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Google's Impact on the Internet
Kierkegaard writes "The Globe & Mail and Fortune Magazine both wrote a piece on Google, arguably one of the most important companies in the world, and its influence and impact on the Internet. In particular, they mention the effects of Google's recent new services, like Blogger and Maps, as well as their take on how Google threatens the Microsoft Corporation. "If Sergey and Larry stick to their corporate mantra -- Don't be evil -- and are able to stem degeneration into the typically corrupt corporate ethos, who knows, they may just succeed in assuming the fair and honourable dominion over the world's information they so naively set out to achieve eight years ago in their garage.""
If they weren't around I'd just be using Yahoo or whatever, and having less unused space in my various free web-based email accounts.
Google's always behind technology
..
:)
Yahoo's always behind safe money (see the Y! News vs G News)
And Microsoft is behind all evil,
Netscape survived as Firefox and
Macromedia just went to Adobe
That's a brief history of the web since Y2K
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I tend to find that especially amongst "non-geeks", Google IS the internet. Could they have much more of an impact than that?
There is nothing more practical than a good abstract theory.
Consider this. Yahoo, MSN, and many others have begun scrambling to provide the same services that Google has right now. Toolbars, Desktop Search apps, and even increased space in your email accounts. Like it or not, Google has changed the face of the search industry. Will they keep their dominance? It depends on how the technology evolves. I've not seen any of the other internet based companies have the same impact. I'd say that makes Google pretty important.
Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
OK, I'll admit I didn't RTFAs, but I have to ask: how in ${deity}'s name can Google threaten M$? Do they sell OSes, OA suites, etc.?
This is like this "iPod killer" fixation: why does everything have to be viewed as a threat to M$? Is billg's incapacity to accept to have to compete (fairly) and resulting intolerance of potential competitors rubbing off everyone else?
Unless Google pulls a rabbit out of a hat (like a new operating system), I cant see this changing any time soon.
I think they're doing a good job of "not being evil". People freaked out when Gmail first came out because of the whole we'll-scan-your-emails-to-show-relevant-ads thing. But people aren't complaining too much now with 2 gigs free space (and increasing everyday). Yahoo was all over the 1gig free e-mail but hasn't said much in regards to Google's 2gig offering. They have been getting new products to the market a lot faster than their competitors. It's now mostly Yahoo and Google with Microsoft somewhat lagging behind in the innovation and speed department.
http://tech-hawg.blogspot.com
Yeah. So they think that goodness will triumph. Fat chance. The Dark Side always wins. Power corrupts. No matter what pledges are made, there is nothing concrete that will keep google from becoming 'evil'. After all, everyone's perception of evil changes, and who knows what would happen if Google starts thinking for people, deciding for its customers what it's best interests are? The online community is getting too reliant on google. We need competition. We need alternatives. If one group be allowed to dominate, it needs to be one with openness and non-profitness written into its being. And google does not have that.
Think of the progression in the trilogy, "Lord of the Rings" -- the main character, Frodo Baggins, starts as an ingenue, takes on the task, and at the end, once he realizes the true power of the Ring, decides that he will keep it for himself. Of course, there is a twist of fate and a happy ending, but one thing was for certain: Frodo was seduced by the power the Ring offered.
The same thing will likely happen to Google, though the term 'evil' may a bit overused. Google is a public company now, and like all public companies, they have a responsibility to maximize shareholder value. If the directors of the company will not do this, the board has a responsibility to put in place people who will.
That said, Google will become more like Microsoft and more like Adobe over time. They will try to protect their market share, they will try to prevent the entry of others into their market space that they perceive as a threat. And, given the world's propensity to pull for the "little guy" Google will in turn be perceived (rightly or wrongly) as a bully, a bad guy and therefore -- evil.
This is a natural progression for successful startups. Microsoft did not begin as a huge monolith, it was a small company that one could send an e-mail to the founders and usually get a reply. It was also a decent company from a service standpoint. They grew, their market grew and the service got a lot less personal and the stakes got a whole lot bigger. Thirty years later, they are thought of as a James Bond villain.
Sergey and Larry are answerable to the stock holders now. Their responsibility is to maximise shareholder value. That may or may not coincide with a nice guy image. As for 'corrupt corporations' - they are there to make money for their owners, not be some quasi-religious body to make us feel good.
If you can't find something important on Google, do you just giveup?
I'm not quite following how Google had a negative impact on USENET. I think USENET's decline in usage (and quality for that matter) is tied directly to the fact that they really didn't 'market' themselves as a useful service for information dissemination to the masses
I too used to go on USENET quite a bit to find out interesting tech information, but I stopped in the late ninties once surfing the web made getting that information a whole lot easier (and cleaner for tha tmatter). It's not a good thing when you can load up just about any unmoderated group and the first 500 threads are adverts for horse porn.
