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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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Global domination!!
AHHH!!!!!
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
It's a way of life! But seriously, I don't think anyone - at least in the short term - can keep stride with Google. They are constantly upgrading their traditional services - search, Usenet archive, etc. - while at the same time implementing incredible additions, most of which can be found in beta. They're not following: they're leading. Unless they completely ignore any unforeseen future trend, I suspect they will be as dominant in the search market as Microsoft has been in the OS & applications market. And Google deserves it.
A blog like any other.
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.
I predict a resounding win for Google!
Of course I also predicted that DOS would beet windows.... I meen realy, who would want to waste 90% of their machine to just make things look pretty?
I would rather be ashes than dust!
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.
I used to experiment with different search engines back in the day, From Infoseek, Excite, Yahoo, Webcrawler, HotBot (does this one really count?), etc.
After I stumbled on to Google via some friends at Georgia Tech, never looked back. I try one or two now, on occasion, but can they really say duopoly? Yahoo may have members et al, but for searching, nothing I've tried comes close to Google 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.
Seach for animals and related information. Thx.
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.
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.
Let me use my amazing visibility into the future to predict what will happen...
Google will continue to innovate, developing new features, integrating new capabilities into the developing 'user portal' centered around GMail. They will continue to develope advanced ways to organize, search, and use huge amounts of data.
Microsoft will wait to see what the users gravitate to the most, and will create a nearly identical version of the feature. They will extend it in a few minor ways to integrate more tightly with their operating systems. Since it will be in the OS by default, they will quickly gain a large market share.
On a lesser note, other 'competitors' like Yahoo, will continue to innovate in areas of banner advertising, and flash advertisement integration. They will add new features only after Google releases products that make theirs look primitive by comparison.
The only question my visions have not answered is: How large will Google have to become before slowing their innovation and playing it safe.
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.
Do 90% of users really need more information ? Most of my googlems (google problems) occur because I can't formulate the question properly - E.g., the other day I wanted to know what all the numbers on a plain old fashioned check are for; it took me 30 minutes, and I still never got an explanation of how the transit number ( the 3 part number upper right with a bar, not the aba number) works.
So, rather then more info, we need the ever elusive electronic expert (or perhaps, starting in middle school, a class on searching - the most useful class i ever took in high school was typing).
Another big problem is redundant pages, which would only be made worse by more info - already, google does a lousy job of filtering similar content; e.g., if you look for a laboratory protocol for, say, how to make PBS buffer (don't ask) you will get hundreds of redundant pages,of widely varying quality, many of which are straight copies (unattributed of course)
My prediction: people were willing to pay experts (librarians, consultants) in the old analog digital days; they will pay for them again, once the model becomes clearer. I wd not be surprised if this is already happening on an ad hoc basis at the more savvy consulting, law and engineering firms - a full time search person is cost effective.
Also, much of the technical web is proprietaty, for profit stuff - like the serious academic serial Journal of Colloid and Interface Science, several articles from this journal cost me (well my company) quite a lot. Of course, you can always postulate a major revolution in how this stuff gets publishec, but right now it is for profit.
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.
Very interesting article, with many implications.
From a business standpoint, Google will need a lot more resources to compete with MS. Swallowing Yahoo might not be enough. A consortium between Amazon, Google and Yahoo and a number of universities might still not be enough.
Microsoft; "I spit on your meagre $2-12 billion."
Since the point is winning an architecture standards 'war', the context for these standards needs to be defined first -or last as the case may be. Will these standards ultimately be commercial, governmental (international or national), military or none of the above? Microsoft with greater resources has the advantage of being able to hedge more alternatives.
Microsoft's Windows vulnerabilities grafted onto entry into everyday technologies make the 'Y2K' scenarios a year by year (day by day) nightmare. I don't like the idea of a hacker using either Google or MSsearch to gain access to my thermostats or my refrigerator. Or my Slashdot password, either.
If search is to be a $20-30 billion a year business, what will the computer/cellphone/intranet/PDA/various electronic device security business be worth?
To paraphrase Eistein, 'I don't know how this architecture war will be fought, but the next one will be fought with pencil and paper.'
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
Try this Google search for my brother's band (see sig)
It's taken quite some time and the placing of links on as many relevant sites as possible to achieve second ranking. The problem is that all the 'Independent Music' sites that mention Ahymsa have much more 'Google Juice' viz, they are linked to by many more other sites/pages than the Ahymsa site itself.
The solution is to get a link to Ahymsa.co.uk from every 'High Juice' site that mentions it, boosting Ahymsa's reputation by having sites, which themselves are trusted/linked to, link to it.
So why isn't Ahymsa.co.uk the top result?
I can't get a link onto this page because it's an internal search result (and it's horribly out of date). Given time, it will disappear, and Ahymsa.co.uk will be back on top.
In summary, remember how Google works, and work with it. How about getting the Alumni of your Small Town to link to the association's site from their own personal or business sites?
Oh, the irony of my .sig (Slashdot has Google Juice coming out of its ears)