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The World According to Google
Ant writes "BBC News has an interesting article and a streaming video documentary on Google. It has interviews with Google staff and people who dislike the company. From the article: 'In the 18 months since its stock market flotation, Google has been transformed from a company that prided itself on being simple and effective, into a multi-headed high tech beast which wants to get involved in everything.'"
Has Microsoft been around so long and done so much damage to our notion of the underlying motivations and competences of computer companies?
Who says large computer companies can't be both competent and not evil sleazebags.
I certainly would not be bugged. I could care less.
On a more positive note, my colleagues and I support Google 100% in its attempt to defy the Department of Justice. Despite Google's supporting Beijing in its attempt to suppress human rights and democracy, the company has taken a courageous stand in supporting human rights in the USA. Google was the last place where I would expect to find a champion of privacy rights.
Go, Google! You are now my preferred search engine.
Google lives alot off their web-search.
:)
Froogle: oh come on, this is REALLY BAD. Both Pricegrabber AND Pricewatch are better.
Gmail: Storage, yes, OKAY UI yes. The UI isn't that great, there are lots of bugs STILL, Sometimes I can't even access my mail, and others report the same problem. Yahoo Mail has always been there for me, just didnt' give me the massive free storage. It's easy to give out 2.5 gigabytes of free storage though when you DONT LET PEOPLE SIGN UP.
Google Video: I won't even give my own comments on this one, it's been raped by enough other people that its very ammiture I don't need to get into any detail.
Google Web Search: It is awsome, of course. Very fast, and very speedy, *but* it is technical heavy. Yahoo/MSN mix tech/non-tech. Ask Jeeves is way out in left field mainly returning non-technical results. I actually think Yahoo is the better all around web-results engine, but they bloat it down with heavy pages and its not as fast. This still is googles one and only bread and butter
Google Maps is great, but don't rely on them for directions AT ALL. I swear to god, I've gotten lost using their map directinos here in the bay area so many times. The last time ending up in the middle of no where surrounded by f*cking fields trying to get to a resturant for a lunch meeting, I switched back to reliable MAP QUEST (who btw have been updating their site to provide more "local" style searches and AJAX'ish interface enhancements). By the way, when Google got me completely lost, I was low on gas, my cell phone dead and not a house in sight. After driving around on fumes, so pissed off, I found a UPS truck and chased him down. When he pulled over for a delivery I jumped out and asked him for help. GO UPS! Heh.
Alot of Google's other products are low-profile and not used much relatively speaking, which brings me to the main point, I hope for the sake of the Google Share holders, that Google isn't going off on the deepend with the "throw a thousand darts and see what hits" approach. It's easy to get caught up in yourself, especially when your stock is soaring.
Then again, who knows, maybe Google will "get it right", and be the world power 5, 10, 20 years from now. Every department outside web-search @ google smells an awful like dot-com 2000/2001 to me.
It'll be interesting though to watch!
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
Ah, Going public. The excitement of Stock Options and being traded on the stock exchange. Everyone thinks paydays will get bigger and the company with thrive and grow.
In reality, what happens is that you are know answerable to the will of mysterious stock holders. You start learning a new phrases and vocabularly like, "shareholder equity", "IPO", "Sarbanes-Oxley", "vesting period", "we must make decisions that increase shareholder value", and "the purpose of stock isn't to make employees rich."
Soon after the IPO, raises and bonuses shrink. Healthcare gets slashed and perks vanish away. Why? Because executives who are now accountable to shareholders rank their company vs. competitors and create a scorecard. Suppose the shareholders were to find out that your CEO was paying better bonuses to employees than the industry standard. He might have to answer for that on an earnings conference call or meeting with the mysterious shareholders. Executives however always want raises, bonuses, perks, and cheap stock no matter what kind of job they do. Just ask the idiot running GM into the ground. He should be well compensated no matter how poorly the company performs.
I think Google thought they could go public and still maintain control of the company, but it looks like they are careening out of control. The absolute best thing that could happen is for Google's stock to crash, then have Google buy all the outstanding shares and convert back to a private company.
There are still some really great privately held technology companies like SAS where life is good for employees. Am I bitter? Sure, I went through the whole IPO process and watched as executives were rolling in cash while they sold stock for which they had paid a mere $.01 per/share. Meanwhile, I had to hang onto my stock and stock options for a vesting period while the price plummeted and they all left to go find another company to rape and pillage. Does anyone know of a situation where going public was actually good for a company and it's employees?
I've noticed a lot of people make certain comments about Google's web search that others can't reproduce.
I'd like to ask you to try running a Google search with cookies erased and blocked and compare.
Platform matters as well.
For example, on my machine, a search for "wine" returns WineHQ first and www.wineandco.com second.
It knows I'm more likely to be interested in WINE vs the drink, and in french results versus english.
Platform affects this as well. And probably browser.
On a Windows 2000 machine with Internet Explorer, wine.com is the first hit.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Everything else Google has done since then has fewer of those properties. That's the problem. Their excessive market cap forces them to "grow" into less profitable markets. That's the real problem.
Google should have taken on debt and gone private. They didn't need to raise money; they just needed to buy out the VCs. Then they could have stayed in their winning niche of "honest, non-obnoxious search".
I think you are concentrating too much on Microsoft's failures in branching out. Microsoft started out as a company that wrote BASIC interpreters, then they "branched out" into operating systems. They then " branched out" from OSs to word processing/spreadsheets/presentations and were successful I would say. Even things like Windows CE while not exactly setting the world on fire like they would have hoped has become fairly successful if you go by sales.
