The Un-Google - The Search Competition

WinEveryGame writes "The Economist is running an article on the state of the competition for Internet Search. While Google clearly dominates, and continues to have positive momentum, its leadership is still vulnerable. The search-engine battle is not over yet." From the article: "In terms of momentum — mass times velocity — Google's lead indeed looks daunting. It has by far the most mass, with an American market share of 43% as of April, which reaches 50% counting AOL, an internet property that uses Google's search technology. This compares with 28% for Yahoo!; 13% for MSN, which belongs to Microsoft; and 6% for Ask, which is owned by IAC/Interactive Corp, a conglomerate of about 60 online media brands. Google also has velocity: its market share grew by 17% in the four quarters to this spring, whereas Yahoo! and MSN both lost share. Only Ask has more velocity — its share grew by 35% — but then again it has little mass."

Comments

The Many New Possible Fronts

[eldavojohn]

The search-engine battle is not over yet.

Of course it isn't.

There are some customers (government/military included) that are aware of the two concepts of precision and recall. Before you groan and skip this post because you recall those words from all classifying algorithms, you should take note that there are two stages we have yet to meet in this respect.

One is simply improving precision without sacrificing recall. When I search for 'horn' in Google, how many of those searches are relevant? I was thinking about a French horn (instrument) and the first link brings me to a society about them. The next three links, however, do not. You might say, "Well, gee, you should have put 'French' in your search" but is this really necessary? So there is some money to be made in "learning" search engines that tailor themselves to the user or perhaps the results could be displayed intuitively in domains of knowledge (a la Clusty). So that I can select a node that applies to the correct searching term and see all results returned below that. Have you ever wished to view your search results in a format other than a linear display of ranked results? The documents are related in more than one dimension, you know. As computing power increases, I suspect there will be room to display them in two dimensions (heat/area mapping, nodes & vertices on a plane) and three dimensions (spatial 3D engines with nodes & vertices in space).

The second stage is giving the user the power to adjust precision versus recall. Even a graphical interface that shows the F-measure relationship between precision and recall would be helpful to consider in the search engine wars. Say you give the user some control through a slider AJAX interface of a threshold ß. But the threshold isn't simply the "Google score cut off" or even a term frequency cutoff. Instead, it's applied to be a "relevance" threshold. You would score relevance by fingerprinting frequency, specificity, clustering and other useful tools by using a domain ontology or taxonomy.

Another big thing that is missing is identifying what kind of data you are searching. Social data? Scientific data? Historical data? etc. Perhaps I'm only interested in who's who to Stephen Hawking. I'd search for him and flip through nodes of separation from him to other people.

The current search sites also only tend to favor key-word regular expressions. What about searching with raw text or entire paragraphs? If you want to see an interesting demo of this, visit Collexis' Demo Site which alludes to a whole new kind of searching.

The key to entering the market as a competitor with Google is to pick up Google's slack and to try to pose yourself as a complimentary service to Google. Google is terrible at closed domain searches but amazingly efficient at open domain searches. You don't want to compete with them so fill a different part of the market. Google benefits from simple design, so go to an advanced flashy complex design. Most people aren't looking for that but the people that are have nowhere to go.

The Economist is alluding to potential leadership problems inside Google. Who cares? That's not going to be Google's downfall. Google's downfall will be an new intuitive way to search and the only thing that will prevent their downfall is if they buyout the company or bone up on the technology.

The search-engine battle hasn't even hit its stride.

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[Aurisor]

I was thinking about a French horn (instrument) and the first link brings me to a society about them. The next three links, however, do not. You might say, "Well, gee, you should have put 'French' in your search" but is this really necessary?

Unless there is only one meaning for a word or the computer can read your mind you're going to have to be more specific. I don't see how any kind of technological advance can ever enable a computer to know which kind of horn you want without being told.

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[Alex P Keaton in da]

Googling "Search Engine" returns 2,190,000,000 results.
The top 5 results?
1.Dogpile Web Search Home Page
2.Search Engine Watch: Tips About Internet Search Engines & Search ...
3.Lycos
4.MetaCrawler Web Search Home Page - MetaCrawler
5.Mamma Metasearch search engines on the Internet.
Google is 8th!!!!
Granted DogPile and Mamma include Google results, but it appears Google is no longer relevant. In today's world, you are judged by your Google ranking. Google is 8th when you google Search Engines. They are a has been....

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless there is only one meaning for a word or the computer can read your mind you're going to have to be more specific. I don't see how any kind of technological advance can ever enable a computer to know which kind of horn you want without being told.

Did you even read my post? If the search engine "learns" and knows I love music, it would trump the other forms of 'horn' and put those related to French horn first. How does Amazon know what books you'd like without reading your mind? Also, if it displayed the results by domains of knowledge, I would merely select the domain I wanted to see results from in an intermediary step.

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[Imsdal]

So there is some money to be made in "learning" search engines that tailor themselves to the user (...)

Google supposedly does that, or will in the near future, assuming that you are logged in. From what I understand, most of the /. crowd considers that to be a fairly big integrity issue and don't search while logged in. (Or maybe they are just a vocal minority?)

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[tred]

So there is some money to be made in "learning" search engines that tailor themselves to the user

Am I the only one who sees privacy issues here? One concept of the next gen search engine that the article addresses is just this: one that tracks my every click, learns about me, and tailors searches in terms of that knowledge. I wonder just how clear a picture this data could paint of a person? How much of myself do I want represented in someone elses database, without a clear sense of how they'll use it or what it says about me? In what ways beside enhanced search and advertisements might this data be (ab)used? Could outside access to this kind of data cost someone their job, or a political campaign, or much worse, just because of a link they once clicked?

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[kiwimate]

Very good post, my congratulations.

Yep. These are some of the same problems that present themselves in the document management / knowledge management / ECM market. What I want is a taxonomy. That way I can drill down when I search for horn and see the results categorized appropriately.

But how do you present a taxonomy? It's not easy, and you really need to know the context. Example: what is a generator? Enter that word into Google and the first page is entirely links for products to generate ASCII art or banners for your church. Interestingly, the entire list of links consists of electrical generators.

What I'm thinking about, however, has many different contexts in the electrical industry. If I'm an engineer, then a generator is something that produces electricty. If I'm in customer service, however, a generator is a company that generates power and connects to the interconnection grid.

This also presents a problem when discussing searching on raw text or paragraphs. Again, you need to understand the context of the industry that you're working inside. You need a combination of good Natural Language Processing (NLP) and something like an expert system for your particular industry. This could be particularly important in any industry with a highly technical verbiage, such as IT, legal, medical, musical...well, you get the point.

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[Nexus7]

> So there is some money to be made in "learning" search engines that
> tailor themselves to the user

I for one, wouldn't want a search engine that customizes its output to that extent for me (not the way it looks, or the ordering, but the content itself). I'd like to see results for all types of horns even though I've only been interested in air horns in my previous searches. That'd be like only watching a particular news channel that is known to be slanted one way, you'd end up thinking to world is just as they say it is.

> or perhaps the results could be displayed intuitively in domains of
> knowledge

That would be helpful. For example, the biggest online auction site will show you all the results for say, "xenon lamps", but they also generate a menu in the left frame containing the main categories, such as "Automobile", "Business & Industrial", "Sporting Goods", etc. However the database of auctions is very well ordered and makes this possible. Generalizing this to contexts in real-life would be considerably harder. Classifications would be possible along many axes... a problem worthy of the company that would tackle it.

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[Van Cutter Romney]

No, Google's search result is 3rd in the ranking and not eighth. ----- Ghosts with kicks do not listen to talks.

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[McWilde]

"Google is 8th when you google Search Engines. They are a has been...."

It should be perfectly clear from your own post: noone uses the term "search engine" anymore, it's called a Google these days. Just like Xerox and Kleenex. I just googled "Google" and Google still dominates the first ten pages of results. Stanford is on page 4, Slashdot on page 8. I didn't feel the need to page on until I found Yahoo or MSN in there.

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[Atif.Hussain]

search engines that tailor themselves to the user

this could be the biggest pitfall

1. without elaborating much, privacy .
2. one might search for different domains at different times.
3. information cutoff. If i ever weighed something light, i'd remain forever in darkness.

Your suggestions of categorizing results according to search term meaning is already being taken, i saw few with clear distinction classified in google, but needs improvement.