Usenet didn't keep with the times, therefore USENET is marginalized. Then again, you can still find great tech information (Novell is a great example here) on the moderated forums.
"...arguably one of the most important companies in the world..."
Huh??? What about, oh, I don't know... oil companies, food companies, telecom companies, drug and health industries, transportation.... I could go on, perhaps just consider companies that have been around for, oh, longer than 10 years or so for some companies that are vastly more "important" than some search engine.
The internet is not the entire world, people, much as we sometimes wish it were. If it magically went away today, the vast majority of the earth's population probably wouldn't even notice....
arguably one of the most important companies in the world
I guess this is where the arguably comes in....Google is great and all but...one of the most important companies? In the grand grand scheme of things I would say that it is barely even relevant. Sit back and think about any company that is researching an AIDS cure/vaccine, cancer treatment, any kind of any disorder - Alzheimer's, parkinson's, multiple sclerosis...and depending on how you cut 'company' I would hazzard a bet to say that any non-profit company is more important/relevant than Google...
Keep perspective people, at least quantify your statement with "most important tech companies" and then you have a more sane argument. Google is just a good company.
I must say that I have growing concerns about the prospect of one company effectively determining what can and cannot be found on the world wide web, not to mention one company handling the email of a vast proportion of Internet users.
http://www.a9.com
http://www.alltheweb.com/
http://www.yahoo.com
http://search.msn.com
http://www.lycos.com/
http://www.altavista.com/
http://www.dogpile.com/
http://search.excite.com/
http://search.looksmart.com/
http://www.ask.com/
Where are you getting this "one company" stuff? Same goes for email, just because Google knows how to design a good interface does mean they are the only option.
You can either bring no service, or service in compliance with the rules and regulations of the locations that you are providing the service.
Which one is more evil? Refusing to provide your service to a population that could otherwise benefit from it, even in its reduced capacity, or making it available, even if you might not be happy with the terms you're required to comply with?
The correct answer -- neither. Neither one is inherently evil. The first one is petty and immature, and the second one can be construed as greedy without knowing all of the details.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
"they didn't market themselves"? who is "they"? usenet's totally decentralised, there is no "they" to market anything.
google groups has done usenet harm in a way: they've now got "google groups" and most younger people don't know their NNTP from their elbow. you can now not only post to usenet via google groups, but *start up new google groups* which obviously don't propogate out to usenet - hence a google groups user's unlikely to go and start using usenet.
usenet's signal to noise ratio is somewhat higher than the web though, possibly for exactly this reason...
Let's say that tomorrow Google says that, in the interest of increasing revenue, they are going to implement GooglePops, their new pop up and pop under advertising service. "Our advertisers have been asking for fresh methods of recovering customer eyeballs in this space," said a Google rep.
The outcry would be immediate. The Slashdot story would get 5,000 comments. There would be people who said that this proved that Google was evil, after all. And there would be people who would defend them, in the context that pop-up ads are effective, and therefore what people really want.
In the end, Google would lose a tremendous amount of credibility. People would start laughing at them. And AltaVista and A9 and MSN would work ever harder, knowing they could knock Google straight off the perch. A lot of people would stop using Google and would never come back. And the Googleplex would no longer attract the very best people, as it does today.
This is the beauty of that ever-adjusting system we call the free market. People who don't like Google will go to other search engines if they see it as truly "bad". And enough is now understood about search that it wouldn't be that difficult to create a new search engine with similar quality results.
This is our protection against Google turning "bad". They know that if they do, they lose credibility and customers. The people who run Google are smart and know where the money is: In being the biggest and most respected search company on the planet.
They're not going to give that up for a bunch of pop-up ads. But if they do, we'll desert them in droves, and they'll get exactly what they deserve.
Hope that helped.
D
Here's a touchy subject. (No trolling, really, trying to make a counter example).
Is it better not to have slavery? Or to have slavery and abide by the law, and treat your slaves as nice as you can? I'd vote that the first one is the more socially responsible one.
Yeah, this is a bit of a stretch comparison, but the point I'm trying to make is that Google could have made a stand to say, "what you, China, is doing is wrong, and we will "do no evil." Instead, they accept the check and say, "we'll do what we can."
Can you shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding?
Before Google, there was Yahoo, THE search engine
You've got your web history mixed up there, nephew. Before Google, there was AltaVista, THE search engine. Yahoo! was THE web directory..the distinction being that a directory has its web pages organized in a categorical hierarchy, and back then, Yahoo! hired web surfers to do nothing BUT categorize the entire web. Yahoo!'s directory is still there, but it has really, really suffered since searching overtook directory seeking, and in general could not keep up with the exponential growth of the web.
