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."

Comments

price mystique

[The Clockwork Troll]

Google's stock price is based on mystique. Investors don't know what they're going to do next so they give them the benefit of the doubt and price the stock as if every effort they're undertaking will be successful as AdWords/AdSense.

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.

Zonk, we need to talk

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Oh noes! Google trys to make monies!

[grammar fascist]

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 think Google has already peaked

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

It's interesting how geeks have turned on Google

[mrraven]

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.

There's a reason Cringley is a 2bit writer

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Is that how you see it?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.