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[Momoru]

Despite the joke, it goes to show how Google isn't that great at returning the "Best" result anymore. It needs to change its algorhythm now that all the SEO's know how to game the system.

I still prefer Clusty.com 's way of doing search...much easier to find the most relevant thing when you type in a term used for multiple things like "Paris" Does one want the porn star or city? or "Cold Fusion".. the technology, or the programming language? Google doesn't know, and for really common terms it fails. Clusty can tell the difference, Google can't.

Even better is Yahoo's beta search that allows you to filter results of sites that are more sales oriented or research oriented. If I want to find out about the new Trek Mountain Bike, Google hits me with tons of sales sites, when really I want reviews, or vice versa. If someone could combine all those, and then maybe a Digg like system of users rating relevance, they might have something.

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[yohan1701]

If you put in just "search" 16,210,000,000 results
1. Google
2. MSN
3. Lycos
4. Exite
5. Search Engine Watch

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[drew]

"Well, gee, you should have put 'French' in your search" but is this really necessary? So there is some money to be made in "learning" search engines that tailor themselves to the user or perhaps the results could be displayed intuitively in domains of knowledge (a la Clusty).

Even if a search engine were sophisticated enough to incorporate taxonomies and domains of knowledge, how would it know that you meant a French Horn vs. say, an English Horn. There are many types of horns even in the music world.

Now, I agree there is a lot of room for improvement- one of the other posters used "Cold Fusion" as an example. A search engine that could determine between the programming language and the scientific theory would definitely have an advantage over most search engines today. But would you expect the search engine to know that you were looking for "Cold Fusion" if you just searched for "fusion"?

More intelligent search engines won't eliminate the need for you to be sepcific about what your searching for. If you go to a hardware and just tell them you want a wrench, you'll have to dig through a big aisle with a dozen kinds of wrenches to find the one you want. But if you tell them right away that you need a 4mm allen wrench, an employee can probably take you right to it.

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the parent was a joke
I know it is hard to understand for some, but for those with some social skills, jokes don't have to be 100% accurate. Are you that guy that ruins jokes with "wait, why would a rabbi, a minister, a imam and a priest be walking into a bar when imams can't drink?"

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[Asprin]

So there is some money to be made in "learning" search engines that tailor themselves to the user or perhaps the results could be displayed intuitively in domains of knowledge (a la Clusty [clusty.com]).

Perhaps it sounds paradoxical, but typically I am searching for things OUTSIDE my areas of expertise so how much of this sort of learning is really practical?

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[Lagged2Death]

You might say, "Well, gee, you should have put 'French' in your search" but is this really necessary? So there is some money to be made in "learning" search engines that tailor themselves to the user or perhaps the results could be displayed intuitively in domains of knowledge (a la Clusty [clusty.com]).

I suspect that whatever search engine innovations come along, the use of a little smarts and specificity on the user's part will always pay off.

If a search engine returns results in clusters and hierarchies, then some familiarity with that engine's clusters and hierarchies will make you a better searcher, and ultimately will make that engine a more effective and precise tool for you.

A user who has a very specific thing in mind (like a French horn) yet uses a search engine to look for the vaguest, most context-free possible word that might be related (like horn) is always going to get more noise than signal. Clusty's approach is to 1) organize the noise and 2) compress the organized noise into an outline style hierarchy so that more noise fits on a single screen. That's not really improving precision, it's really a tacit admission that your search string sucks. It may in fact be a good idea to do 1) and 2), but neither addresses the fundamental difficulty - that you refused to provide information that would have dramatically improved the precision of the results.

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[tutori]

Exactly. A search that learns about you would be very bad. For example, if the search engine sees that you visit /. frequently, it will just assume that anything you type in is a typo, and what you meant to type was 'porn'. On second thought, that might not be so bad after all...

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[DJCacophony]

Do you mean an Electrical generator?

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[L the Cat]

I just went on MSN Search and typed in: "operating system". Results: 1. BSD Unix 2. Linux 3. OS/X 4. GNU Hurd 5. VMWare 6. P-system 7. Symbian 8. Windows NOT! Maybe that is why Google is #1?

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[Anonymous Coward]

Shall the listing begin, of all the horns that are musical and not considered "French Horns"? Yes it would be nice for you, if you could teach a search engine that whenever YOU look up horn, YOU would get back results that only pertained to "French Horn". Personally, I think that is one of the worst Ideas I've heard come down the pike. What if I am searching for a car horn? Or a bicycle horn? Or rhinoceros horn?

Let's see. It might go something like this...
ME: Computer, I'd like to do a search...
COMPUTER: Ooh, a search? Then you would like these results based on your last searches...
ME: Cancel. I did not even tell you what I was searching for...
COMPUTER: But I learned what you look for, and I have already provided it for you...

Silly, but the point is simple. If you are searching for information about a "French Horn" you search for "French Horn". If you are looking for information about horns in general, and all the different kinds of horns there are, then you search for Horn.

Sure, it's a great idea to have search sites offer different ways of sifting through the results of a search. Nothing at all wrong with proposing new navigation techniques, and new ways to list and cross reference what you looked up. But to think that the search engine should get to the point where it attempts to anticipate what you want, and provide it for you BEFORE you ask... that's a little over the top.

In your example, where the engine learned you only EVER use the word Horn when the word French preceeds it, and any results related to "horn" are ignored by you if they do not pertain to the French Horn, then sure, it would learn quite nicely, and would only provide "French Horn" results for a "horn" search. WHat happens when you need to search for information on changing your "Car Horn"? By your argument, you should not need the additional qualifier of "Car" to preceed the word "Horn" and the search engine should still know that you want "Car Horn" as the target of your search. Even though you trained it to equate the word "Horn" to mean "French Horn"...

Which opens up the possibility that your search would display as a collection of results containing "Car French Horn"... since your search engine takes the word Horn and replaces it with "French Horn" automatically after you have trained it to do so.

But the idea of taking any search result, and breaking it down statistically and catagorically BEFORE displaying the linear results... that's good stuff.

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[miyako]

One engine that has a really interesting way of dealing with this is ahref=http://www.kartoo.com/rel=url2html-10505http ://www.kartoo.com/> which is a meta search engine. Its written in flash, but uses an interesting concept of creating a "map" of different pages.
I just did a search on "Paris" and it brings up a list of pages- you can mouse over the pages to get a preview of the site. It also gives you a list of categories such as "City of Paris" "Accomodations" and "Entertainment". These categories are listed on the background of the map, and the pages are grouped according to their category. Lines are drawn between pages showing links and the category that connects them.
It's kind of hard to explain but actually a really neat concept. I don't use it as my primary search engine (I rarely use it at all) but it can be very useful for people who either, A: aren't familiar enough with search engines to play the "add and subtract various keywords and add quotes until I get the results I'm looking for" game or B: only have a general idea of what they are looking for, and want a quick way to narrow down their results

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[Hillgiant]

When I googled "Search Engine" on Yahoo!, it comes up #2. Right behind Yahoo! Search. I wonder if Yahoo! still fudges their results...

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[Omestes]

You forgot an element needed to people to actually want to use it, usability. People want a simple search engine, which is (in part) why Google reached ascendancy in the search engine market. With the goliath of the pre-google days (Yahoo) you had to actually work to find what your looking for, scroll down and find the right category, etc... People don't want to select nodes, or spend any amount of time on the results page, they just want to find and move on with the least amount of work or time. And on this front, Google is good enough. You must also balance simplicity with precision, especially for a mass market app.

I really don't have a big beef with Googles accuracy, it seems, again, good enough, on this point. Generally what I'm looking for is on the front page, generally in the top five. So no real complaints there. When I am hunting for more esoteric things, though there is a slight dip in this precision, so perhaps a learning algorithm would be a prefered approach.

Google also has a problem (still) with irrelevant data, such as message threads and blogs. I don't know how they would get around this, though, since one man's junk is another treasure.

Another aspect in this, is nontechnical. Buzz. Right now Google has the household word going for it, it is a reflexive aspect right now, in that people go to it without thinking. Most of the gains in user base in the other search engines also come from marketing, and not technology.

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[shimmin]

This is serving the customer. Clearly, someone who is at Google, and is looking for another search engine, is not well-served by a link to Google.

Re:The Many New Possible Fronts

[consonant]

Search Engine, pimp thyself!

