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Who's Afraid of Google?
Khuffie writes "Wired has an interesting article about who's afraid of Google: in short, almost everyone! "Even in the early days, its ultimate goal was extravagant: to organize the world's information. High-minded as that sounds, Google's ever-expanding agenda has put it on a collision course with nearly every company in the information technology industry: Amazon.com, Comcast, eBay, Yahoo!, even Microsoft.""
Google itself? Is it afraid of itself becoming and doing evil eventually?
Oh, one thing that Google hasn't done is Database, although its existance is almost solely based on databases. When are we seeing GoogleSQL?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
The Financial community has a hard time getting their minds around what Google does. Simple answer near a I can tell is they make money hand over fist...create new services that don't cost much to add on, and make even more money. Sort of like the GE mentality...try it..see if it sticks and run with it if it does.
Maybe I'm alone in this, but I haven't had much reason to feel like they were the type of company to be afraid of, unlike SCO or M$oft.
Chime in if you think I'm smoking crack.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
A known country has around 50% of the world military budget. This country and several others have skills and history in espionage. They have also showed the interest to build up their sources over a period of many years before they get anything back.
Would the media ask questions if a known government agency was running a public spider? What about a firm like google that do run a spider?
What about centralizing emails on something like gmail? Or listening to chating trough talk.google.com?
What about telling another spider about the robot.txt files that tells google to stop?
mmm.. What about making a geographical network over all the searchers? Using a tool bar or something like it to get even more information?
A lot of possibilities for those who do this kinds of things for a living and have a budget so much larger than most countries state budget.
I totally agree with you. Ebays' main feature is to be able quickly search their 1 million plus database of goods. Everything else is just fluff (except maybe Paypal but I don't know banking at all).
However, ebay is not being very good as the monopoly auction site. They charge a lot for items (paypal and ebay will take about 10% of what you make for items below $100 and at least 6-7% for larger items) and keep finding new fees to add, sell straighforward features for sellers for higher price and I feel Ebay doesn't retain records of past auctions long enough.
There is no questions that Google will enter the auction market whatsoever. I think they're probably just stuck on googlePay or similar. The auction site itself is probably piece of cake for them.
1) Nothing to do with google.
2) They mean open format alternatives, no open source (sighs)
I'm not afraid of google, but I am afraid of lazy journalism.
My pics.
Is it a good thing "to organize the world's information " ?
It seems I'm one of the few people not excited about this idea. I fear that in the future privacy will be luxury item that very few can afford.
One SF novel I read introduced me to very interesting idea - if everything networked and you can access virtually any kind of information about the only reliable way to have privacy is to drown it in a see of misinformation and irrelevant information. Anything distinctive about you becomes a disadvantage - you can be identified by it and tracked down. So everyone will want to conform and be a Bill Smith from a large city working for large company...
A lot of information out there gets recorded about every individual person - shopping habits, library books, income, medical history, debt, family, education, political affiliations, phone calls history, traffic violations... Only right now most of this information is unorganized and not readily networked, so you can't come up with inexpensive and fast way to retrieve it. On other hand if Google achieves its goal...
You think monopolizing OS is bad? How about monopolizing access to information? How about monopolizing not letting others acces your private information? It just might happen.
It seems to me that Google hurts consumers. The reason lies with how they do their ad ranking. Basically, the ad that generates the most revenue for Google gets ranked first -- in a lot of cases this is the ad that pays the most per click. In all cases, it's the ad that's writing the biggest check to Google.
This methodology leaves no room for providing discounts to customers. There's literally no money left over once the advertiser pays Google. Think about a simple example of an industry with average operating margins (excluding cost of customer acquisition) of 20%. In such an industry, companies have an incentive to pay anything up to 19.9% to acquire customers. Google is such an efficient marketplace that companies wind up paying that 19.9% or even more (some companies will overpay because of the value of the brand exposure).