Yeah, they had some failures, but what company if any significant size hasn't? Even the vaunted Nintendo had the virtual boy. Google will make some mistakes too
I'm sorry, I'll go back to the mindless M$ bashing now...
I'm glad to see they mentioned click fraud. However Google seems to claim they're doing something about it. Personaly I think they have a policy of turning a blind eye to click fraud. I know of someone who was charged $100,000 for false google-ad clicks. They noticed a huge surge of clicks but no new business. After asking Google about click fraud they were informed that they'd have to prove it and submit the proof to Google in order to get a refund. So, they had to hire a 3rd party to monitor the clicks and send in reports. I'm sure Google has the ability to notice click fraud...especially when it's just one IP address clicking thousands of times, but I guess they like the revenue it generates when nobody complains. What kind of company puts the onus on their customers to make sure the transaction they're facilitating runs properly? Seems like a law suit waiting to happen.
Yes, publically traded companies are, for the most part, intended for the sole purpose of "maximizing shareholder equity."
But is that all they should ever be about? A lot of people think that corporations are bad, and that their number one purpose should be (by law!) to "serve the public good", followed by any claims about money. This is what the people who founded the USA believed.
Yes, there are non-profits that fill part of the public good gap, but isn't there room for something in between? "At Bwandana, Inc., we will donate 50% of our profits each year to save the rainforests. The remaining 50% will go to grow the business and maximize shareholder equity."
Perhaps existing companies could not change their purpose without legislation. However, if a new company makes a claim (like, say "Do no evil"), and puts that in their business plan before they go public, there is no reason at all why that cannot be their number one purpose. Anyone who owns stock in Google knew that was the purpose of the company when they bought the stock. I suspect that some people own the stock because they feel the company does good.
If Google fails to follow its business plan, which includes the requirement to do no evil, then it would be the responsibility of the shareholders to oust the board and replace it with others who would.
Now all that said, yeah, I agree they need to grow into other, related markets, because that's the only way they can survive a downturn.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
OK - I'll play Devil's advocate.
Standing up for ideals with the Chinese Government would mean not operating in China. Standing up for ideals with the US Government did not mean no longer operating in the US.
To be sure - that seems to indicate that ideals do not always lead business decissions. Although with China, there seems to be an ongoing theory that affecting change in China is best done by becoming valuable to China. The cynical would rightly point out that the biggest driver to this is greed - on both the Capitalist and Communist sides.
I am generally more of a moderate (A moderate who hasn't posted to slashdot in about 3 years and no longer has the email account at which he can retrieve his password) and I have noticed a trend where the republicans accuse, in a specific and calculated way, democrats of the behavior that the republicans are engaging in.
They accuse the democrats of the politics of destruction
They accuse the democrats of arguing through emotion rather than reason
They accuse the democrats of not caring about our basic rights
They accuse the democrats of engaging in judicial activism.
However they have mastered the politics of destruction through arguing by emotion to install an executive that does not care about our basic rights... and the republican majority in legislature is allowing judicial activists of the conservative mold, who hold extremely dangerous opinions about the power of the executive to take control of the supreme court.
It is astounding that verbally accusing the democrats of one thing is more persuasive than an actual history of republicans *actually doing it*.
To the republican party, and especially the executive of the US; There are FOUR lights!
Maybe the BBC, historically one of the world's great information delivery organizations, has an interest in casting Google in a negative light? Microsoft isn't the only company that sees Google as a threat, after all.
With cookies wiped using Mozilla 1.7.12 under Gentoo Linux I get wine.com as first hit as well.
:)
I qualified the cookie bit with OS/Browser since it seemed to me that I got more linux specific results when using Mozilla under Linux.
So in this case it seems the key factor is probably their cookie info.
You might want to just keep an eye out and see if what is returned changes subtly for you later.
Like the parent, you may just assume google is biased, when it is actually trying to sniff out your biases.
Also, it seems to affect more the ordering of results. I still get more or less the same search.
Still.
134,000,000 results with cookies intact.
157,000,000 results without cookies.
So obviously things are a little different.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
I'm sorry, but after having watched the "documentary", I was slightly shocked. How is searching for your kid's condition on the Internet relevant to the success of Google? I mean sure, there's the obvious connection that is supposedly formed in anyone's mind upon seeing/hearing this: nobody could help her, she searched Google, she found help there -> Google is a life saver. That page that she found might as well have been a hypochondriac club website in which semi-professional people are paranoid about a new mole on their skin. How can any sound-thinking human being associate Google to rescuing that girl from blindness after being told the facts? Something isn't right here. I mean is it just me or is BBC trying too hard to put Google in a good light? And it's not just the little girl example, the ones following are even more preposterous: a detective using Google as a means of finding information about people? Sure, a lot of people leave traces of their identities on different websites, but Google just searches, the websites are already there. Google itself only aggregates the info, so again, this is sort of blurry. Even considering how easy it is to steal someone's identity using the web today if you're skilled enough, that still is not enough to prove that the Internet is somehow relevant for finding the guy your wife's cheating you with.
Just get the facts and judge them for yourselves. You think Google is going to turn into its antagonistical self and consume every soul on the planet and that Larry and Serghey are The Antichrist? This is just media hype, time to wake up and smell the monopoly.