But since we are trying to compare quantities...

[everphilski]

It should really be m*v^2. (m*v is a vector equation, m*v^2 is a scalar)

Does google really dominate?

[EmagGeek]

It seems more and more when I try to find something on google all I get are a bunch of link farms. This morning I was trying to find a bike jersey for a friend of mine and on the first page of results, it took getting to the second page to find any actual results. I did much better using Yahoo and found what I was looking for on the first page of results.

This is just one example, but it happens constantly...

Re:Does google really dominate?

[rainman_bc]

It seems more and more when I try to find something on google all I get are a bunch of link farms.

Totally agree. It isn't that Google is great; it is IMO quite far from it.

Personally I only stick to Google because of their usenet search. I honestly think their web search is crap thanks to google spammers, or those self titled Search Engine Optimizers.

I actually thing Yahoo's search engine is somewhat superior... I kinda like search.yahoo.com

Re:Does google really dominate?

[helixblue]

http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

Re:Does google really dominate?

[MicrowavedH2O]

I agree to some extent. I was searching for this site that hosted the solutions manual to my calc textbook. I entered a few unique words I had seen on the page before, and for some reason, google didn't get it at all, while it was the first result for yahoo.

Re:Does google really dominate?

[Dan Ost]

I wonder how many people report such spam to Google?

Re:Does google really dominate?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems more and more when I try to find something on google all I get are a bunch of link farms.

Getting tired of the nazi's over at webmasterworld, I decided to see if I could find a new webmaster forum. I joined about six and started in the "submit my website" sections. It was just a feature that webmasterworld didn't have and I was curious what kind of sites other people are actually working on. I didn't sumbit my site, just looked through sites and tried to hand out some reviews, and here is what I found,

The "submit your website" section is full of people using barely modified site templates (game, forum, directories, cms, mfa sites, ect). It was a waste of space, no programming, no originality, nothing. Here's how a typical post would go, "I spent 8 hours modifying this template, everyone please take the time to review my work." Average reply, "I like the color scheme, you should make it validate." Validate! These people are downloading templates and modifying the header with some crappy jpg and you think they are going to take the time or even have the ability to validate? Worse though is if you dare to tell them their site is useless. They get mad and say, "I spent a WHOLE 8 hours working on this site, it will be the number one site in the world in a week."

The worst offender yet has to be Digital Point, not only because they are probably the biggest but because they allow you to post your own adsense if your are first or last poster. Great idea, the whole place is full of mountains of spam. You'll get plenty of replies though, gems like, "I agree" and "Good job".

Here's the part that fucking kills me though. These people making these crappy sites are making money. Some even have the fucking nerve to complain they are only making $40-$50/day. They all use adsense, they all spam the search engine with useless content, and they all link to each other to build backlinks. An honest person, building a good website couldn't possibly compete at their level. These people are self-linking and building overnight directories so fast that within a week they have 100's of backlinks to their crappy sites. An honest person waiting for real organic backlinks can't possibly compare. Google is giving some of these assholes PR6's for these slapped together template sites.

Don't believe me? Take a moment and head over to the Digital Point forums and click on the "NEW POSTS" link on the menu. You'd be lucky to find 2 or 3 posts that aren't complete garbage. I just looked and the in the top 10 are two people asking for help with starting wikipedia dupes. Just what the web needs, more duplicate content. Let me see, I want to find information on widgets. Okay, first result, wikipedia... oh, they don't have what I am looking for, let me check the second result... wikipedia clone, let me try the third result... answers.com (roll eyes)... fourth result... wiki clone, fifth result...

The speed at which these overnight sites are appearing is staggering. There is no way google can keep simply using algorithms to keep up with the flow.

Re:Does google really dominate?

[kingjosh]

I agree, if Google wants to be superior they need to take measures to clip the useless link farms from the top results. The search engine is the easiest to manipulate and everyone is doing it. They should take steps to not count links in comment spam, etc.

Re:Does google really dominate?

[rainman_bc]

I agree, if Google wants to be superior they need to take measures to clip the useless link farms from the top results.

But the crappy thing is, Google has a vested interest in making you search longer. The more time you spend on their search engine, viewing more pages, the more ads you see. We are not Google's customers; we are Google's product.

Imagine, if they were to add your relevant results on page 3 instead of page 1, you've just viewed 200% more ads. 200% more ads show = more ad revenue for google. It might not seem that big of a deal, but given the amount of usage Google gets, the reality is that they aren't too motivated to get rid of link farms and google spammers.

However there's only so much tolerance for that behaviour that users have, so there's a tipping point. The only thing that keeps me tied to Google is usenet search. If yahoo were to have that I'd switch to search.yahoo.com in a heartbeat.

Watch Google's market share start to decline if another search engine gets it right and filters out that crap.

Re:Does google really dominate?

[Onan]

I currently work for Google. Everyone here uses Google for their searching; it's just so obvious a choice that no one feels obligated to pretend anything else is better.

Before this, I worked for Yahoo. Everyone there used Google for their searching; it was just so obvious a choice that no one felt obligated to pretend that anything else was better.

Re:Does google really dominate?

[dbcad7]

I tried searching "bike jersey", and I don't get what your saying. Of 10 results only 1 was not a place to purchase a bike jersy, and that was was an article on how to buy a bike jersey. Clicking Froogle also gave places and pictures of jerseys.

I have run into "link farms", so I know what you mean, but the example you gave didn't do that to me.

Google groups is the killer app for me.

[deragon]

The reason I mainly uses Google is Google groups; whenever I have a computer related problem, the Usenet archive is often helpful. I do not think that there is any other archive of Usenet like this out there (available for free). If there are, please share the links.

And how many slashdotters find Google Groups useful?

Re:Google groups is the killer app for me.

[gowen]

Google Groups is great, and gives the lie to the idea that Usenet is dead.

Having said that, dejanews had a much better interface. (Simple is good: you'd expect Google to know that).

Re:Google groups is the killer app for me.

[Jugalator]

And how many slashdotters find Google Groups useful?

Being a developer, I use it quite often at work to find info about software issues and help against assorted quirks that can be more of a jungle to find on the world wild web. :-) There's lots and lots of software development stuff there too.

Re:Google groups is the killer app for me.

[bigdavesmith]

When I have programming problems or questions, now I actually turn to Google Groups before a standard web search. The results seem to be much more on target since each result is generally a specific issue someone is having. Once you get an on-target post, you just have to wade through all the flame wars, format nazis, and ploinkers...

The groups that actually seem to be hosted by Google are a little easier to read, but less populated.

google cant find me

[JCOTTON]

Actually, I have as small personal page for people who are looking for me to find me. It is here. I am probably the only person in the world with a page that lists my name and my elementary school name. If you do a search on these terms "JOSEPH COTTON SEABREEZE" in google, you will not find my page. If you do a search in yahoo, then there it is at the top. So Google is not king, by any marker other than market share.

Re:google cant find me

[JCOTTON]

Ironically, by posting this on slashdot, I will get a higher rating on google.

Re:google cant find me

[Sosetta]

I thought google admitted a few months ago that it's full. The servers that they use have reached capacity and that's why they're building a new double-football-field sized warehouse to fill with new servers so that they can do more.

Re:google cant find me

[mattpointblank]

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22JOSEPH+COTTON%22 +SEABREEZE&btnG=Search&hl=en&lr= yields your page as the second result.

Re:google cant find me

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh my, what ever shall we do without JOSEPH COTTON SEABREEZE's valuable, valuable site being referenced. The only reason Yahoo picks it up is because it was made in the era where Geocities was still reelevant to anyone.

Re:google cant find me

[Kris_B_04]

*grin*
Ya mean that wasn't the whole idea? :)

Kris
(who still is damn lucky all the /. hits on my old job's web page didn't get me into trouble... although now.... *giggle* I'm not working there any more.. hmmm...)

Re:google cant find me

[Anonymous Coward]

But it's Slashdotted.

Ha, ha!

Re:google cant find me

[Chicken04GTO]

no doubt. calling google irrelevant when it doesn't find someone's EXTREMELY irrelevent site is hilarious.

Re:google cant find me

[LnxAddct]

Relevance is key, and your site isn't very relevant (no offense). If you put your name in quotes, it turns up a better result (1st or 2nd). Apparently there are more important websites out there that contain joseph, cotton, and seabreeze. Get over it.
Regards,
Steve

Re:google cant find me

[IDontAgreeWithYou]

Not only that, but there are several other sites that include the (relatively common) words Joseph, Cotton and Seabreeze. I call Troll!!!

