only connect with what we don't know, but that we can explore the unknown in terms of its relationship with what we do know.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
The majority of users who use search engines are just end users anyways and appreciate the simplicity of Google's page design. I go to Yahoo, Altavista and Lycos and there's half a million links all over the place. I go to Google, and there's a nice clean page with the text box smack right in the middle.
Visual appeal still counts.
There are three very distinct elements involved in creating a powerhouse search engine:
- A large crawl: A search engine with nothing in its database isn't going to work very well. A search engine needs as big of a crawl as possible in order to have any results at all. This takes huge resources in terms of bandwidth and computing power. Some of the early search engines met their demise when they couldn't afford to keep their crawlers growing as fast as new web content comes out.
- The Sorter: Once the long list of results that match the keywords are pulled out of the crawl, a sort needs to be applied in order to locate the best results and present them first. Google got vaulted to the top because PageRank was better than anybody else has ever put out. However, PageRank isn't perfect, so there is still room for somebody to make something better than PageRank.
-Promotion: A web site just sits there unused if it isn't promoted. Google never spent much on advertising and it just relied on word of mouth since it was so strong in the other two areas. And now that everyone turns to them first without even checking other engines, that has given them the strong advantage of a strong brand image. However, we've seen plenty of cases where inferior technology has been beaten out by better marketing. If somebody's tech passes Google, without marketing it nobody will know about it. Therefore, look for the challengers to be launching major ad campaigns inviting people to at least try them before they assume Google is better.
Can anybody put it all together? We're about to find out...
I don't really care who has the most advanced search capabilities. I use google because all the paid links appear off to the side in a different color.
Thats all I really want . . . to get my search result seperate from the commercially paid for product placements.
--Tsiangkun
... it could be great idea to publish unanswered questions as weblog.
i haventfound.blogspot.com/
Even google cannot answer everything. Web is limited even if you don't believe it. You post your question. Answers will come through trackback, comments, email. Googling the web after you posted the question. Or not.
All you need is some tag to mark post as answer or question. Hot list like metafilter to aggregate.
Is it a good idea or does it belong to recycle bin?
Mailing lists used to be about that. Discussing specific problems. Finding answers. Nowadays they are quite dead. Except some. Newbies, spam, whatever is the reasons. Problem is that those who possess knowledge don't have enough stimulus to share it. I don't solve that problem. The answer might be micropayments or gifts via amazon.
But make a good deed today. Answer one or two questions. In a year it might make quite a lot. In some day you might need answer to something yourself.
http://answers.google.com/answers/main
http://
Google recently added stemming as a search of {quit smoke} will reveal. You can read about it in their help section. Stemming can be disabled on specific words. Otherwise the update came around November 15, 2003, but is probably still in flux, so there isn't too much good info about it yet.
A lot of articles (including this one) are focused with how Google (and their would-be competitors) can improve search via algorithms like PageRank; and again and again the proposed/imaged solutions are based on server-side computation. IMHO, the real solution to improving search is client-side -- and I don't mean search toolbars -- but rather using the computional power of the client to provide a better experience than what is available inside your browser. Searching in a browser is cool, but why not build a powerful Google search client app?
As a simple example: if your a Mac user, Beholder is really a much more useful image search frontend than using images.google.com alone (yes, I've mentioned this before, but hey, a developer has to eat).
Google really helped with research papers couple years ago, but now I find there's too much spam. So much so, that now I'm into Grad studies, I am going to Lexis-Nexis to find out information about topics. Also I have found that the Internet is certianly not what it used to be either in terms of quality of content. There used to be a lot more academic sites appear when I searching for information on a topic. Now, especially being in an political science related field, International Affairs, doing a web search on some topics leads to dozens of ranting bloggers instead of more academic type work.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Yes, Google has a spam problem. It has been getting worse over the last year. In April, 2003 Google stopped crawling the web once per month, and then recalculating PageRank based on that monthly crawl. Since then, there has been a question of whether PageRank can even be calculated accurately by Google.
I speculated about a 4-byte docID overflow problem in an essay last June at Google Watch. In recent months Google started a "Supplemental Index" for some curious, unexplained reason. Their total number of pages indexed was recently updated to 4,285,199,774 -- just below the maximum for a 32-bit integer. It looks as suspicious now as it did last June.
Last November, Google began using an on-the-fly filter to further refine the search results for ecommerce sites. Some spam was deleted, a lot of other spam took its place, and a lot of mom and pop ecommerce sites were dropped inadvertently. Many people were unhappy.
Further evidence that Google's old ranking system is broken is the fact that three famous Googlebombs, "french military victories," "weapons of mass destruction" and "miserable failure" are all still working. The first one is eleven months old. It used to be that such Googlebombs were suppressed at the next monthly crawl, when PageRank was recalculated. Now it seems that suppressing them is beyond Google's ability. How else can you explain why Google puts up with these widely-publicized embarrassments?
Google's results remain unsurpassed for noncommercial sites from EDU, ORG, and GOV domains, however. Their crawling of the noncommercial sector is the most complete of any engine. The reason Google does so well here is probably because spam isn't much of a problem in this area.
So far Yahoo doesn't appear to be making much of an effort at covering the noncommercial web. It should be added that Google has more of a spam problem simply because spammers have been focused on Google for so long. Once Yahoo gets the same attention from spammers, then we'll be able to make a fair comparison of Yahoo with Google.