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In Google We Trust
firstadopter.com writes "The New York Times (registration needed) writes about how far Google has penetrated our culture (soul sucking "Free" registration required) in the last six years with the pros and cons of its success. It's amazing to think 200 million searches are done on the search engine each day on an index of 6 billion pages."
Is whether Google will be able to hold onto their cool after they have their IPO and have to answer to shareholders...
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
It's a NYT story about google, but without the google no-reg link, heh.
Wow, this is BIG news!
People use Google!
Calling the f'ing newspaper!
5 years ago i would refuse too belive that the name of a search engine would turn into a common verb. ;)
Google it.
Its better than RTFM
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
It is interesting, whenever I want any information I go straight to google and rarely consider other sources. How many people do this? Do you ever find better results with other search engines?
No-reg link (free of karma whoring)
Yep, while listening to Michael Myers commentary track of the Goldmember DVD, I heard him call Michael Caine a "veritable Google of the entertainment business." Thus, we are stuck with the word google as synonymous with search or knowledge base, whether Google likes it or not.
-- SKYKING, SKYKING, DO NOT ANSWER.
In Searching We Trust
By DAVID HOCHMAN
Published: March 14, 2004
BEN SILVERMAN is what you might call a Google obsessive. A producer and a former talent agent best known for bringing "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" to American television, Mr. Silverman Googles people he is lunching with. He Googles for breaking news, restaurant reviews and obscure song lyrics. He Googles prospective reality-show contestants to make sure they don't have naked pictures floating around the Web. And, like every self-respecting Hollywood player, he Googles himself. Competitively.
"Guys all over town are on the phone saying, `I bet I can get more Google hits than you.' " he said recently. "It's become this ridiculous new power game."
It's more like the new kabbalah. With an estimated 200 million searches logged daily, Google, the most popular Internet search engine, "has a near-religious quality in the minds of many users," said Joseph Janes, an associate professor at the University of Washington in Seattle who taught a graduate seminar on Google this semester. "A few years ago, you would have talked to a trusted friend about arthritis or where to send your kids to college or where to go on vacation. Now we turn to Google."
The Web site that has become a verb is many things to many people, and to some, perhaps too much: a dictionary, a detective service, a matchmaker, a recipe generator, an ego massager, a spiffy new add-on for the brain. Behind the rainbow logo, Google is changing culture and consciousness. Or maybe not ? maybe it's the world's biggest time-waster, a vacuous rabbit hole where, in January, 60 million Americans, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings, foraged for long-lost prom dates and the theme from "Doogie Howser, M.D."
"In one sense, with Google, everything is knowable now," said Esther Dyson, who publishes Release 1.0, a technology-industry newsletter. "We were much more passive about information in the past. We would go to the library or the phone book, and if it wasn't there, we didn't worry about it. Now, people can't as easily drift from your life. We can't pretend to be ignorant." But the flood of unedited information, she said, demands that users sharpen critical thinking skills, to filter the results. "Google," she said, "forces us to ask, `What do we really want to know?' "
Google delivers information that can radically alter one's self-perception. About a quarter of "vanity" searchers ? those who search for their own names ? say they are surprised by how much information they find about themselves, according to a survey by the Pew Internet Project.
Sometimes, they're really surprised. When Orey Steinmann, 17, of Los Angeles, entered his unusual name on Google's query line, he discovered that he was listed on a Canadian Web site for missing children and told a teacher. After an investigation, county officials took him into protective custody last month and federal marshals arrested his mother, Gisele Marie Goudreault. She has been charged in Canada with parental abduction, said Barbara Masterson, an assistant United States attorney in Los Angeles. Canadian authorities are seeking Ms. Goudreault's extradition, and Orey is deciding whether to contact the father he never knew.
Then there are the Google miracle stories. The morning after five left-handed electric guitars owned by Robert McLaughlin were stolen from a storage room at his San Diego apartment complex last year, he searched Google's image library for guitar photos to use on a reward poster. Instead, he found the stolen goods. "The thief was selling them in a live auction," he said. "In the past, my report would have gotten lost in a mountain of paperwork. Because of Google, the cops recovered four of the five guitars that week."
While some compare Google's reservoir of six billion documents to the ancient library at Alexandria, it often feels like the shallowest ocean on earth. "Google can be useful as a starting point to research or for superficial inquests," said James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress. "But far too often, it is a gateway to illiterate chatter, propaganda and blasts of unintelligible material."
I just glanced at the google terms and conditions and can't for the life of me figure out what makes them obscene. It's a standard T&C, only shorter and clearer than most companies'.
Well, Google has certainly affected web design. It's not uncommon for designers to arrange their site architecture in order to optimize their page rank.