Re:google cant find me

[bob122989]

Ironically, by posting this on slashdot, I will get a higher rating on google.

Even more ironic than that: I was not able to view your website because it was slashdotted, but i was able to see the text of it using google's cache, which was the top result of googling "josephbcotton" (quotes not in search).

Re:google cant find me

[Anonymous Coward]

Google can find you (as people have already mentioned); also, Geocities is a brand of Yahoo!. Think that might help a bit?

Re:google cant find me

[geoffspear]

No, you won't.

Slashdot adds a rel=nofollow attribute to your link, specifically so you can't spam Slashdot to increase your page rank. Nice try, though.

Unfortunately, whatever moderator thought your completely wrong statement was "insightful" has moved you a bit closer to getting a karma bonus and taking away your nofollow attribute.

Google sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, actually, almost all current search engines suck. There is waaaaaay too much noise in the results they return. Let's say I'm doing a search for "product X", search for it in Google and what do you get? Several links to ebay (which may or may not be current), tons of links to various "rate it" sites such as epinions/nextag/msn/etc, and maybe a few smatterings of other sites mixed in. Typically the manufacturers own site won't even appear in the first couple of dozen results!

So basically, I agree with the general position of the article, that there is still a TON (actually several tons) of work to be done and room for someone else to move in with a truely superiour solution. While it's great that Google is tinkering with lots of other technologies, I wish they'd actually make some real advances in their core business (and actually, I'm slowly starting to come to grips with the fact that their core competency may not be searching, but really it's in creating low latency widely distributed computing infrastructures). For all the years and the massive sums of money, my search experience is not significantly better than it was 5 years ago.

Re:Google sucks

[TheBogie]

I understand that Google is doing a great job of removing "noise" in their China site. If you type in Tiannemen Square Google nicely filters out all the democracy "noise".

On the other hand if you happen to be a government official and would like to find out who is posting a particular blog, Google will print out a nice map directly to their house for you so you can go and attach a car battery to their nuts.

Maybe the chinese government can cut out the middle man and have larry and sergey attach the electrodes for them?

Re:Google sucks

[january]

aaah, the fine art of googling.

There are ways and means to improve the google results. First of all, with google toolbar and personalized google, google actually adapts the search results to your search patterns. So if it sees that you rarely look at the epionons, you will not get them as top results.

Next, use "site:". In many cases, you get much better results if you narrow your search to ".net" or ".org", leaving out the ".com". Refine your search, start with a large number of keywords and only when it does not return enough results, broaden your search. Also , you can eliminate these notorious no-content providers (epinions et al.).

And, as one slashdotter pointed out, use google groups. Usually you get to what actual people have written, and not to automatic contents.

Cheers,
January

MS Uses Google :)

[gasmonso]

I was on the phone with some engineers at MS the other day and even they admitted that they use Google. It's just better... for now.

http://religiousfreaks.com/

Google is not that strong!

[TheShadowHawk]

I have found some interesting information about google... I will share it with you now before

How do they calculate market share?

[truthsearch]

Does anyone know how they calculate these market share values? AFAIK they don't all publish traffic statistics.

Re:How do they calculate market share?

[clickclickdrone]

Don't know but on the web sites I manage I get the following incoming links: Google 91% Yahoo 3.5% MSN 2% AOL .8%

Resting on Laurels

[Billosaur]

So Ask--which used to be called Ask Jeeves but dropped Jeeves, a knowing butler, from its logo in February--is taking a different tack. It has come up with ExpertRank, an algorithm that also ranks web pages by incoming links, but is different from Google's PageRank in that it first groups, or "clusters", pages and links by theme. So instead of using a web page's overall popularity to calculate its ranking, it finds the pages that are most popular among experts on a particular subject, a method that often returns better results than Google's. Ask also uses these thematic clusters to suggest the best ways to narrow or expand a search, a feature called "zoom" that is very popular.

Which is the trouble I have with Google; their search results are like a shotgun blast too many times, getting far too wide a spread of sites having anything at all to do with the subject I type in, instead of being more narrowly focused. The problem I see with Ask's method is just how do you define who the experts are and what field they are experts in? Web sites can contain all sorts of content and people will reproduce links at a whim, just because they like what they see. Would they use a system similar to Amazon, where people are ranked by how many people use their recommendation?

Re:Resting on Laurels

[teknomage1]

Simple for Ask, experts are those that best further the marketing goals of their backers.

Re:Resting on Laurels

[billstr78]

There are no actually subject specific "experts" at Ask. They use computer algorithms which are generic enough to work with any subject group, not just ones that a single person might know a bit about. The term "Expert" is figurative and not literal.

Numbers don't match my stats

[Betabug]

Which world do these numbers come out of? This month on my private site so far I got 1400 incoming links vom Google and 30 from MSN (the next runner up), 27 from Yahoo. Maybe it's just that Google loves my site for some strange reason, but I can't imagine my own little sample of web hits is statistically so "off" from their numbers. Other sites I admin for have similar numbers.

The numbers of pagehits by spiders from those search companies are much more on an equal basis. Sometimes one of them is on top, sometimes the other, but they all spider like crazy.

Much more interesting are little search engines like gigabot, which never ever gave me one incoming link but still spider like it's going out of style. Somehow makes me think they must live either off warm air or spam. What reason to be do they have?

Re:Numbers don't match my stats

[Imsdal]

This month on my private site so far I got 1400 incoming links vom Google and 30 from MSN (the next runner up), 27 from Yahoo

I think your numbers are less representative than most, but even so, I find Google "only" having 50% to be strange. On our site and for June only: Google 75.5%, MSN 11.8%, Yahoo 4%, Kvasir 3.1%, Google (Images) 2%, Altavista 2%, everyone else 0.2% or less.

Since we are based in northern Europe, Kvasir (a Norweigan search engine) is obviously having a much higher share than for most other sites, but my gut feeling of Google at 75% seems reasonable.

Re:Numbers don't match my stats

[bigdavesmith]

I think this could be explained by the content of your site.

If your site focuses on technology related commentary, java tips, and hardware reviews, I would expect Google to have more links.

If your site contains an aundance of kitten pictures and Christian Fellowship information, I would expect things to be more evenly distributed.

People with no idea what is going on will just use whatever search engine pops up when they get their PC from dell and start it up. People on slashdot (you) probably have pages with content geared toward the more technologically enlightened crowd, so your target audience is tuned in to Google.

Of course I could be wrong, and your private web site might be Betabug's Perfect Poodle Pictures.

Re:Numbers don't match my stats

[Anonymous Coward]

Referrer stats for June 2006 Nostalgia Zone Comics
Yahoo less than 10%, Ask and MSN are almost non-existant.

8991 "http:www.google.com
1986 "http:www.nostalgiazone.com
1329 "-"
913 "http:www.google.ca
847 "http:search.yahoo.com
813 "http:www.google.co.uk
301 "http:www.google.com.au
221 "http:www.google.de
186 "http:www.google.es
163 "http:www.google.fr
137 "http:www.google.it
112 "http:www.ask.com
110 "http:www.google.com.mx
97 "http:www.google.pl
92 "http:www.google.com.br
86 "http:www.google.nl
83 "http:search.msn.com

Re:Numbers don't match my stats

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't imagine my own little sample of web hits is statistically so "off"

Top ten reasons why nobody reads your blog.

Seriously though, all it means is that Google users are more interested in the "long tail" (ie: finding John Random Netizen's blogs) than Yahoo users. By your own admission, readers still are able to *find* your site through the Yahoo search engine - which would suggest that Yahoo is still covering you.

Have you tried submitting the search terms that people use to find your site into various engines? The types of terms they submit - and the results on various engines - would probably reveal a few pieces of the puzzle.

All I know is that if Yahoo vanished, I'd have to vastly change my online activities (new Yahoo Mail, News, Finance, del.icio.us, Flickr are invaluable) - whereas if Google vanished, the only thing I'd really miss is Google Reader. I've found that Yahoo Search is just as good as Google Search, it can even do some things that Google can't - internet video and audio search, for example (Google Video only indexes stuff hosted by themselves).

