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Google's Insular Nature
stockpicker_dude_78 writes "Robert Cringley has written a thought-provoking article on Google's insular nature, and compares them to the similar environment at Microsoft." From the article: "Google is secretive. This started as a deliberate marketing mystique, but endures today more as a really annoying company habit. Google folks don't understand why the rest of us have a problem with this, but then Google folks aren't like you and me. The result of this secrecy and Google's 'almighty algorithm' mentality is that the company makes changes -- and mistakes -- without informing its customers or even doing all that much to correct the problems."
Contrast to amazon.com which is priced much closer to earth because all their cards are on the table.
Google knows that at this point the switching cost to move to the next best thing when it arrives is low, so they have to sell the future and keep it secret and holy as long as possible.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Google has already peaked. It used to be that the quality of links in Google's search results were very good, and reflected pages with good content. No more. The spammers have figured out how to put their pages on top of Google's searches. The trick, basically, is to have a lot of pages with links to each other, which fools Google's link ranking algorithm.
For example, Here is a bogus blog site which is trying to Googlebomb. It looks like a blog site, but the site in question just grabs text from RSS feeds and makes a bogus blog, which also has ads which this spammer hopes to get high Google ratings with.
In my case, I had a bad transcription of the Lyrics to an early 1980s song have a high Google rank score at one point. It was a clearly personal web page. Well, back in 2002, it was one of the first ten links Googling for this particular song. These days, a Google search for this song gives you those sites which have made an ad-filled page with no content for every name in their database, those lyrics sites with too many popups, ads, and spyware (and who have copied my poorly-transcribed lyrics instead of the real lyrics), the Amazon page for this product--but my lyrics page is no where to be found.
Google's goden age has come and gone. Their searches are becoming less relevant and informitive, and big players like Microsoft are butting in to their territory (for people who don't think Microsoft can make an effective search engine: People said Microsoft couldn't make a decent browser in 1996).
These days, Myspace is the place to be (In the USA, that hot chick will have a MySpace page and will give you their MySpace ID); You Tube is a great place to easily get pirated TV content (cool rare 1980s music videos and Dr. Who TV shows, in my case); and DIGG is more relevant than Slashdot (but shares Slashdot's problem of having too many fanboys and flamers).
Google was every geeks darling and there was very much a see no evil attitude until Google did the blatantly evil thing of censoring Chinese search results. That was fortunately a wake up call and now I think people are questioning whether Google's "do no evil" ethos is true, which obviously it isn't being a
a company funded by stock investment it's ONLY priority (and one enforced by law) is returning profit to it's investors. The fly in the ointment though is now since Google is perceived to be hypocritical it's no longer a good investment. The bottom line is that for a lot of people who consider themselves to be rationalists geeks are effected by fundamentally irrational trends i.e. feelings towards a company as much as anyone else. Google good, google bad, depends on which week we are on. Would this article have been written before Google sold out to the Chinese? Probably not since the geeks hadn't turned on Google yet even though they were doing the EXACT things this article talks about before the Chinese debacle.
So yes I think in many ways the criticism of Google is a good thing, it's just too bad we had our irrational blinders on about OTHER Google blunders before the big Chinese sell out.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
"Please, stop pointing out that while we brag about how much we love open source software, most of our exciting free applications are only available for Windows!"
At the risk of restarting this flame war, why would google make software for Linux? A lot of their stuff, like Google Earth, has no clear revenue stream for them on windows either. And hitting 93% of users is a lot more tempting than going for 3%.
Google is basically responsible for Firefox's income stream. I'd argue that does more for Linux than any other non-linux company out there.
The ______ Agenda
Not true at all. In a properly targeted campaign, users would be just as likely to click on either ad. If I Google "equation editor" and Luis' ad pops up, I'm just as likely to click on it as I would be if I Googled "Sonicare" and an Amazon ad for a Sonicare toothbrush pops up.
I don't know about that. There's a certain power in branding that you're overlooking. If I search for "Sonicare" and an Amazon ad for a Sonicare toothbrush comes up, I may well click on it because I have purchased from them before and had a reasonable experience. If I search for "equation editor" and Luis' ad comes up, I've probably never heard of it, and thus it's not distinguished from the other ads sitting next to it at all. If there are 4 ads on the side of the page and the user decides to click on one, Luis probably has at most a 1/4 chance of getting that click, whereas Amazon probably has a much better chance than that, simply based on brand recognition. That brand recognition might even pull someone who wouldn't have clicked on an ad in the first place over to the ad bar.