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Google Still Ahead In Search Competition
ricst writes "Google is, as we all know, King of the Hill. But Yahoo, MSN and others have come a long ways towards catching up as this International Herald Tribune article describes. The gap between 'best' and 'next best' has narrowed substantially. The good thing is that we all benefit as these guys keep challenging each other."
The important part, do they do no evil?
How is this gap measured? It's all a matter of opinion. All search engines can give you at least somewhat relevent results.
Don't forget A9, which recently added some virtual locality features. I think the fact that it's a subsidiary of another internet behemoth (Amazon.com) gives it some edge as well.
MSN and Yahoo still have a long way to go. I like Google for its simplistic site design and its lack of obtrusive banner advertisements shoved in your face. I use the word simplistic cautiously because as we all know Google is very powerful and keeps getting better every day. Who seriously wants to support Microsoft anyways?
just for giggles, i tried searching MSN for friend chicken and search result number nine was University of North Texas Dining Services' Menu. Not sure how relevant that is, or maybe its relevant to our discussion.... because it is not.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The main thing I think that keeps Google ahead of everyone else is that they seem to be some nice folks.
They've never gone and done anything nefarious (Micro$haft), and they've never had to switch search engines every other month (Yahoo!). They've just put out a quality product and improved on it continuously.
They've got good tools that are both powerful and unobtrusive. They have very good search results. And they offer free services that make using their software a real pleasure.
Yahoo and Microsoft can try to do what they like, but they just aren't as cool as Google. I seem to recall a previous article on Slashdot that stated that most searches conducted at Micro$haft are done on Google, even over M$N search.
Because of the quality of it's search engine Google has, over time, became a part of speach. How many times have i heard people say "i just googled for it" or "i found this and that after some googling". Internet search is now associated with google, its the mindset of the vast majority and that is going to be very hard to compete with.
In case of slashdotting, the article is also available from the NY Times.
It wasn't a very informative read -- quick summary is that Yahoo and MSN are catching up to Google (they don't give many specifics as to what "catching up" means) and each of these companies is making more money from searches than they have in the past. They allude briefly to Yahoo improving their search technology and Google losing focus somewhat due to management being preoccupied by their IPO.
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Webmasters, go check your logs. It looks like MSN is heading for a very frequently updated search engine.
I host 13 websites on my servers, and on some of them, msnbots causes most of the traffic. It's about a crawl a day.
"To google for something" has became part of common language. People have associated the word with the web search concept, plus it does a great job and is quite innovative.
Every once in a while, I'll use yahoo (as I have an old email there mostly) or when google won't find something (almost never).
But don't count on me to use MSN. I think I've already paid far too much microsoft tax (starting to become more and more fed up about these guys), and they really don't need advertizing revenue from me. And the only way they seem to be able to get half decent results - is by using some bots to harvest google results (not completely ethical imho). Plus, I've always seen "MSN" as crap - especially after having seen the IM. Plus their webpage is quite "graphically overloaded" (yahoo is a bit like that too, flash ads are particularly annoying). When I want to do a quick search, I like google simple logo (which changes with holidays) and a simple seach box.
Google works. The results are great, the (text) ads are unobtrusive, they're innovative, and they've earned everyone's trust. Competition is good sometimes, but I'm not about to switch to another search engine.
///<sig
Google may best a9.com in the search department, but not when it comes to the patent department. Helped out by parent Amazon, a9.com boasts twenty four patent assignments (17 issued, 7 pending), while Google falls short with twenty one (8 issued, 13 pending).
Who cares about Google. They are not God or even close. In fact it's not so much Google is so great but all the others are so BAD.
Google has become incredibly flakey lately turning up worse and worse results, I'm not sure this is all to do with spammers either. Sometimes I have to add about 10 different -this -that to a search to get relevant results. It's very much gone down hill and some of it's page ranking is a nonsense.
The original posting says Yahoo and friends are catching up. Well good. Google desperately needs more serious competition than it has. Things without serious or adequate competition are a monopoly and guess what ? That's bad
It seems that when Google does something innovative, EVERYONE follows suit. For instance, Google video, Google desktop search, Google translator, etc, etc. Some of those were actually there fist in obscure places and google found them and adapted them. Also, the issue with the algorithm in which Google ranks its pages in regular search is still under review, a la Google bomb. Try typing "Miserable Failure" in google and hitting I'm Feeling Lucky. Now, it's not that I dont agree with that statement, its that Google needs to fiddle with their search algorithm a bit. But, I still believe, Google catches the most relevant and the most results of any other serahc engine i've ever seen. And now they're coming out with Google Video, for searching what time your favorite program is on. http://www.video.google.com/ Plus the AdWords problem everyone else has mentioned.