The Real Stats

[Nutmegan]

I don't know how they measured the dominance of these search engines, but I know how its supposed to be done: by the number of hits it gets on Google. In that respect, Google: 9,630,000,000 Yahoo: 5,240,000,000 MSN: 4,220,000,000 Ask: 2,140,000,000 Clearly, though, the most dominant search is the word "search" itself. It gets 16,670,000,000 hits.

Re:But since we are trying to compare quantities..

[dkf]

Hmm, computing "energy" is interesting, even though it could lead to surprising results (such as highly rating a search engine undergoing catastrophic decline). It also ends up ranking things quite differently: Google 0.50*0.17*0.17 = 0.01445 Ask 0.06*0.35*0.35 = 0.00735 Yahoo! 0.28*0.16*0.16 = 0.007168 (less than Ask!)Note that I had to pull the figures for the growth rate of Yahoo! out of my butt here, but since we know from the article that they're growing slower than Google, selecting one percentage point less - 16% - and calculating from there should provide a reasonable upper bound on the "energy" value, and the interesting thing is that even with all that, they're still lower than Ask, and the other search engine mentioned (MSN Search) has got to have an even lower "energy" value.

The real question is what these figures mean if anything, other than that the cartoon on the Economist page should not be interpreted as being at all representative of reality! I suppose it does mean that, for the field of search if nothing else, nobody's going to be knocking Google off their post for a while; they're utterly kings of the search hill.

Not over yet?

[russ1337]

"This compares with 28% for Yahoo!; 13% for MSN, which belongs to Microsoft; and 6% for Ask, which is owned by IAC/Interactive Corp, a conglomerate of about 60 online media brands"

This isn't over, simply due to lack of certainty in net neutrality. If media companies get leverage to control bandwidth to the big search companies (Google), it goes without saying that that these figures will change significantly. For Google, it could be death by a thousand cuts...

Re:Not over yet?

[Ragzouken]

Well google is safe in the UK, Japan and South Korea, and probably a load more places that have laws for real net neutrality, so maybe they will move.

Re:But since we are trying to compare quantities..

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just 'dot' it with a unit vector in the positive direction? Your suggestion gives twice the kinetic energy -- something completely different.

Not war, market

[12ahead]

It's not a war, it's a market. Markets change. That's a good thing. Right now most people are happy with google. If something better comes along, I am sure nobody would stop embracing it just because they love Google so much. For shareholders and Google's owners it's probably different, as they want to keep on top and gain maximum market share to increase profits (or whatever). But as a consumer I couldn't care less if the best search engine is called google yahoo or msn. If a search engine searches well, I'll use it. If it doesn't - well, game over.

Momentum?

[Intron]

The article totally fails to take Lorentz-FitzGerald Contraction into account.

Re:Momentum?

[clickclickdrone]

The article totally fails to take Lorentz-FitzGerald Contraction into account.

Mornington Crescent.

cult of personality

[Anonymous Coward]

This is were Google truely dominates, in cult of personality.

It seems more and more when I try to find something on google all I get are a bunch of link farms. This morning I was trying to find a bike jersey for a friend of mine and on the first page of results, it took getting to the second page to find any actual results. I did much better using Yahoo and found what I was looking for on the first page of results.

I speak of the same experience in another thread. Simple fact is, Google appears to be doing nothing to make searching truely better. I give them some benefit of the doubt by saying "appears" since they may have "the next great thing" in the wings and we just haven't seen it yet. But lets face it, searching today is a time wasting experience. What's worse is that several years ago, it was time wasting due to the large number of seemingly random links. Well, those links aren't so random anymore, AAMOF, those links are geared to simply make Google money. I've said it before and I'll say it again, anyone who buys into their "do no evil" marketing fluff can give me a ring, because I have a nice bridge to sell them. How are they any different that M$ in this regard? They have tons of money, some of the brightest minds in the valley, and yet a simply search for a product gives me pages of utter crap. Hell, if a manufacturer makes the mistake of naming their company after their flagship product, you won't even be able to find their main website in a search until the third page!?! But Google still collects their bucks. How is this helping? How is this not evil?

Anyway, off my soap box. Here's to hoping someone can come along and actually do some good here (and yes, it may even be Google themselves).

Can't have a monopoly on the Internet

[mspohr]

Of course the search engine wars will never be over. Unlike desktop operating systems where Microsoft has a monopoly that is difficult to dislodge due to the large installed base, training, etc., it is very easy to change search engines and this will keep competition healthy.

Search can always be better (as other people have pointed out). This is a good thing. Competition is good and we benefit.

(This is also why Microsoft is so threatened by the Internet... once you move everything to the Internet, the desktop OS becomes irrelevant and all you need is a browser... this can be provided quite nicely by "free" software running on minimal hardware.)

Re:Can't have a monopoly on the Internet

[Draracle]

We can only hope competition remains in search engines. The TV controlled public opinion for the last generation. Media giants worked to own and control all the TV outlets and build vast networks to send out the desired message. The same happened to the newspaper industry and the radio industry. Public opinion for the next generation will be heavily influenced by the internet and due to the nature of the internet the only way to control the information is through the search engines or ending net neutrality. My guess is it won't be long until a similar oligopoly takes control of the internet as has occurred in the other media -- infact, it will be the same oligopoly. In democracies mass media is the most powerful resource, a subversive form of control that works far better than standing armies and police states of the non-democratic systems. The game plan, if you haven't noticed already, is to leverage the current level of media control to convince the public to hand over control of the internet before the internet becomes the dominate media source. So we can whine and complain about it all we want here, but most people are still getting their media from Time/Warner and Co.

Re:Can't have a monopoly on the Internet

[mspohr]

I agree that this is a real threat to the Internet.

Noam Chomsky has written a lot about this subject and his books ("Media Control" and "Necessary Illusions" among others) lay out the case clearly.

Some choice quotes:

The media are a corporate monopoly. They have the same point of view. The two parties are two factions of the business party. Most of the population doesn't even bother voting because it looks meaningless. They're marginalized and properly distracted. At least that's the goal.

People have to be atomized and segregated and alone. They're not supposed to organize, because then they might be something beyond spectators of action. They might actually be participants if many people with limited resources could get together to enter the political arena. That's really threatening.

Edward Bernays, the leading figure in the public relations industry " The people who are able to engineer consent are the ones who have the resources and the power to do it-the business community-and that's who you work for.

Re:Can't have a monopoly on the Internet

[Draracle]

Yeah, I am totally amazed sometimes at the level of bullshit that comes from the mainstream media -- and even more amazed when the government claims the media has a leftist bias or are anti-government. Steven Colbert's speech at the press gallery's dinner was a very accurate criticism and a demonstration of the kind of guts that media should have. Descent, even against the right choice, is a requirement of a healthy democracy. Bush's "decider" comments was succinct description of what the media does now. The government decides and the media reports -- there is no room for questioning, the media is to act like it is state controlled. In return the government helps with stuff like the COPE bill.

The Internet is the next target because the planners realise its potential for growth and its ability to broadcast dissent. No longer can they silence the opposition through the cost of running a nation media network -- anyone can start a webpage and broadcast it to the world. That level of information freedom is very undesirable to anyone who wants to shape and mould public opinion. Will the Internet become as controlled as the other media of the world? Yes. Why? Because those who control the media now realise the damage that the Internet poses to their current oligopoly and they have the monetary resources and political resources to do as they wish. And don't forget their best weapon, they also control public opinion.

Re:Can't have a monopoly on the Internet

[ClamIAm]

it is very easy to change search engines

This is only because right now, I can access whatever web site I want to at full speed. If the telcos get their way, I'm pretty sure all the search engines that failed to pay their protection money will start grinding to a halt.

Re:Can't have a monopoly on the Internet

[DarkOx]

Its easy to change search engines today. It was easier yesterday and it will be harder next week, month, year etc. Seach used to be a website you visited and that was all. Now there is all sorts of browser integration, webservice calls from applications, and plenty of other attemps to create more secure lasting relationships with a particular search service then your bookmarks list. Google and others are doing exactly what MS did, embrace and extend.

Think about it this way. Once upon a time if you did not like MS then there were plenty of other DOSes out there. Chances were pretty good your application could be easily rebuilt for some UNIX variant as well. Gradually M$ started including all sorts of things the application developers would come to depend on. Once that happend you had much less choice in OS.