It has surprised me for some time that no competitor to Google has arisen that somehow provides some of this money back to the customers. A simple (and completely unworkable due to fraud) example would be a search engine that gives 50% of the click revenue back to the user who clicks the ad. I'm relatively certain that something will arise someday that returns some of the revenue from search-engine ads to consumers. A clever version was the iWon portal -- they let you win cash prizes, with each link clicked counting as an entry into the drawing.
A search engine might be very successful and actually help consumers if it worked on a bounty basis. Advertisers would offer the search engine a certain dollar amount or percentage of each transaction as a rebate if customers buy stuff after clicking the ad. The search engine could then return, say, 50% of the bounty to the user. Obviously this would require more bookkeeping, but it would make the search engine much friendlier to consumers.
Until then, I still do my searching on Google but my buying on PriceWatch, PriceGrabber, etc. I still for the life of me can't understand why people click Google ads and make purchases. You're just not getting a good deal.
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It seems no one is safe: Google is doing Wi-Fi; Google is searching inside books; Google has a plan for ecommerce.
Of course, Google has always wanted to be more than a search engine. Even in the early days, its ultimate goal was extravagant: to organize the world's information. High-minded as that sounds, Google's ever-expanding agenda has put it on a collision course with nearly every company in the information technology industry: Amazon.com, Comcast, eBay, Yahoo!, even Microsoft
Does ANYONE remember how Google entered the search market as "just a search engine" because others failed to concentrate on their core business and that this is exactly what made them so succesful? This was their prime strength. I don't make this up. They did. Now they are ad-brokers and stock-driven, their prime aim is exactly the opposite. They need as much services and thus page hits as possible, and next year they need more, or otherwise they are "doing bad", for stockholders anyway. Me, I think they can be beaten by the next company which purely concentrates on search. Actually, if I consider all the fluff and features I don't use, all the overpaid top names working on pet projects, and the lack of any true inovation in the search field, I wonder what could have been done if they had concentrated on search and search alone.
Now, certainly you could say "no, that's the price of Google giving you such a great service." My response would be that, while that's nice and all, eventually some competitor will arise (MSN, maybe) that will offer some of that money back to consumers. And when that happens it may go hard on Google. After all, I love Google, but getting discounts would probably make me more inclined to shop elsewhere, thus draining Google's most profitable searches.
It's simple economics really. Any time a company generates outsized profits with a business model that is not based on some kind of a monopoly (think M$ or eBay), those profits will be competed away.
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Well not that I think it's evil, but google's search engine has already suffered due to the fact that it's all about the money. If you do searches on phrases that are competitive, you will see that most of the time all the top listings are to companies and not necessarily to the site that best matches your search. This is primarily due to the latest changes in their search engine. For example hits to your site from paid adwords links make your site rank higher. So businesses that buy up all the top paid listings also push themselves up in the non paid listings as well. It's so bad that a real non biased information site doesn't stand a chance of getting listed on the first page if most people are searching for it using keywords that are very popular keywords that companies bid on.
OSTG should be afraid of google. Simply put, Google can offer competitive services similar to those that OSTG offers. Google would have a marked advantage with a much larger userbase than (most) OSTG services and can come up with witty names to further their competition.
Take for example:
Sourceforge and Freshmeat - - Google Codebase
Thinkgeek - - Google store already exists, just rename it to ThinkGoogle or something similarly witty
Slashdot and Newsforge - - Google News already exists, just add comments, which shouldn't be too difficult seeing as how they already have an accounts system in place
ITMJ - - Google blog already exists, could be renamed to Blogoogle or something.
Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
There's always this talk running around about how google is taking over the world. You know what? SO WHAT! The only people google are adversly affecting here are other giant corporations. And they are the ones with the loud mouths shouting to reporters how evil google is. In reality, we live in the age of the giant corporation. One way or the other, these giant organizations are going to control major parts of your life. I would _much_ rather have google a major part of my life than microsoft, ebay, aol, or comcast. They are just being whiney little bitches because google's business practices are much better than theirs. They are scared people will come to expect that kind of business.