When I go to the store I can pick up any box of "Kleenex" - even by a different brand name - without noticing.
But how can you go to "google" something, then type in "www.yahoo.com" (or other search engine). With search engines, far more than with any physical product, the name ties much more directly into use of the product and therefore is far stronger.
Microsoft is trying to head off this tide by making it so easy to search that you no longer need to type in "google" to a browser. But even there Google is one step ahead with the google search bar.
As long as most people get to google via some typing, there will not be the same brand dilution issues that things like Kleenex have.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Surely you can't be talking about the International Herald Tribune. The only clean, elegant, readable news site on the web? It looks great in IE and Firefox; what browser are you using?
Someone obvously put a lot of thought into designing this site. Text is arranged in narrow columns, making it more natural to read, kinda like a real newspaper. Navigation is intuitive; printing and emailing articles is easy. What more could you want?
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Functional and substantial... compelling...
The designer is a god among mortals..."
In terms of design, Google:search::IHT:news
Until the other search engines release competing APIs (hopefully with a higher than 1000 query limit), Google will remain top dog from the POV of /. types.
Neither Yahoo nor MSN provide a View as HTML option for PDFs, it's really useful when you are not so sure if that's what you want and you dan't want to wait a hell of a time for Acrobat Reader to load. Or even worse, to download it and then open it with xpdf for every file that might have some spec about some transistor.
It's funny how everything in this (pseudo-)decentralized environment keeps naturally migrating towards a single central point that everything else revolves around. Not that I think this is a good or bad thing, it seems that its just a natural part of everything human to form itself into some structure resembling the state (city=net,government=google,citizens=sites), which may be also true of much of the natural world as well (galaxies, for example, are drawn together around a common object, which is similar, although the cause of it is different).
;)), or maybe it's too difficult (maybe it's impossible)...
;)
It's almost as if, given the chance at a total level of equality, we unconsciously back away from it. Maybe equality isn't what we need or want (subconsciously speaking, of course
Perhaps P2P is the answer to this little late-night rant -- the example of a lasting and true decentralized system -- but seeing as how the only real mainstream applications of it have so far been illegal activities, I don't see it replacing the WWW any time soon (ie. freenet).
Does any of this make sense, or am I just really tired?
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>A company normally goes public because it needs
:)
>the extra bit of investment, right?
Yes, but Google isn't an ordinary company. Google is highly cashflow positive and didn't need to raise capital. I think the main reason it went public was so that there was a market for existing shareholders (like employees with options) to sell shares, and because they reached a size where they needed to disclose a lot of information anyway.
>Do shares continue to affect how much money it
>has once it's gone public?
Typically not -- unless they want to raise more money, or want to issue shares to take over another company.
>If investors don't care about ethics and google
>ignores this, their stock will go down and they
>won't be an attractive investment.
Yes, but since the Google founders have effective control, they might not care.
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Google relies on the browser, and although, as noted, Firefox is already very Google friendly, Google is determined not to let MSFT define the battlefield. Google is big enough to take the battle to Redmond, by taking it to the desktop, starting with GMail and Google Desktop http://desktop.google.com/, then GBrowser (see whois below), then a suite of apps - Photos (Picasa), music (GTunes?), movies (GVideo?), etc. - designed to incease their desktop presence and mindshare. Then who knows, a desktop OS? (GLinux - their own version of Linux)
It's the rational thing to do as the new 900 pound gorrilla. Hence they will hire the best they can find in each area, while still trying to maintain the support of the open source community. How users react will depend on the amount of control Google tries to exert, and how arrogant they are perceived to be.
Whois: Domain Name: gbrowser.com Registrant:Google Inc. (DOM-1278108) 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043 Technical Contact, Zone Contact: DNS Admin (NIC-1467103) Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043 dns-admin@google.com +1.6503300100 Fax- +1.6506188571 Created on: 2004-Apr-26. Expires on: 2006-Apr-26.
People don't try a selection of search engines every day then use whichever's best. They find a search engine they like and stick with it.
The competitors are going to have to be considerably better than Google before people will switch in significant numbers. Or they're going to have to cheat... bundling, anyone?
Look at IE versus other browsers: IE has been behind on features for years, but does it make people switch? No, they use what they're used to.
www.jux2.com compares the result sets from google, yahoo, and ask jeeves and you can immediately see what's missing from each
Very true. Infortunately, people doesn't seem to be nice to Google. As an example let's take this "Google file system" from some time ago. As much as I am usually against frivolous lawsuits, in this case I really hoped Google had sued its authors and won. Why? Because this so called "file system" is a classical example of parasite which can only hurt Google. And for what? So its "developers" could have their project posted on Slashdot frontpage? So they could say "look, mom, how bloody 'leet' I am"? But no, Google didn't sue them, even though I strongly advised them to. They are nice even to people who violate them.