If swiching search engines actually breakes my web browser or means the integrated features in my window manager/shell are going to quit working I am much less likely to do it. See google Desktop, picasa, toolbar and so on.

Huh?

[belg4mit]

Since when is delta M equal to v in kinematics?

Re:But since we are trying to compare quantities..

[nepheles]

Gp wasn't suggesting computing energy, just pointing out that a bare mv results in a vector, not a scalar that can be easily compared. What we want is m|v|, which can be computed as m * sqrt(v^2). And anway, for "energy" computation purposes mv^2 will get you double the "true" figure (assuming you were interpreting it as kinetic energy), since K.E. = 0.5 * m * v^2.

obligatory SW parody

[oni]

Obwan: that search engine is our last hope
Yoda: no, there is another

(later)

Yoda: google... page rank is strong with you... pass on what you have indexed... there... is... another... search engi(ugh)

velocity, acceleration?

[MADnificent]

Shouldn't it have to be:

m = mass -> $$$
v = velocity -> users
a = acceleration -> growth

This way you can see how much energy a company has, and thus it's importance (m*v*v/2), growth can end *very* fast.
The energy a company gains is m*a*v, that shows that google is the best growing company...

etc.

The Google Killer

[drgroove]

The Google Killer will not arise from the current stable of search engine competitors. Like Google's arise from seemingly nowhere in the late 90's amidst then formidable competitors like NorthernLights, Altavista, Goto, Hotbot, Yahoo!, etc., to its position of dominance today, the "next big thing" in search will arise either from a currently unknown startup or from academic research.

Re:The Google Killer

[billstr78]

And then Google or Microsft will buy it and it will not kill anything except Google or Microsoft competition.

here here

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason I mainly uses Google is Google groups;

When google acquired the archive from dejanews (can't bring myself to call them deja) is when I started using google. before then I was a metacrawler guy, but it's just easier to search groups first, and then simply click the web tab. I think it's safe to say that if google didn't have groups, I wouldn't be using it as my primary search engine today.

You can't use Google Earth at Work

[Lord Satri]

... you can't even install it.

I know I'm a little off-topic, but (from my own slashgeo website):
The Ogle Earth blog indicates that if you use Google Earth at work (the free version), you're in illegality. From the site: "1. USE OF SOFTWARE The Software is made available to you for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Software or the geographical information made available for display using the Software, or any prints or screen outputs generated with the Software in any commercial or business environment or for any commercial or business purposes for yourself or any third parties."

The EULA changed with the new version launched this week. You simply have to buy one of the other 3 (paying) available versions of GE.

Re:You can't use Google Earth at Work

[fletchermemorial]

You obviously didn't read the EULA at all!
of course it's for personal, NON-COMMERCIAL use! Think about it. Using google earth for home use to get directions, maps, or what have you. Then on the other hand you have an entire company using google earth for the same thing. On one hand, you have one small costing program being used by one person, as opposed to an entire company's worth of people using the same software for the same fee. If that doesn't sound like pirating software to you, i think you need to take a better look at software before you criticize it.

There is a commercial version for a larger sum of money, which makes perfect sense.

Next time don't post off topic

Re:You can't use Google Earth at Work

[Lord Satri]

Sorry to say, but *you* didn't read the EULA ;-)

Read the tens of geospatial blogs, they all agree: it is said if you're in a business environment you can't install the software. Simple as this. The links I provided in my original post provide even more links that all confirm what I just told you...

(and no, I'm not happy about this decision either ;-)
And yes, I admit, I was off-topic...

Re:You can't use Google Earth at Work

[fletchermemorial]

I hate the fact that i am replying to this flame thread, but if you read on in the article that you, yourself posted, it clearly states there is a professional version, like i said. Just in case you were wondering, i actually DID read the entire google earth EULA instead of just some news article. I used to work for a general contractor, and he wanted to know if we could legally use the software as a psuedo GPS to install on all of our mobile laptops. I personally read, and found out that we couldn't with the cheaper version, but for $400/year you can. Who would have thought that a software would come in home and professional usage? Jeez...i don't know, almost every major piece of software in the world? Here's a more familiar example: Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition, and Microsoft Windows XP Professional.

Re:You can't use Google Earth at Work

[Lord Satri]

Why do you believe this is flaming? I just want to share the right information. Sorry if I sounded agressive. I'm not :-)

In my first post of this thread, it is specifically specified that those restrictions applies to the free version of Google Earth. So what I said was true. As far as I've been told (but haven't confirmed myself), you do not need the Pro version (400$), the Google Earth Plus version, which is only 20$, is business-environment friendly. (there's 4 different versions of GE...)

Lets be honest..

[FrostyCoolSlug]

Google isn't just a search engine anymore, they have moved into so many other areas it's going to be almost impossible for any one search engine which is soley a search engine to compete in any way, and if they branch into the same areas then the argument 'Google did that first' will come out. If anyone wants to be any threat to google at this point, they will have to do something completly original, and get a large market because of it.

Re:Lets be honest..

[Jaysu]

"...the argument 'Google did that first' will come out. If anyone wants to be any threat to google at this point, they will have to do something completly original, and get a large market because of it."

Not true... Google wasn't the first to do maps, video, weather, etc. Google just made a better product. All it takes is someone else with an even better product to make some room in the market.

the climbing ask.com

[op12]

About a month back I did a comparison of some searches, based on ask's claims of understanding concepts. They were able to outperform Google in this functionality: http://www.nirajsanghvi.com/stories.php?sid=318&ti d=55

Chinks in their armour..

[slashmojo]

Google is still mostly a general search engine at a time when verticals are rising fast..

Look at technorati for example and look at the effect (or lack of) on technorati traffic when google launched their own blogsearch.. nothing at all.. it failed to make an impression despite technorati having growing pains of its own that probably annoy many users and send them elsewhere. Google tries to apply the same methods used on their main search system to the blog search and its not really working partly because its more about people than data.

Blog search is fairly saturated already and most of the big search players have a blog search of some kind and 'independants' are still popping up daily but what about board/forum search? None of the majors do it at all!

Boards are not seen as quite so trendy as blogs and so have been mostly overlooked despite them being hugely popular and showing no signs of stagnating.. the board world is still growing fast and the only real board search engine to date is boardtracker which has many of the features that google and the rest of GYMA lack including..

Persistant search.. they all offer alerts but what use are these when they are alerting on content they just found which was created years ago? Only the specialist search engines like boardtracker offer real persistant search at the moment.

Categorized searching (helps with the problem someone mentioned above when searching for 'horn' since you can restrict search to the 'music' category or whatever you want) - again boardtracker has an effective implementation of this and a few others may also but where is Google?

Searchable rss feeds.. rss is good and google does have it on their blogsearch but what about the main search? Its very widely used these days and not having it is like having a three wheeled car.. it will still go, but corners are tricky and you'll feel a prat driving around in one. ;)

Tagging systems with tag clouds etc and other 'social search' features. Yahoo leads the way with these through various aquisitions.. boardtracker offers tagging for boards, technorati for blogs.. but where is Google? They seem to prefer complex automated systems rather than letting the wisdom and power of the masses help out with organizing the worlds data.. its their loss.. yahoo knows it, the verticals know it. You can't really replace one with the other but they work well together, its smart to integrate both, its smart to enhance one with the other.

Google is certainly still the best and fastest general search engine around but they still have some learning to do and either they should get out there and do some smart aquisitions to fill the chinks in their armour or they should start building what the people want because the times they are a changing.

The competition will never be over

[blueZ3]

and that's a good thing.

The barrier to entry in search is moderately high (you have to be able to afford the hardware to do your indexing) but there will always be people willing to invest in search. It's easily monetized (love that word, eh?), there's no cost for users to switch to new competitive product, and there's no magic bullet that gives you both accurate results and the ability to weed out aggregators and shady SEOs. As long as developers can come up with new search algorithms that give better results, there's the chance that the "next Google" could be launched.

I like and use Google, but that's because the results are usually valuable to me and the ads are minimally intrusive. Currently, the one issue I have is Google's inability to prevent aggregators from showing up in search results. I've never found anything useful through aggregator pages, and I'd like Google to filter them out.

Anyway, the ability of new companies to explore search is something that's good for SE users. New search startups can be launched and attempt to improve search. Google is forced to innovate. Where's the downside?

