Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
what's next from Google:
WORLD DOMINATION! (currently in beta)
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Those who rule the Internet rule the world.
Ancient Greek Philosophers -18c Enlightenment Thinkers -Slashdotters
...they're getting involved in everything because they've been good at everything*? When they start failing, I guarantee you they'll stick to what they're good at.
*except Google Earth. I still can't find the Sydney Opera House, no matter what keywords I use.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
http://www.google.com/googlegulp/
Google gulp beta! 4 great flavors
This is a cool video about the subject, what would happen if Google and Amazon merged.
http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/
Windows? I haven't used that since 1999. Fix the Slashdot Problems
Hmmmm, turns up 2,840,000,000 hits
Remember kids, with great power comes great opportunity to abuse that power
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.
Here's the URL for the Real Video stream for those who don't want to watch in some horrible little JavaScript window:
The Money programme investigates the internet search engine Google.
(Works here in the UK at least.)
And so we should leave it in the hands of an organization susceptible to political pressure from the United States of America?
Just throwing that idea out there.
For example: I wanted to register Slashdot.xxx, but someone kicked up a fuss and now that isn't going to happen.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
The thing with Google is that they went to the stock market and received insane amounts of money.
Then the stock has risen to insane levels. To prevent the stock from crashing, they need to materialise and be more than just a bunch of IP. So now they are trying to jump at all markets at the same time and just wait for something that will work. When they have viable bussiness in different markets, they have something to fall back on when something else suddenly fails or temporarely performs badly. Also, investors won't freak out as easily when something goes wrong, which would cause the stock price to collapse.
It's all very interesting to see how things wil evolve!
Google's first and only real responsibility is producing a profit for it's shareholders; "Make money for our shareholders, Don't be Evil.". Making money is not a bad thing, and when you make a good product, money is the tangible reward, that's capitalism in a nutshell.
Google claimed the thrown of search engines, but they know someone might one day build a better search engine technology. It's best not to have all your eggs in one basket. It's the responsibilty to the shareholders to ensure Google doesn't lose big one day.
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
"Google has been transformed... into a multi-headed high tech beast which wants to get involved in everything"
And this is where it needs to be really careful, otherwise it will - by definition - start being the next Microsoft. Up until now they haven't done anything that I'd particularly object to, but as soon as they start using their gmail account system like a Microsoft Passport system for all their apps, I'll be outta there.
Google have already stated their world information-dominating objectives, and on its own that's something to be worried about, regardless of which company decides it'd be a nice mantra to have...
Interesting that you posted as an AC.
Of course, if you hold these opinions, the NSA probably already has surveillance on you through your ISP. After all, if you're not with us, you're against us. See you in the carrot patch.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
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?
It occurs to me that stuff like this that appears at Slashdot and elsewhere on a regular basis, it's just exactly like all the entertainment industry dish that goes on out there. It seems that geeks are really no different than all the other hoi polloi out there, their soap operas just have different characters...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Serious business
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
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".
Yes and then we can gain access to root and find the garbage file to execute the Da Vinci code and hold the world hostage!
I think people are quick to call anything a documentary these days, this is opinionated hidden agenda drivel. Someone always enjoys to hate the successful.
Google labs existed long before Google became a behemoth and they were always striving to corner every market (even ones that didn't exist yet); google talk, google desktop, the google cache blade, gmail, google news, picasa, etc. Most of these technologies were released before or were already in the works before they hit it big with wall street. And, they've been hiring bright minds since day one, this is nothing new. Also, they purchased the leading usenet (dejanews) company before they became a behemoth.
This company always had their eyes on the prize, and although unspoken, it was always understood their solutions would be free and minimalist. Too minimalist sometimes, google talk for example could use a more cluttered interface and some actual features. However, their focus was on using open source and widely available technologies (jabber, instead of inventing YET another) and keeping their product as simple as possible (see k.i.s.s.) as they always do.
Google is the most noble and innovative companies to exist today, they fight for human privacy, and they're always willing to push the bar and defy the status quo. The reason you have more space in most popular webmails, along with simpler faster loading interfaces with fewer or no banners is because of Google being a force of nature. The same is true of other websites, where companies have cut back on the amount of flash ads or banners that they used, following Google's lead. But, no one does it like Google.
There was a section that went out of the way to highlight what appeared to br one womans unease about the privacy problems caused by Google's ability to store the results of a users searches - with no mention of the fact that in most cases all Gooogle will have is an IP address, or even that using Google isn't compulsory.
Two points.