But the problem persists. What if one day someone writes a "file system" stealing storage from Slashdot, saving its files in the form of gigabyte first posts filled with goats.ex links and literally tons of uuencoded pornography? This is exactly the same, only much worse, because unlike Slashdot Google has much less intrusive advertisements and no bias and corporate agenda. From every greedy US corporation, Google is unquestionably the closest to being absolutely perfect. And how do we say "thank you"? By stealing their property? By advertising this pathetic thief "file system" on the front page of the most popular website on the north hemisphere?
I just want to remind you that I was strongly against it from the very beginning, explicitly voicing my concerns when it was a "hot" topic, only to get completely ignored by the entire community. But we cannot tolerate such a behaviour, I'm sorry. Google is not another IBM who didn't see anything wrong in helping build concentration camps or Cisco who is perfectly comfortable with building the largest machines of censorship and oppression in the history of human kind.
Google, unlike any other company, is trying to do what is best for us. They deserve our gratefulness and respect. The existence of script kiddies shamefully exploiting Google's services for their own miserable advantage is a precedence not only insulting to our intelligence but a one actually harmful for us in the long run, because that could possibly mean the end of fantastic projects from Google, when they eventually stop to think and inevitably say: "Hey, what's the point of doing no evil? What's the point of being nice guys if people just want to steal from us? Maybe that pop-up pornography ads and paid search results placement weren't such a bad idea after all?" I know I certainly would.
Sorry for a long rant. I just love Google and I hate people who hurt it. I think it is great that Google is still ahead. The question is: how long will they survive in the world of greedy scums like M$N, AO£ and ¥ahoo? Is there a place for nice guys in the world ruled by greedy bastards? I certainly hope so.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Personally, when I first started surfing the web (c. 1997) I used Altavista. I don't remember when I first discovered Google. It was a fast change, so much so I just subconciously accepted it's superiority.
Strange though, at some point in the last few months I've created a Search Engine folder my bookmarks and managed to fill it up... now how did that happen?
I still remember the time when Altavista and Yahoo were the kings. Then google came and dominated in a few years. I don't think it would be impossible for the same to happen again, but as long as google remains focused on improving their engine I think it's very difficult for this to happen.
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There is no such thing as "fair use" in the UK (and Europe AFAIK).
I doubt that this would really fall under fair use in US as, from what I've read, that applies to re-use of copyrighted works when you have some rights to them already (quoting books, re-formatting musical works, etc.).
This is an adaptation of an original work. It shows the initial artistic work in low quality and therefore infringes not only on the commercial rights of the "artist" but also on their moral rights!
Consider how to prevent people buying a poster and then distributing their own postcards of that poster in competition with the original artist. Sounds like google is doing the digital equivalent.
If copyright laws were strictly followed life would far less of a rich tapestry.
PS: I don't see anything wrong with what google do per se, just pointing out that it seems incompatible with the law.
I work for a long distance company and I spend a lot of time confirming numbers people dispute on their bill (i.e. I DEEN'T CALL THES NUMBER AN IF YOU CAYANT PROVE I DE-ID, I'M GONE SEEWWW YEW SUMBEACHES).
If we can't find a number using AnyWho, we always use Google next and I'd say 99.9% of the time this resolves the issue without having to verify the call with the term party (i.e. If that lady's daughter wasn't sleeping with my husband, my number wouldn't be on her bill).
When Yahoo first said they weren't going to use Google anymore for their search results, I really didn't believe them. I mean it took them forever to admit what we already knew so the trust factor was a little broken.
It took a while, but gradually the returns from searches did seem to be different or different enough. I'm like well, ok, they're on their own now, but Google still gives more or better results.
Until recently. Lately, searching Yahoo has been like back in the 90's when I first discovered HotBot(R.I.P.) then Google. In the past month or so, I actually have found what I wanted easier and faster using Yahoo. By faster I don't really mean return speed, I'm actually referring more to the relevance of the first items returned.
It's not every single time, but often enough and different enough where now, I don't just use Google by default anymore. I actually make a point to check both and lately Yahoo is gaining on them in turns of generating the results I need and on returning a search that's different enough from Google that's it's worth the extra time to see what Yahoo turns up as well.
Now my searches are for very simple and every day thing. However it seems to me, it's always those small things that cause the tide to turn in the larger pool of profitability in the long run.
I also like the new video search. To be honest, it's cut down my pr0n search time a lot. Uh, at home of course, not at work.