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What's Next For Google?
j_heisenberg writes "Technology Review has a nice story about the coming MS-Google showdown. I like especially the data comparison for different media on page 2 concerning data content."
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It would be nice to have a simple MS-Paint like interface to sketch a little symbol (like the contamination sign, or some more obscure wiccan symbol) and have google return both definitions, and better images.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
The only people who don't use google are those who haven't seen its full power. Take, for example, my father. He used any search engine, but usually MSN. Then one day he came to me, saying "What is this song called?" referring to a song he knew a few words to. I said calmly, "Go to google, and type the lyrics in quotation marks, and you will find the answer." It worked exactly the way I had said, and now he only uses google. And looks down at MSN.
Just like in software applications, a monopoly is no good. People nowadays rely highly on search results by google, and if google can't find it, it doesn't exists. Sounds pretty dangerous to me. There have already been precedents of censoring data by google. Competition is good, also in the market of search engines. And I wouldn't forget MS, they also have the money and the knowledge to make an even more powerful search engine. And if they integrate it closely in Windows, its popularity will surely increase.
I'm still waiting for the Google instant messaging client that will link right Gmail. It strikes me as the one truely obvious thing that Google hasn't done yet.
The ad market for adsesne will eventually dry up, either through click fraud or through a recession that kills ad spending. As Yahoo figured out in 2000, ad spending is the first thing to go when times get tight...which invariably leads to calls for revenue diversification. Google will end up going the Yahoo route of charging fees for some services once they hit this patch. When you have to report revenue every quarter, telling investors to hold on until ad spending comes back just doesn't cut it.
what we all here at /. always forget is that the success of anything is not largely determined by the technical superiority. Who cares if google is better than anything else when noone knows? I personally think google is the best, that's why I never use any other engines but soooo many people don't know that, or don't know how to use google correctly.
So, all MSN has to do is get enough people to use it, it does not matter how good it is and Microsoft is very good at that. Then they will get more ad-revenue and take that away from google. So while I very much agree with all the comments that google is improving itself and that it has so many services, it's page is lean and everything but unfortunately those are not the only factors that will decide success...
Yahoo is beating them right now in terms of appropriate search results, as well as faster crawling and indexing.
The recent destruction of GoogleGroups and the excellent interface to usenet that it used to offer are a pretty clear indicator of where Google is heading. Just like Microsoft, they will continue to dominate some areas by virtue of mind share and momentum, but the glory days are over. I didn't know any geek that didnt admire google up till a couple of weeks ago; to a person, they are shifting persectives, and think google has lost it. Some day there will be books written about the changes now taking place at google; but at the moment all we outsiders can see are sign of confusion and general creepyness.
Summary--Google's best moneymaking potential is in the black helicopter arena, where their assets will blow away startups like BayTSP, Cyveillance, and Genuone despite the startups having had the first mover advantage.
Yes, this doesn't square with "Don't be evil." Neither does helping the PRC subjagate its people by assisting with censorship. And a publically traded company, as any Cryptonomicon MBA here can tell you, cannot have the luxury of a conscience.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
Getting rid of google-bombing search engine results within your search results! I don't even know what it's really called, but I think you'll know what I'm talking about. If MSN manages to do this, then I may just have to do the unthinkable.
For those who are interested, there is a flash animation of the possible evolution of google. Its quite possible, also makes you think. http://oak.psych.gatech.edu/~epic/
This article is a collage of beaten subjects : possibilities of search, advertisement means money, and how Microsoft's Bill Gates will do anything to win this new war. It is SOOOO cliche it almost feels like someone paid for it.
- Technology means money, cites Microsoft, Cisco, Intel and IBM. (We didn't know that.)
- Those who prevail will have more chance to set the standard for the industry to follow. (This is news to me.)
- Says search will go through email, PDF, and even phone conversations(whatever they mean by that, to me sounds like spook work). (WILL? It already does, AFAIK...)
- Recruitment PR work included: says Google is great place to work at, allows pets, gives drinks, meals, massage and car wash (Who paid for this?).
- Says Google is based on citations, tells love story of Brin and Page inventing PageRank in Standford PhD(which they didn't finish). (Who paid for this?)
- Says advertising means money. (We didn't know that either.)
- Says only a few will prevail.(That neither.)
A strong contender for the christmas-weekend-cliche-of-the-year on Non News category.
Broken Hearts are for Assholes. - Frank Zappa
Just to clarify, I run a high school alumni site for my old school. I'm not posting the name here cause the site is "bandwidth-challenged".