The good thing is that it's encouraged symantically correct HTML (ie. using [h1] and [em] tags, instead of [font size="30"] or [b]). The downside is that some people still don't understand what it takes to rise in the rankings: quality content and getting linked to. The more shady web designers set up link farms and share links like a heroin addict shares needles.
That must hurt them deeply. I bet they miss you.
It's safe to say when a search engine takes place as a verb in the 'tech cultures' vocabulary that it has created an empire "Would you google this for me...". In my opinion it was one of the great replacements for lycos and yahoo when it came out. Quicker more feature rich and over all better and easier to use, and that is why it has been able to grab such a market hold and popularity
After all, Apple has, hasn't it?
The coolest voice ever.
The actual headline on the NY Times article is "In Searching We Trust", but Slashdot calling it "In Google We Trust" isn't that far off the mark since no other search engine is even mentioned in the piece.
Google isn't the only search engine out there, just the dominant one at the moment. Somebody who is using only Google, and is not aware that their are other tools with which to get a second opinion is missing out on a pretty big portion of the web that Google either hasn't discovered or just doesn't think highly of in PageRank.
I'm not religiously devoted to Google, I use it because I reckon it's the best search engine available. If something better comes along, I'd switch straight away.
Decode these
Yeah, if you search on "apple" it's going to talk about the computer company. Search on "apples", you know, like human people talk, and the first hit is an excellent, informative site on the tasty fruit. Search on "fruit apple" (well, without the quotes) and you get relevant results as well. (On the other hand, "fruit apple" is a better search than "apple fruit", so there is some seeming arbitraryness to it...until you learn that Google gets some hints from word order on queries and pages.)
But yeah, successfully using Google requires both some search term assemblage skill and some online cultural literacy. Old farts at the NYTimes might not be blessed with too much of either, but I bet their kids are.
It's not perfect, but that college president / symphony director's comment "It's like looking for a lost ring in a vacuum bag. What you end up with mostly are bagel crumbs and dirt." sounds like it's coming from someone who doesn't really know how to use a search engine.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
This is so untrue. Almost any computer savvy individual knows that google results are not very reliable. Google is just an online popularity contest. And it doesn't go very deep into the website structure. If you believe in google as your messiah, then you do really need to get your head checked.
As for the story about Left Handed Guitars, all I can say is it took google more than one month to include my site in their searches. So unless the guy did the search after one month, he would probably not have found them.
Google is not at all what it is hyped upto be. It has its uses, but it ain't the oracle my friend.
Indefinitely Detained US Citizen
Google, the most popular Internet search engine, "has a near-religious quality in the minds of many users,"
And that is exactly why Microsoft will have a hell of a time toppling it with any MSN Search. Lord, Google is a verb now. The kind of entrenchment that Google has in our culture is extraordinarily difficult to overcome.
The coolest voice ever.
www.google.com
To be honest, before I used firefox, or phoenix as it was called back then, I very rarely used google. However, since firefox has a built in 'google function' as I call it (this works by typing google [searchtopic] in the address bar and hitting enter) I must use it around 10 to 20 times a day.
Looking back on things, I don't know how I ever got anything done without firefox or google...
In my experience Google seems great for searching for popular items, but due to their ranking system if I want to perform an obscure search, my chances of finding anything are slim to none.
Apparently, the "deep web" is the best place to make obscure searches, and I've used turbo10.com to perform searches in this way. It's really interesting to compare the results of two searches between google and turbo10 - google certainly appears to be the quick and easy search engine that grandma can use, but for serious work, I am increasingly finding myself turning to the deep web.
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
Here is the cached page if we ./ google:
J :w ww.google.com/+google&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
...
http://66.102.11.104/search?q=cache:zhool8dxBV4
Wait
For developers, the Google SOAP API is great. I used it a year and a half ago for a demo system that answered "who" and "where" questions posed in natural language. You need to ask for a license key that allows 1000 SOAP based calls a day. In addition to searching, you can also use the Google spelling corrector with this API.
Amazon also provides a SOAP (and REST) API.
-Mark
Currently many interesting sites, such as wikipedia, everything2, groklaw, are spread by words-of-mouth (mostly on slashdot :) Surely many people has taken the pain to collect a set of links that is hopefully quite complete by the time of writing (which is much harder than simple googling), but such pages usually show up only in obscure places at google. Maybe the community can invent some way to make an easy-to-use distributed link-list service where everyone can easily share the results of their searching efforts.
The other day I had to look up a missed call from my cellphone. Now, there is a pretty good online phonebook for my country (Iceland), but the number was not found. So I googled it (yes, it has become a verb), and google found it. Turns out it was a direct line to an employee of a company (who's main number was registered in the phonebook). I use google every single day, life just wouldn't be the same without it.
