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In Google We Trust

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the stuff-to-read dept.

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."

21 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. The multi million dollar question... by turnstyle · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:The multi million dollar question... by mindriot · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Google simply won because it did what it was supposed to do -- find web pages. Just that. Fast. No advertisement crap and other "portal" bullshit. Remember, when Google came up, other engines were getting gradually more clogged up with crap no one needed -- just because someone wanted to make an extra buck. Look at the other engines now. Like AltaVista. They've all gone back to simpler interfaces and concentrated on what they are supposed to do -- providing a simple interface for a web search, not a shopping mall.

      Once people realized that Google just /worked/, the world was conquered simply by word of mouth...

    2. Re:The multi million dollar question... by KingJoshi · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Which is one thing people forget but makes others things all the more puzzling.

      Winamp became almost the defacto music player, and while WMP has also a large share, winamp gained popularity through word of mouth as well.

      ICQ *used* to have the same, until the software began to deteriorate. Now, AIM, MSN and Yahoo are the popular ones, though I don't know of anyone that uses Yahoo (I hear different ones are popular in different regions of the world).

      Programs such as Kazaa, Gnutella, Imesh, etc also gained widespread usage pretty fast.

      So, how come Mozilla and Opera (obviously technically better products) didn't spread as fast?

      It is true that the default setting by Microsoft makes a huge difference. That helps with MSN (Windows) Messenger and MSN.com. AIM gets a boost due to the many AOL users. But we know that quality products and services do spread rapidly through word of mouth endorsments. What is keeping Open Source Software behind?

      GAIM isn't as popular as Trillian. I don't know of anyone that uses Jabber, though I wish more did. Is OpenOffice.org being held back severely by those that pirate (copyright infringe) Microsoft Office? But two things being free, obviously that also means there is enough hassle to change or the product is inferior (in the minds of the many users).

      Switching OSes is even more of a drastic change, so if people seem unwilling to embrace Open Source less than piracy for application software, then it seems unlikely Linux will be embraced in the home anytime soon.

      I think GNU/Linux is not ready yet for the home (though I do think it's ready for business desktops) but beyond that, I think word of mouth reputation must also improve. Hell, based my own experiences, I wouldn't recommend people use Linux except Knoppix or MandrakeMove right now.

      It's obvious that advertising and Microsoft's monopoly and default settings make a huge impact. But word of mouth recommendations make a huge difference. And right now, Linux's reputation (and I guess Mozilla as well, though I'm not sure as to what reasons those are) also need improving.

      --
      In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
  2. Its impessive. by Orgazmus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Its impessive. by lxt · · Score: 5, Funny

      Somehow I don't think "Just Dogpile it" would have the same effect :)

  3. Alternative search engines by amacleod98 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Alternative search engines by pphrdza · · Score: 5, Informative
      Try Teoma, AlltheWeb, Wisenut, Profusion and Vivisimo (both metasearch clustering engines)

      Fun new one to try: Mooter

    2. Re:Alternative search engines by 16K+Ram+Pack · · Score: 5, Interesting
      NB: From the UK

      Some things are fantastic on google/google groups. Searching for technical answers, and often general searching.

      Some things work less well for me, often because of the linkfarm pond scum. Searching for say a type of shop in a particular town often isn't as good as Yell. For fact finding, I often use Wikipedia. For movie info, I go straight to the IMDB.

      For a search engine, though, I've yet to find anything better.

  4. Mike Myers commentary on Goldmember by intertwingled · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  5. Article Text by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."

  6. Google-centric web design by TrentL · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Google-centric web design by TrentL · · Score: 5, Informative

      I don't think [b] has anything to do with the page-rank score, I was just using it as an example.

      "Symantically correct" html means the tags have meaning. [b] (bold) doesn't *mean* anything. Neither does [i] (italic) or [font]. The preferred tags to use are [strong], [em] (emphasis), and [h1-6]. This idea is that HTML should describe content, and stylesheets should determine how the content looks.

      If you surround something with [b] tags, you're coupling the content and the presentation. It's better practice to surround content with [strong] tags and then define how [strong] looks via a stylesheet.

  7. It's safe to say by barenaked · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  8. What about the deep web? by Gilesx · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  9. Mirror (if we slashdot google) by itsme1234 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Here is the cached page if we ./ google:

    http://66.102.11.104/search?q=cache:zhool8dxBV4J :w ww.google.com/+google&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

    Wait ...

  10. Google web services (SOAP) API is very cool by MarkWatson · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  11. We may need more complete site directories by r6144 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Indeed, searching (whether on the Web or on IEEE journals and similar academic things) is useful when you just want to have a basic idea about something popular, but it is easy to miss things this way, probably because others use a different wording, a different spelling, or simply because the actual authors are not the ones naming their ideas (you will probably not get Newton's original super-groundbreaking article on Newton's laws, except through trees of citations, just by searching for "Newton's laws" on any search engine :) When doing academic research, if we want completeness (for example to look for some new ideas) we ca n at least browse the contents of all recent issues of journals of interest, but there is no such thing on the web. Google Directory is an opportunity to get the things more complete for those who really need the completeness, but it is currently woefully incomplete.

    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.

  12. It's amazing by AbstracTus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  13. Google, the friendly giant... by Bl33d4merican · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  14. Don't forget history (v2)... by turnstyle · · Score: 5, Insightful
    "However, it would take even more millions to beat google and build a better engine"

    Once upon a time AltaVista was the "unbeatable" search engine of choice.

    --
    Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
  15. Google averages 2415 searches / second by freelunch · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).