Re:The competition will never be over

[bill_mcgonigle]

Anyway, the ability of new companies to explore search is something that's good for SE users. New search startups can be launched and attempt to improve search. Google is forced to innovate. Where's the downside?

You don't see it because you don't hate free markets. Some people do.

Show me a better search engine than Google and I'll use it. That's what got me off of altavista.digital.com over to google.stanford.edu. I think some Slashdotter mentioned it.

Google...fight?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you should invent some sort of GoogleFight system, where you can see which search term gets more hits on Google. That would be clever and effective.

Where is my 'remove this site' button?

[Unxmaal]

At some point within the last few months, Google removed the "Remove this site from search results" button. I made heavy use of it, perma-banning resultspammer sites like ExpertSexchange.com and its ilk.

Sadly, this button is now gone from Personalized Search, and the resultspammer sites are steadily reducing Google's usefulness to me. Where I could once search for specific tech terms and get a good batch of reference resources, now I'm getting junk portal pages for the top five results.

Sure, I could report a link as spam, but that's a lot more time-consuming than the button, and it doesn't appear to have any immediate results for my searches.

This makes me sad. I've loved Google since I first met her, but I can't be with her if she's going to continue mainlining spam.

Re:Where is my 'remove this site' button?

[m3ph]

Indeed the quality of results has dropped dramatically. I used to use google because it would supply with with information about what i searched for. now it just trys to sell me what i search for. could they not seperate google and froogle properly?

Re:Where is my 'remove this site' button?

[Anonymous Coward]

This makes me sad. I've loved Google since I first met her, but I can't be with her if she's going to continue mainlining spam.

Sorry man, but Google is a dude. Hope your not sick with yourself now.

Why Google?

[urdine]

The reason everyone still uses Google isn't because they have the best ranking of results anymore, which is usually encrusted with spam sites designed to beat Google, but because they have the most COMPLETE results. When you search for something rare, Google most likely will return results no other basic engine has. So people have gotten accustomed to checking Google first out of habit more than anything else.

To me, I think the future of search isn't necessarily a better Google, but something different. The problem with Google is the same as its strength - its simplicity. There is very little control on Google for more complicated searches, such as searching only company websites, or searching only encyclopedia content. It's just a big kludge for them to add stuff like travel info or weather or movie info without knowing the intent of the searcher beforehand. Searchers have to get savvier, not just the algorithms. I think search aggregating sites like Seaurch.com which has 200 engines but still uses a simple interface, is a great idea. Sites like Clusty.com also take an interesting approach towards understanding the searcher's intentions.

The issue of trust

[Aram Fingal]

While it's true that their search algorithm is important, the other very important thing which contributed to the success of Google is that they have always offered honest results. They do have sponsored links but they are clearly marked as such. You know that the main search results are not influenced by advertizer money. Other search engines before Google typically did not make it clear when a site had paid for higher rankings.

Google's motto of "Do no evil" is really just a modernized version of "Honesty is the best policy." Any search new search engine needs not only to have a good algorithm but they also need to build trust with users.

Now that Google is truly evil incarnate...

[WED Fan]

...alternatives would be nice.

Any geek, or normal person who is for freedom of expression, free society, freedom from oppression should be actively boycotting Google until they eschew any relationship with RED China.

FREE TIBET

Re-establish recognition of Taiwan.

Punish Google and Yahoo! (especially Yahoo!)

E != mav

[Vlad2.0]

Of course classically F=ma and W=E=int(F dot ds). If the article simply used acceleration instead of velocity (I can't believe they associated something that doesn't change with growth. *sigh*.) then instead of momentum they'd have force. You could then of course measure "energy" by quantizing their growth in a specific direction(s).

If you're going to make an analogy of something with classical physics you could at LEAST get the "units"/equations right.

Re:E != mav

[MADnificent]

I seriously don't want to troll, but mod this -1 please. As I said

The energy a company gains

this should be read as dE=mav. However, it was expressed very poorly, thanks for clearing it out. It would have been best to put the different companies is a vectorfield or something like that... It wouldn't have made much of an article though. ** I want latex math in /. **

Neo Google

[Anonymous Coward]

We need a Neo Google to replace the monstrosity Google has become. Google is an ad driven monster on the road to become another ABC, CBS, or NBC.

Bring back the honest, untainted search organization. There needs to be a search engine with proactive privacy (no analysis, no data retention). One that's fast and bullshit free. No cookies, no javascript, no "sponsored" links.

Just like ebay has become addicted to shills and gray market goods, Google will become addicted to the ad revenue from shady rank fraudsters and porn companies.

Appropriately, the verification word for this post is "liberate."

The Position of Power

[DorkRawk]

I think it will be hard (or at least take a loooooong time) to over throw Google as a search engine for the masses even if a better engine comes along. There is really something to be said for people recognizing the phrose "Google it". This is similar to the reason that msn.com is one of the top 10 (or 20?) visited sites, simply because it's the default homepage in Windows IE. There is a huge number of people who don't care enough about a "better product" and will just stick with what is standard. The phrase "Google it" is one of their biggest assests as a company. For a lot of people Google = search and thats invaluable.

The Real Un-Google

[tidokoro]

Thought this was going to be a story about lastgoogle.com.

Article totally ignores emerging fields of LRS (Last Result Search) and SEdO (Search Engine de-Optimization).

But then what do you expect of The Economist? Typical center-right-wing media bias.

Google's search

[menace3society]

What has made Google from a nifty tool to a worldwide phenomenon is the breadth of their searches--they are no longer about searching the web only. You can search also Usenet, maps, scholarly research, online vendors, books, email, and even your own files and images on your PC. You can also use Google to search the web for images, videos, stocks, catalogs, blogs, and news articles. Simply beating Google in web search won't dethrone them, you'd need to beat them everywhere (or at least make their other search services irrelevant).

The bigger they are, the harder they fall

[abstract1]

As we all know, searching is becoming a main focus not only on the Web, but also within businesses in general. It seems that there are several large companies (namely Google, Yahoo, etc, etc) that are going head to head to take over the market. However, as this article notes these powers are also becoming distracted not only with the fight amongst themselves to become the number one search engine in the world, but also with venturing into other areas of interest (i.e. Google going after the Microsoft software industry). This only leaves the doors open for up and coming smaller firms to offer something that the world has yet to see. While these search superpowers are struggling with each other, small operations are rising up everywhere with new and innovative ideas - the type of ideas that got Google where they are today. It is only a matter of time before the giant falls...before the next big thing comes to the search community. It shouldn't be long now if these power don't come up with something new and innovative.

Wont help

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ironically, by posting this on slashdot, I will get a higher rating on google."

Slashdot puts nofollow tag in links, so Google ignores those links.

ROI

[b7j0c]

interesting notes, but until most people can't find what they are looking for, there is no ROI in doing massive relevance engine upgrades, in fact such upgrades may be ROI negative if it breaks expected behavior. this is why i don't expect search to move much in the next five years. there will be tweaks and improvements, but i don't sense a sea-change until there is a large pile of unclaimed money available.

Wikipedia is lame

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it hard to take anyone who quotes Wikipedia seriously. Just because it's popular, doesn't mean it's accurate or in depth. Wikipedia is dominated by lobbyists, government officials, marketing firms, and anyone with a political or social agenda.

It just makes you look amateurish when Wikipedia is your "go to" source.

How about privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd gladly give up Google for a decent search engine that:

1. Doesn't keep logs of my searches forever,
2. Doesn't turn over my records without a warrant,
3. Doesn't attempt to cross-reference my searches with my activity on non-related services,
4. Isn't interested in data-mining me, and
1. Provides an ssl tunnel so my ISP doesn't have logs of my searches.

There is no Yahoo

[fm6]

It's interesting that they count AOL as part of Google, but not Yahoo. In point of fact, Yahoo also uses the Google search engine. So Google actually has 78% of the U.S. market, minus the (unknown, but probably very small) percentage of Yahoo users that actually rely on Yahoo's poorly maintained "web directory".

The fact is that Yahoo has never had a viable search product. They started out as a shared bookmark file, then became a directory web site. It was never the best way to search the web — the web always grew too fast for a directory to be up to date. But because Yahoo managed to get a lot of visibility early on, they created a mindshare they've never lost. It's the ultimate triumph of branding over substance.

Re:There is no Yahoo

[Asmotheque]

This is completely incorrect. Yahoo! has its own, internally produced algorithmic search product.