I preface this by saying Google is probably the only search engine I use at the moment but ...
This stinks of hype. With an IPO due later this year, a established news source writing at lengths about the wonders of Google sounds a bit fishy. I began to wonder reading the article - who exactly really wrote this...
Hopefully its just the paranoid part of me.
Some one, please, prove me wrong.
[ Monday is a terrible way to spend one seventh of your life. ]
I think the "next big thing" will be information only search engines. Filtering through the plethora of advertising and crud is getting more tiresome as the punters learn how to optimise their rankings. Something like Google but with a Bayesian spam filter attached to the front end to filter the results for me...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
...If you're lazy and afraid of possible spamming (probably not from NYT, but you never know), then try the slashdot account!
Username: slashdot2003
password: slashdot2003
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
I'm using wikipedia now for my encyclopedia over google (which I used to use). I've also been looking for alternative searching systems but google still seems to be the best. I wouldn't put much stock in them staying on top after profit driven investors get to them. Froogle has been an interesting foray, I must say.
The basic concept of PageRank is flawed because it assumes a monotonic ordering of sites on some single scale (e.g., popularity as defiend by linkage). The problem with PageRank is not the use of links to assess popularity, but the presumption of a single scale.
The search of "Apple" illustrates this well. This search, like s many is deeply ambiguous. It could refer to the computer company, to the fruit, to the record company, to New York City, or to Apple Valley (MN or CA). Even if you know it refers to the company, its still ambiguous. It could refer to the company (as an investment), the products (for purchase), or a question(as in technical support).
The point is that each of these ambiguous alternatives creates an independent cluster of hits. Although one can create a ranking within each cluster, it is impossible to construct a meanful rank for all hits across all clusters - the second hit for "Apple computer" is not comparable to the 2nd hit for "Apple Records".
Instead of a pagerank scheme that sorts the universe of hits the instant the user enters the search, search engines should be more interactive. The first page of hits would emphasize breadth -- displaying hits most representative of their respective alternative clusters. As the searcher selects hits, the subsequent pages might show popularity-ranked hits within the clusters that seem to interest the searcher.
Each hit and each page would serve a double-duty -- serving the searcher's need to get information from the internet, and answering the search engine's question about the needs of the searcher. Until the search engine understands each searcher and each search, it cannot hope to rank the hits.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I thought it was 4,285,199,774 pages
Here's one way it is done...
I think Google really is an example of a large company that everyone can like. Other posts have already alluded to the attitude many have taken--not even thinking of other search engines when looking for information. With an index of over 6 Billion Pages it's almost impossible for anyone else to compete. But these facts are just the tip of the economic and creative iceberg. Through a proactive strategy, Google has become a symposium of services. Google News, Froogle, and partnerships with Dictionary.com and Blogger.com. When google created a tool bar (http://toolbar.google.com/), Yahoo and Microsoft followed. (Google's toolbar, FYI, has been the most successful--much to Microsoft's chagrin.) It's actually rather amazing that such an aggressive and successful company has remained free of so much of the controversy typical of similar corporations. Google really is a friendly giant.
Every windows user is a sadomasochist.
From the article:
My interpretation of the sentence was: hmm, strange that so many Slashdot trolls share the name "Dave Gorman".
668.5
I remember reading somewhere on the Net (of course) a piece called something like "Google Ate My Brain" refering to the fact that you have to google to know something, and you can't rely on your existing knowledge. While it's great to be able to use Google for nearly everything you would like to know about, it has its sad counterpoints. One of the counterpoints could be the fact that you are more unsure if what you know about a thing really is right, and you have to google for the truly definitive answer. And another counterpoint could be the absence of deep knowledge on websites.
"Until you do what you believe in, how do you know whether you believe in it or not?" -- Leo Tolstoy
Registration is not needed! Thanks to google :-)
4 GOOG.h tml
Just google for the following URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/14/fashion/1
(without the space in "h tml")
Google will tell you that it found no results, but that you can visit the link by clicking onto it. Do that and that's all.
I was disappointed in the piece. Because I'm the founder of Google Watch, the reporter on the piece, David Hochman, called me twice in the last three weeks to talk about Google, for a total of about an hour. I have a feeling that the reason the piece came out the way it did is because he was constrained by his editors. The NYT has a custom-filtered AdWords feed from Google, and it's one of the reasons why the Digital NYT is in the black. Their record of publishing trenchant pieces about Google has been rather lame now for several years. Money talks, both at the NYT and at Google.
"...It's amazing to think 200 million searches are done on the search engine each day on an index of 6 billion pages."
