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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.
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.
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.
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.