Re:There is no Yahoo

[Cochonou]

Not anymore. See this link: Yahoo dumps Google search technology

Re:There is no Yahoo

[fm6]

And you know this is true because? http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/ 2165081

Re:There is no Yahoo

[fm6]

Hmm, you're right. I wasn't sure whether the Yahoo-Google contract was still in effect, so I went to Yahoo and did a search. The results were very Googlish (and unYahooish — they're excessively fond of graphics and fancy layout). So I jumped to a conclusion.

What settled it for me was that if you click on a "cached" link you go to a page that looks very much like a Google cache page. But the IP number definitely belongs to Yahoo.

The next one shuns Ivory/Ivy elitism.

[sethstorm]

The next one will:
1) Not have the unsightly "Ivory Tower" philosophy that Google has inherited from Stanford - sorry, but Orkut "Circlejerk Bukakke" needs to lay off the Animal House.
2) Not go to countries such as China or India, but taking the greater challenge of developing in our own backyards. There's a bunch of people here that can do the work at the original rate and easily come up ahead in total cost savings versus the "rubber stamp CMM" countries. Slapping them in the face is only going to determine if your trial will be a mock one or a real one.
3) Not considering the Midwest as just "flyover country" due to lack of exclusive colleges and exclusive places. We're all not just country hicks. The ground's been good enough for farmland, manufacturing, missile silos, why not put your datacenter and other things in here as well? Or is it that you're just too busy with writing offshoring loophole law?

Re:The next one shuns Ivory/Ivy elitism.

[taradfong]

> The ground's been good enough for farmland, manufacturing, missile silos, why not put your datacenter
> and other things in here as well? Or is it that you're just too busy with writing offshoring loophole law?

I admire your patriotism, but this is just sour grapes. Look, I'm formerly from the midwest - now on the west coast, and the truth is that you simply can't attract young, active people with flat, land-locked ground covered with crappy weather. They'll pay extra to live where you can have fun living.

You also need a critical mass of opportunities that are interesting to young people. When I was in Chicago, my startup 'generously' offered me enough stock options to *maybe* equate to 1 year of pay if an IPO happened. And I had to search hard for this more technically interesting company after reams of boring business data processing jobs.

Yes, I'm *know* there are brilliant people in the 'silicon prairie', and companies will keep happening there, but not like they do out here, or even the northeast.

What you talkin' 'bout, Google?

[rolandog]

I wish Google purchased Clusty... it'd be great because then people would see that query results are 'ordered information'... which, after all, is what Google is all about (first sentence). That way, Google would show that it "knows".

Re:cult of personality - antispam search tips....

[iamcf13]

The parent AC is correct.

Big business turned the Internet (the WWW part principaly) into little more than 'online TV'. Because of all the $$$ at stake, we have probably the best search engine around, Google, drowning in ad driven/cash driven search engine spam ('spamdexing').

If you are searching for something in Google, add site:.edu to your search. By doing that. that should lead you to .edu sites who are there principally to educate rather than sell you something. If you have to do general search, add
-shipping -visa -mc -amex and the like to your search terms to block the 'ad pages'

Good Luck!

P.S. The best search engine would just index the single homepage page served up by the webserver at all 4,294,967,296 possible IPv4 addresses (minus the reserved/private/unused ones). The rationale is that if you are paying for webspace and a unique IP address, chances are good you have worthwhile content there. This would eliminate 'spamdexing' in all its forms in one bold stroke. The drawback is that 'online communities' would only be listed by the main IP webserver address and not by the URL which is why Google is in the 'mess' they are in.

If you are doing worthwhile research and want to avoid as much e-commerce as possible in the process, here again are some helpful tips....

add site:.edu in Google searches (mentioned earlier - restrict search to non-profit educational sites)

add -shipping -visa -mc -amex and the like to Google searches (mentioned earlier - helps eliminate product 'ad pages' and leave behind product review pages

search well-known 'info sites' like http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ or http://www.wikipedia.org/ If you can't find the info you want at those two places for free, the content you seek is either not on the Web or (more likely) you have to pay for it to get access. We all know how Net-savvy people hate to pay for anything they find on the Web....

As a last resort, search Google's Usenet interface at http://groups.google.com/ Helpful info can be found there but be prepared to really dig for it! =/

Google Great

[acurism]

I don't see Google dropping off, in fact, I see them gaining more momentum in search. They have other interesting services too that will get more and more popular as the casual Google user starts playing around with the other things have to offer. They truly are a innovative company that can even the score with MS and make it less of a MS world which is good for the consumer.

Re:But since we are trying to compare quantities..

[Anonymous Coward]

What we want is m|v|

That's definitely not what we want. Unless you want to ignore the difference between growing and shrinking marketshare, of course...

Re:cult of personality - antispam search tips....

[maelstrom]

Yeah, anything hosted on a virtual host is worthless. Where is the rolly-eye emoticon when you need it?

Re:But since we are trying to compare quantities..

[NereusRen]

Except we do want to compare (one-dimensional) vectors. Unless you don't care whether a company is gaining or losing marketshare?

It appears to me...

[Ayanami Rei]

It appears to me that Google (or a 3rd party organization) needs to start a new "trust" index.
Kind of like what Yahoo used to look like, where sites that are known to be useful and are actively updated are maintained in some sort of internal database that is updated by Google staff or a non-profit organization.

This site or internal database should be used to inflate the relevance of documents PR/relevance on the trusted domains. The editorial policies of the site might influence these decision.

There could be two kinds of trusted skew. End-skew and transverse-skew.
Sites like Wikipedia might only get an end-skew because it's too easy to subtly modify a page to point to a site of your own (and thus get a PR boost by proxy).
Tightly controlled sites like MathWorld, on the other hand, might be granted transverse skew.

It could also be used to blacklist sites (like Digital Point) and skew the PR down when it traverses links from there. I would also give a small negative skew, to say, Digg.

So maybe what I'm getting at is content "trustability" metadata. The lower it is, the less likely Google might consider a document from that domain to be authoritative or relevant. If it is very low, it would assign negative skew to any linked sites as well. The higher it is, the more highly it would score it, and at a certain point it pass this bias on to linked sites.

And it would be nice if Google could determine user content from article content on syndicated sites that allow comments. Links and terms contained therein should be weighted differently.
  Voluntarily added classes that googlebot can parse for divs?

Midwest...

[Ayanami Rei]

Google isn't going to place a datacenter anywhere unless it can easily get at least an OC-48 from two different backbone providers.

That rules out much of the midwest except for the areas around Chicago and Denver.

Marketing dudes with physics skills?

[wealthychef]

I just think it's cool that there are marketing geeks who know that mass x velocity = momentum.

Noise in the results

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

Yeah, the metasites & link farms are sure gaining in annoyance factor - in direct proportion to their page rank. Which reminds me... has the "remove this result" feature disappeared for any other users of Google Personalized?

Anyway... Rollyo + Furl + Foxmarks = Crazy Delicious.

Any hypothetical Google Killer would be well served by implementing a union of the features of the above utils. Sync my bookmarks (the ones in my menu bar, not just on a page you own), archive the pages for me, make keywords out of the bookmarks' directory structure, make keyword:domain associations out of those relationships in my bookmarks, and let me search only the relevant domains by using a simple "#_categoryname_#:" operator in the search. Then show me domains with rising representation in peoples' bookmarks and which have strong associations with my category of interest. How hard is that? Nobody's rolled it all together in a do-it-all-for-ya fashion, but the features are all out there piecemeal.

Re:Relevancy

[hackwrench]

You should be able to hit a button that says such and such a site is relevant for the given search, rerank all other sites accordingly. Sites for musical horns aren't going to highly crosslink with sites using horn to mean "a high pommel of a Western saddle (usually metal covered with leather)". It's also annoying that there isn't a way to sort by pages with major recent content changes.

Re:cult of personality - antispam search tips....

[eloki]

Yeah, anything hosted on a virtual host is worthless. Where is the rolly-eye emoticon when you need it?

I don't think the parent is really arguing this per se, I suspect that they simply feel it's impossible in the long run to separate garbage content from real content on virtual hosts. He has a vaguely interesting idea but it's obviously not practical.

Re:But since we are trying to compare quantities..

[Anonymous Coward]

bad math alert. 'nuff said.