This is their thought process...
OMG, google is serving their customers in a postive way?!! You don't fucking say! Well we need to put a stop to this shit right away. The nerve of them. Who they think they are!? Don't they know that not stuffing DRM and standards non-compliance into your product is the first no-no! You must take away all rights of the consumer. The consumer is to be told what they want and need. Google is giving them choices!?!? Next thing you know, they'll grow spines and start making decisions for themselves. We can't have that shit!!
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
In alot of ways this is a smarter business model than the 'squeeze' tactic. When you look at companies, it's the ones that apply the 'squeeze' model that fail left and right.
Places that concentrate on good product do fail, but they usually do so before they can establish themselves, or they attempt to expand too fast and overreach themselves. Either that or they're just plain out-competed. The trick is to produce a good product(so you keep selling units), while still turning a profit so you don't go bankrupt, and to justify the investment the investors made.
In today's world, it shouldn't be about the 5 year profit margins, it should be about the 20 year margins. More people than ever are investing for retirement, and they're in it for the long term.
I don't read AC A human right
Earlier in the year I had my Google AdSense account suspended because of
illegal clicks. It was against their policy and I acknowledge that..
BUT (the long story)
- The ads. that Adsense was serving to my community website
were irrelvent to the audience of my site. I had informed Google
of this and were told changes were in the pipeline.. for over a year.
- I tried several methods to get more relevent ads. displayed, including
removing words from the site that triggered particular ads (like
'maillist' and 'email') and adding particular advertisers to the
blacklist (which was limited to 200). [Why should I have to modify
my website to get Google ads. to work for me, other than to enable them
in the first place? ]
If I could make the ads. relevent to my audience, then this would help
bring more visitors, and I could also approach advertisers and promote
AdWords to relevent businesses.. a win,win,win situation (The customer,
The company, and myself.)
This didn't happen!
- In despiraton (and nothing else to do) I clicked on the ads. myself. At least
then it would make some money, make someone pay, and hopefully get some
different ads. displayed.
After 6 months, Google contacted me to say that my Adsense account had
been disabled, ironically the day after I had been informed
about the site target advertising (the feature that I had been waiting for).
A request to re-activate my AdSense account was refused. The revenue
prevously received from Google had been small, and only one payment
had ever been made (the minimal amount). An offer to payback even this amount, in order to get the account reactivated was also refused.
(I could have very easily opened another Adsense account under a different
name/address, but this would not have helped Google and was not the point.)
So.. my point?
- Adsense seems to be run out of the UK (was it purchased?), and seems to have
a different ethos to the 'do no evil' US operation, as much as they try to
be the same comapny.
- While Adsense has taken a strong stance on illigal clicks, there is no appeal process to the decisions that they are making. They have made up their mind,
and they didn't care why.
As Google gets larger, and buys/develops more customer facing businesses,
rather than technology, this situation will only get worse, and more scary.
Yeah, Microsoft didn't charge for Internet Explorer, either.
Penny - plain text accounting
Ebay have recently been much more experimental on their site, as if getting in shape in anticipation for competition... It used to be the same day after day, now they added "my messages" (a major hidden purpose of which I suspect is spying on conversations going on (maybe finding those people that say 'psst, I have pirated software, buy from me away from ebay for cheap so I don't get caught by a verified rights owner etc.)). They have a new option to try selling under a different selling interface, recently made a change to require sellers to list specific refund details (then soon switched back).
Also, maybe I'm just not using the right google code, but ebay is better than google at searching for wild cards as far as I know. example: mic* easily returns microsoft, mint, microphone etc. Doesn't work so well with google. Also to find "not the brand you're looking for", just use the minus sign. There's lots of annoying "training" software FOR other software. So search for, say "exchange server" -training and you get rid of the irrelevant stuff.