Less impressive when you realize that 150 million of those searches are for Britney and Janet...
(I kid, google is the most esssential tool for my job...)
Acquiescence leads to obliteration
Once upon a time, Yahoo was cool and had the endorsement of nerds.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Once upon a time AltaVista was the "unbeatable" search engine of choice.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
For me, the major turning point was when they acquired dejanews. The usenet archive was a great resource of help to me setting up my linux boxes, when not everything worked out of the box like it is today.
I wish google would stop passing the search words along with the URL when I click on a link. That's a privacy invasion.
What's worse, now I've started to receive spam that's addressed as 'from' people whose names I've looked up.
Other than that, I could worship at the temple of google happily. Except that they're planning to go public. Could someone please send me a list of other good engines? I want a couple backup places to check when google starts to suck.
Self-referential sigs are rarely entertaining.
200 million searches a day, eh? Being a performance geek, I am driven to estimate the implications of that load.. Please feel free to augment and correct..
200M searches/day = 8.33M/hour = 138888/min =
*** Google averages 2415 searches / second ***
Average page size = 5,563 bytes (a search for "apple", hey I RTFA)
Assume outbound bandwidth requirement of 6000 bytes/search with some overhead.
2415/sec * 6000 bytes/search =
*** 13.88 MB/sec avg or 1200 GB/day bandwidth requirement (OUTBOUND ONLY) ***
CPU.. 2415 searches/second.. Determine required aggregate CPU capacity using various assumed values for 'CPU per search':
0.25 CPU sec/search = 603 CPU seconds required for each wall second
0.5 CPU sec/search = 1207
1.0 CPU sec/search = 2415
2.0 CPU sec/search = 4830
4.0 CPU sec/search = 9660
8.0 CPU sec/search = 19320
Assume they only run the search boxes at 50-80% util and tweak estimates accordingly. Also, the burstiness inherent in the internet will greatly impact these requirements (assume at least +30% for the second to second variations as well as the hourly variations).
"soul sucking 'Free' registration required)"
Wtf is that about? They're providing you with an article for free, on the condition that you give them some information so they can maybe recover their costs, and you bitch about it? If you don't like registration, don't register -- but then you don't get articles from websites that want to do that. Also, when they say "Free", they obviously mean registration has no monetary cost, not that it has no cost at all (e.g., privacy cost, time cost to fill out form). Many people place a high value on money, but a lower value on time and privacy (to the extent that private info is revealed by these forms).
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
What if google suddently went down? Completely. Totally. Off-the-map down. I wonder how well the internet would route around the problem. Sure there are other search engines, but think of all the more subtle effects that might seen as a result.
Why the heck does every slashdot story linking to a free registration required site put it in a parenthetical after the link? 1) don't we figure it out after clicking it anyway? 2) who cares? 3) does this imply some disdain for free registration, even though it is part of the site's business model (i.e. making money)? 4) Isn't the endless repetition of these little phrases DISTRACTING and ANNOYING??!
/. has included articles from the NY Times for quite a while. There have been a number of complaints that it requires registration to read. The recommended solution has been to not include NY Times articles as /. links (i.e. to refuse to post a link to NY Times the same way /. would not link to an article that required monetary payment).
/. (as paid links presumably are -- at least I've never seen one). The extraneous comment wards off those who would be offended, while at the same time implying that they are being overly sensitive. Laugh. It's /. humor.
The "soul sucking 'Free' registration required)" is a compromise that seems to be working (I don't see the complaints that registration is required anymore). Except when people miss the joke and complain about that.
Obviously the poster read the article. T.f. it can reasonably be assumed that the poster disagrees that registration required links should be barred from
Here's another way of looking at it. Last year, Google returned about 79% of all search results on the web - a very impressive number. That's because both Yahoo and Aol used Google search results.
However, now that Yahoo no longer uses Google, it is estimated that Google will only return about 50% of the search results on the web - Yahoo will now return about 43%. See the before and after pie diagrams and numbers at Danny Sullivan's SearchEngineWatch.com article.
For those of you who have been depending on traffic free from the boy scouts at Google, who have deliberately avoided lots of different ways to monetize their main asset, have you looked at how you rank on Yahoo lately? And have you checked out Yahoo's Site Match program, where you pay BOTH for inclusion in their index AND PER CLICK THRU if anyone happens to find your site?
Basically, they have packaged up their search engine into a small server case (1U), which can be used in a single capacity (for small businesses), or networked together in multiples for larger businesses, or as a company grows.
With it, a company can set it up to search their own website, or in a more useful context, search their intranet for cataloging and indexing internal documents.
Now, I know that alone won't keep them afloat after an IPO, but it is an interesting form of their technology that they sell...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon