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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
You are violating line #247 of our contract. Namely:
"The signer agrees to publish only stories that praise Google as supreme ruler of the universe."
You may yet be spared if you delete this article.
Love,
Google
Motley Fool staffers are just now realizing that Google is slowly running out of gas. Perhaps all this clickfraud exposure is leaving people wondering how could they get away with this Internet ponzi scam for so long... Luckily Google got a little smarter and quieted the naysayers a bit by doing the MS thing and buying all the competition around them. Smart move. MS bought all threats and consumed them into the heap of junk calls Windows. Google is doing the same slowly via different angles (Skype, Writely ... which competes with MS' Word, Andriod, etc). Anyhow, since its all opinionated, I wonder when will Google's true adclick fraud will truly come to fruition... Experts estimate the true value of what Google would owe would be a couple of BILLION in clickfraud.
Infiltrated dot Net
From the article:
Google attracts advertisers like Luis with the idea that their ads will be cheaper because, frankly, they are selling something that is only thinly traded. The dream is that the system scales and scales fairly, only it isn't fair at all because if Amazon wants to advertise an equation editor USING EXACTLY THE SAME AD TEXT AND FORMATTING AS LUIS -- their words will cost 100 times less than the same words bought by Luis. It's not that Amazon (or any other big Google advertiser) has better copy writers, it is just that they sell a broader range of things.
"A large percentage of impressions & clicks do have £0.01 minimum bids," said Jeff from Google, "but these are our very highest quality ads/advertisers."
In other words, the minimum word price is 1p, BUT NOT FOR YOU.
Um, yeah. The same words should be more effective coming from Amazon than from Cringely's friend Luis, because people are simply more likely to click.
You could run all this through an algorithm that maximizes expected revenue (AI people would call this "utility") for Google based on click probability, and you'd come up with pretty much what Google does.
I'm sorry. I'm not a Google fanboi, but this is ridiculous.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
The thing that's always bugged me about Google is the generalized sense of smug superiority the company seems to emanate. "Look at our amusing job position titles!" "No, don't ask us about what we do with all the data we collect!" "Here, look at the quirky benefits we provide for our employees!" "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!"
Google is the kid in high school who is smart (but not exceptionally so), works *very* hard to maintain 4.0 GPA and also sucks up to his teachers all the time. However, he gets very secretive and passive-aggressive when you point out his imperfections.
Of course they are secretive.
;)
They know as well as the rest of us that it will take about 3 days for everyone on the planet to dump Google as soon as a search engine without pages of fake sites filled with ads or just irrelivant sites is all you get no matter what you search for.
Remember AltaVista?
No reason for Google to give us 3 days notice
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
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?
There's a reason Cringley has remained a mediocre journalist, while google is a multi-billion software firm founded on being really, really smart.
This reason is exemplified by Cringley misunderstanding that google (and microsoft, and coke, and countless other hugely successful firms) are successful *solely* because they own trade secrets, leveraged into strategy -- and not because of some stupid "mystique" concept invented by mediocre journalists because they don't know what the company is actually doing, but still get paid by the word.
Duh.
Because it looks to me here more like what's happening here is just the "geek community" (by which, of course, I just mean "people who read slashdot") increasingly losing all touch with reality.
You can see this happening in a number of ways, but the increasing process of demonizing Google more and more (to the exclusion of having much energy left over to care about corporate interests which are legitimately harming the public good) is just the funniest.
You wanna know when Google got "evil"? It had nothing to do with China. Google got "evil" when they got successful. Self-proclaimed "geeks" got so used to rooting for the underdog that, pavlov style, as soon as Google became the overdog they started reflexively rooting against them.
I was reading Slashdot on the day that Google went IPO; people were already predicting, before the IPO, that Google would no longer be able to keep up a perception of being "good" while a for-profit, publicly traded company. And then the next day, when Google went IPO, they went ahead and started perceiving Google as "evil", without going to the bother of waiting for Google to actually do anything evil. Once Google finally went and got around to starting up a search site hosted in China*, these people started using this retroactively as the justification for their loose anger against Google. People who weren't looking for a reason to demonize Google barely even noticed the whole China thing.
* What, you think what Google did was "censoring search results"? The Chinese google search sites hosted in America and Taiwan aren't censored and still work just the same as they always did. It's just that now Google also has a local site hosted in China and adhering to China's censorship laws that people in China can use if they want unfettered access to Google without having to circumvent China's web filters every time they need to search for something. Is this an ethical thing for Google to do? Maybe, maybe not, with the balance probably being on "not". But by doing this, Google has hurt nobody; if Google hadn't done this, nobody would have been helped and all that would have happened is MSN would have become the default search engine in China. The only reason we view Google's presence in China as a problem is that we for whatever reason hold Google to the special standard that they shouldn't do business in China, a standard we do not hold Cisco, Yahoo, Microsoft, Fox News, CNN, McDonalds, or the U.S. Government to.
How can you tell when the Slashdot userbase has lost all sense, logic, or integrity? When they start agreeing with Cringely.
Robert Cringley has written a thought-provoking article...
segmentation fault, core dumped
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
Google folks don't understand why the rest of us have a problem with this
Who? Wha..? Who are these "the rest of us" that this guy speaks of? A similar phenomenon happens with Apple fandom sites. Basically, when a news site or reporter decides to focus only on one or two companies, s/he ends up not having enough news, and this causes a lot of frustration. And they usually end up going down the path of speculative reporting (which is usually really boring, long, and incorrect).
Google is probably too secretive, but I appreciate their attitude. They have VERY LITTLE respect for the stock analysts, and Wall Street in general.
The fact of the matter is that the stock market is built on false (or at least dubious) perceptions. Google refuses to play that game. They don't tell ANYBODY what they're doing, which evens the playing field. The "big players" don't have any insider information, and so don't have a significant advantage over the "little players". I think it's great. Google basically says "We're not going to help the rich get richer."
That said, they are playing a dangerous game. Wall Street (and their ilk) essentially controls the U.S. economy. A given business pisses them off at their own peril. But at least Google is making the effort. And so far it has worked.