First, I'd like to say that any search engine (or website, or whatever) is likely to do this. I recognize that it's kind of spooky to consider what kind of a profile someone like Google could build up on you, given how pervasive Google is -- which is why I wholeheartedly support Google giving the finger to the feds in general when it comes to their users' privacy. This may be a problem, but it's a search engine problem, not a Google problem.
Frankly, I think that we need tougher restrictions present on law enforcement obtaining search engine data. There are obviously practical problems inherent in defining what a "search engine" is, but hear me out. Traditionally, law enforcement could maybe get a warrant to start tapping a phone or search a house (and, incidently, they have to notify people that they *searched* the house, if they do so). I believe that LE can request phone records (though I don't know how far back, and in any event, this is at least somewhat limited information).
On the other hand, search engine data contains an entire history of what people have done on their computer for maybe years. This is absolutely unprecedented. It can be a snapshot spanning *years*. I think that there is too much incentive to grab data for some other claimed purpose and then abuse it -- it would clearly be very useful for political reasons.
I also worry about the chilling effects on thought -- it is as objectionable to me as feds being able to obtain library reading lists (worse, secretly). I want people to be able to read and educate themselves on things without worrying about whether or not that reading might be used against them at some time in the future -- if a lawyer wants to read about communist ideology, I don't think that that should eventually be used to prohibit him from becoming a Supreme Court Justice, for example.
I could see restrictions where LE cannot request data older than $N years, and possibly must go through a more substantial review process than a typical tap or search warrant (in which a judge determines that seizing search engine records is not only *useful* to an investigation, but that there is no other, less invasive, way to perform the request). Furthermore, I think that there should be a requirement to notify the person whose data was seized (in much the same way that house searches currently require notification). This provides some disincentive for "fishing trips".
Second, the woman being concerned was on BBC -- I'm guessing that she's European. European data privacy generally differs from US data privacy in that in the US, the government is often more limited in the personal data that they can obtain, but in Europe, corporations are often more limited in how they can handle personal data. Her concerns were probably about what Google (or someone buying the information from Google, or someone buying the information from them) could do, not with the government.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I, for one, welcome our new internet-meme overlords.
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.
Going public has nothing to do with the emaployees. It has everything to do with the owners. Companies go public so that the owners can make a mint. You, as a lowly employee, are quite honestly, irrelevant. Employees aren't entitled to any ownership at all, unless the owners see fit to give them some ownership.
I don't respond to AC's.
Google has to do something in order to grow, and searching won't sustain them forever. While they're fabulous for finding random websites, I've noticed that I use Wikipedia now if I want to find information about something, since I know there'll always be something useful there. I'm not talking about vital stuff, but if I'm curious about a band, or a model, or an animal or who Winston Churchill was, I no longer resort to Google.
It's also my opinion that it's a good thing Google is doing this. They have the resources to produce some awesome stuff now, and that's what they seem to be trying. Perhaps I'm also slightly charmed by the idea of collecting the world's greatest engineers in one spot.
Mind you, I'm not too fond of all the stuff they're putting out at the moment, but they're bound to strike genius eventually.
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.
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.
I'm rather doubtful that platform matters when doing Google searches. Are you aware that Google has several different data centres around the world that do not always return exactly the same results? Also Google *does* show different results depending on whether you are using a localised Google or not, what preferences you have set (e.g. only return English pages) or whether you are using a themed Google (e.g. Google Linux).
You never know though. Do you have any solid repeatable data (e.g. using proxies and ensuring your searches are going to the same data centre) to prove that the platform does affect results?
Oh yeah... before the IPO, the owner(s) have to have all of their top talent in place. I'd imagine that the underwriters are scrutinizing the team pretty thoroughly. After the IPO, well, the former owners have already made the bulk of what they're going to make. Unless you're a Google or some other abberration, then really the IPO is the goal for most company owners.
Plus, how many employees can you name that work for all of the companies that you own any stock in? Generally, public investors will look at the CEO, *maybe* the VP's, and that's it. Once it's public, then it's all about what kind of finacial results the CEO can return. The owners (shareholders) often don't care how he does it, or who the rest of the employees are, so long as those results are good.
I don't respond to AC's.
"but as soon as they start using their gmail account system like a Microsoft Passport system for all their apps, I'll be outta there."
They're already doing that - see Google Accounts.
Better yet, join the Google Air Force and you can drop some Google bombs.
KABOOM!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Had they followed your advice, Larry Page and Sergey Brin would not be multibillionaires as they currently are.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10