The url is [smalltown]alumni.com, where [smalltown] is a unique name for a town. The title of the document is "[Small Town] Alumni", and the first H1 tag is "Welcome to the [Small Town] Alumni Website". Despite this, if you enter Small Town Alumni in Google (without quotes), my site comes up 7th. With quotes, my site is still 3rd. The one and only site that links to mine is listed first in the search results, and that site happens to be the school districts website. The other 5 that are before me are a link to reunion.com, a cache of the school districts websitesite, and a couple news sites related to schools.
All of those sites only have the [Small Town] text in their site, with the exception of the school districts site, who's link text is "[Small Town] Alumni".
For comparison, entering [Small Town] Alumni into Yahoo, with or without quotes, lists my site first.
The author mentioned a few times that it would be important for search engine companies to think beyond the PC in their search infrastructure and that providing some form of APIs to the search engine would setup standards.
I am not sure about the former but I do agree with the later. Thinking beyond the PC is too difficult, I think. If a tool can be connected to a computer and data can flow between the tool and the computer, then this tool becomes part of the computer. Mapping MP3 player just turns this player into another harddrive, so I am not sure what the author really meant, besides, we do not have our MP3 players on the web, so it would be a desktop search engine that would have to crawl the devices (like Google's desktop searching tool - bar.) So for now atleast, whatever the author meant by this is covered already.
The search engine APIs is a more interesting subject. I suppose Google's desktop bar could be used by desktop applications for running searches from within, that's first.
Developers already can tap into Google's search API (I tried it myself,) but as the author mentioned, these are limited to a thousand searches a day and to a very small set of utilities.
I wonder if it would be possible for a search engine to provide a set of APIs with much more functionality than a simple search API. Incremental searching, time period based searching, topical searching, who knows what else.
Any ideas what functions could be useful in such an API?
You can't handle the truth.
A web development company has a different view of the future showdown between Microsoft and Google. They "predict" it moving beyond the realm of search engines and into the realm of a total mainstream media takeover.
They call it Epic Granted, it is a bit over dramatic, but it does make you think. Make sure you give yourself five minutes to view the whole thing.
It goes far beyond this. Research into genetic and herdity has revealed that there are large differences between intelligence of various races. Perhaps you might be interested in the work of Arthur Jensen who has studied this for many years, unfourtunately his work has been largely ignored or censored by publications due to its highly contraversial (but nonetheless accurate) subject matter.
Simply put, the average Caucasian male is simply not gentically equipped to compete with the large number of Asians out there who are in same fields of study and scholastic advancement. The free-market of education and companies who want only the best and most talented mind have brought about this change in racial composistion.
I argued that if it was to survive, Netscape needed to imitate Microsoft's strategy: the creation and control of proprietary industry standards. Serenely, Barksdale explained that Netscape actually invited Microsoft to imitate its products, because they would never catch up. The Internet, he said, rewarded openness and nonproprietary standards.
I suspect the characterization of Netscape is a little starry-eyed, but I can't be the only one who thought, "No, that Netscape executive was right!" His point (someone else can argue about how accurate it is), though, is that rewards for "openness and nonproprietary standards" did not go to Netscape: MS trashed them, and in the business world Netscape lost horribly. We (as in the users of the Internet) may have won, but we won at Netscape's expense.
And then:
In contrast, the losers in these contests have usually made one or more common mistakes. They fail to deliver architectures that cover the entire market, to provide products that work on multiple platforms from multiple companies, to release well-engineered products, or to create barriers against cloning. For example, IBM failed to retain proprietary control over its PC architecture and then, in belatedly attempting to recover it, fatally broke with established industry standards. Apple and Sun restricted their operating systems to their own hardware, alienating other hardware vendors. Netscape declined to create proprietary APIs because it thought Microsoft would never catch up.
IBM's opening of the PC architecture is thought of by geeks as A Good Thing: by letting go, they created the market we have today, even though they didn't benefit from it. TFA says IBM lost market dominance as a result. It's interesting that he doesn't address the question of whether the PC architecture would have taken such hold of the market if it had not been opened up to competitors in the first place...but again, what we see as a win for PC users, he presents as a loss for the people who came up with the PC.
It's also interesting that he doesn't explain the contradiction between failing to "create barriers against cloning", and Apple and Sun's "alienating other vendors" by making their OS only work on their own hardware. He needs to pick a side on this one...
Anyhow, no grand point -- just some things that stuck out for me in TFA.
Carousel is a lie!
I wish they would implement some type of spam filtering for search results.. Ever try searching for a drug? You get like 20 of the same exact webpages when you click on them it brings you to a huge spam site with the words of like 100 drugs all over the page. I find it very annoying nowadays when I goto search for alot of terms and the first 2 pages are completely spam pages with no content on them at all but a bunch of words to move up in googles pagerank