But I miss it. It's a completely different approach to finding what you need on the web. Instead of doing a dumb search where some fancy shmancy algorithm (PageRank in Google's case) figures out with keywords and inbound links and other magic whether the page it has indexed is relevant, you actually just POINT at the topic you want and find a list of the most relevant sites or subtopics, which then lead to more specific relevant sites. If you wanted information on a topic, rather than some particular detail or fact, it was very handy.
Which makes me wonder. Part of the downfall of creating the kind of semantic tree that is a web directory is the sheer labor intensity of it. It's very hard to write good AI to do semantic categorization, so a manual approach is still the way to go. But what about the wiki approach? How about a collectively maintained web directory? Or is this what those "folksonomies" already are?
Thank you.
The Google groups thing was just an example of Google not being the Holy grail of the internet and the fact that openign technology to people is not alwasy a good thing.
When somethign good gets dilluted by the ignorant masses, it usually starts to suck.
"Two college students took it upon themselves to figure it out and deploy that solution to the world."
That part is true. However, like another poster said (the first post actually) if they didn't come around we'd all just be using Yahoo, or Lycos, or one of the other companies that would probably be bigger if not for Google.
"Sergey and Brin take their job very serious."
How do you know? You know them personally? Or is this just what you read on a news clipping?
"Organizing and delivering a whole world's information/thoughts/opinions is a HUGE responsibility"
It's a search engine. It indexes web sites and delivers responses based on some criteria. It's cool stuff, for sure. But it's not like the world is in the balance and if Google gave the wrong responses world war would break out.
"they've carried it and with dignity. I see little if any abuses of the power they hold."
You stick with what works. Did you know that these guys are worth BILLIONS of dollars? And they're young?
Give Google some time. They're publically traded now. The two guys that created it will have less and less say about how things run. I mean, do you think every descision Microsoft makes rests solely on Gates?
"How many other companies could do what google does and resist the temptation to abuse their audience or subject them to slanted views/opinions or worse."
Google isn't the only game in town. If they started doing stuff like that, it's easy to just use something else. No software changes needed. No lock-in to Google. (yet.)
"Google's only agenda is to get you where you want to be."
No, wrong. SO wrong. Google's agenda is to MAKE MONEY.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
If Google wasn't around, I would be using
Yahoo or whatever for my search engine.
I'd probably still be using Mapquest for maps (and cursing it).
I don't know if I'd be able to search newsgroups the way I do. Would DejaNews still be around?
I guess I'd have to use local.yahoo.com instead of local.google.com to find things in my area.
Image searching - well, I'd be out of luck.
I'd just have to figure out how to do some conversions (like celcius to fahrenheit)
And I don't even use all of Google's features. They are important, because they changed the game. They innovated, in a very simple way (to the end user). Google maps is awesome, but up until Google did it, Mapquest was "good enough". That is why they are important, because they seem to do the things they do VERY well. It would be scary to companies if Google decided to enter their area of expertise.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Your counter example is poorly chosen. It should be more along the lines of:
"Is it better to deal with slave owners to afford their slaves with some limited freedoms, or to refuse to deal with them entirely unless they free their slaves?"
China doesn't give a rat's ass what Google thinks of its censorship policy, so taking the moral high ground is essentially unproductive posturing. The real question is is it better to make a purely symbolic all-or-nothing stand on principle, or to do as much good as you can with the limited options available?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Apparently, if you want to be a successful company, you need to start with two people in a garage...
Everything I need to know about copyrights I learned from Slashdot.
Some people actually weren't around to use the web before Google. I remember being happy to find som emeta search engines that actually did a good job, so I could stop having to search Altavista first, then Lycos, then HotBot/Excite/Yahoo Directory. Now, if it's not in Google, it's probably not on the web...
It has combined software innovation with a brand-new Internet business model--and it wounds Gates' pride that he didn't get there first
Seriously, what did MS do first? The association 'MS = cool new technology' makes not sense to me. They almost missed the Internet by their own admission. I think BillG isn't pissed that didn't come up with a cool search engine but because he can't kill Google like he did with numerous others.
Come on guys. Google is a good company, but if we didn't use google we'd use Altavista or Yahoo or something else.
It's not like the technology they have is rocket science. All they have is a software patent on fairly obvious technology.
What is really needed is a distributed search architecture they uses a similar rating system but circumvents the Google patent. Then make it a distributed crawler system and open source. We need search on the Internet as much as we need DNS. Everyone should be able to implement.
For the most part people would implement search indexing on their own sites.
It just has to get started.