Who Isn't Afraid of Google?

An anonymous reader writes "Google, despite 'doing no evil', has managed to make itself a number of enemies recently. That's the subject of an article from the San Francisco Chronicle, which looks into the Davids looking to slay Goliath. In this strange, strange tale the Davids are the size of companies like Microsoft and Yahoo, rumoured to be discussing an alliance to take on the search leader. The list of detractors is longer than other search providers, though; privacy experts, advertisers, startups, and Hollywood executives are all frustrated with the company for one reason or another. 'Despite Google's power, few say the company strikes as much fear in them as Microsoft did during the 1990s, when its near-monopoly on computer operating systems earned it the nickname "evil empire." Google's spotty track record with new products -- few outside of search have much of a following -- and intense competition with other Internet companies keeps it a step below. "With Google, there is still choice," said Chris Le Tocq, an analyst for Guernsey Research, "so I'm not sure if the 'evil empire' epithet can be equally applied." But he cautioned that the warning sign will come when Google becomes so dominant that customers cannot do without it. How well will Google deal with its customers' problems then?'"

Comments

Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[Mikachu]

How about... anybody who isn't a company/corporation?

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[lordmetroid]

No worry about the the company or the seeming monopoly. It is not a monopoly and as soon as as any market leader reduces customer happiness competition grows. Monopoly can only be achieved through the means of the forcefull regulations and banning of competition by the state createing a monopoly. Google is no monopoly and I could at any time without fear of jail or death create my own search engine and compete or just use it for myself.

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly - Google is anti-corporation, pro "the ordinary people" and generally Anti-American. Only Microsoft can save us from their communist ways now.

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the searching I do that makes Google scary - it's the searching of what I search that makes them scary. Google knows and sells more about you than you might like.

Privacy issues are one big reason why I don't use Google/Alternate webmail providers for email storage. (Yes - my ISP could be keeping in transit mail.)

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[ThePromenader]

Um... quite often in that story, the David-s are not even in the same business as the Goliath in question. Whenever does an urge by one to take someone else's job - without being able to do it - end in anything we can call progress, let alone something positive?

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[aussie_a]

Monopoly can only be achieved through the means of the forcefull regulations and banning of competition by the state createing a monopoly. And yet Microsoft was and is a monopoly without that happening. Perhaps you might want to rethink that definition or use another word, because when communicating with other people its always best to use words with agreed upon meanings. While that definition of monopoly might be agreed upon in some circles, it isn't here at slashdot.

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[packeteer]

If you are a company out do win at any cost what is the best strategy? The best plan is to tell everyone you will "do no evil" and then do it anyway. If your going to do evil you might as well lie about it. Maybe Google is going to do no evil but consider this; any company out do do evil will say they wont do evil, any company out to do good will say they wont do evil. Basically I am saying that Google's mission statement counts for nothing and we need to consider their actual actions. Judge for yourself, is their invasion of privacy evil? Is their acceptance of censorship abroad evil?

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

Monopoly can only be achieved through the means of the forcefull regulations and banning of competition by the state createing a monopoly.

And yet Microsoft was and is a monopoly without that happening.

It didn't actually. Like most people (I suspect) I think that copyright serves a very useful goal, but it is defintiely forceful regulation and banning of competition by the state. The whole point of it is to restrict supply so as to give the creator the financial benefits that come from a monopoly in their particular product. Again, I think that's beneficial if done right but there's no denying that that's what copyright is.

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[aussie_a]

But the state didn't give it a monopoly on operating systems. It gave it a monopoly on the Windows code. By your logic Linux and Apple would have had monopolies on operating systems all at the same time (and no I'm not talking about an oligopoly, I'm pointing out the logical flaw in the AC's claim). It was a nice try though ;)

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[aussie_a]

Please don't put your anti-google spam as replies to my posts. I call it that because your post has nothing to do with monopolies. Next time try an on-topic reply or simply make a new thread in an article.

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[ssintercept]

...i am more afraid of dream theater fans than of google.

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[k1e0x]

Yeah, I agree with you. I'm not sure how it applies to Microsoft as I don't know the back story very well but even a corporation itself could not exist without governments. I would say the laws protected Microsofts monopoly, just as they do with any other monopoly.

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[Mikachu]

Haha, the sad part is that few of the members are really fans of Dream Theater anymore.

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[morgan_greywolf]

Actually, you don't need government rules, all you need is corporate fiat. Windows and Office became the defacto systems because corporate IT departments decided they wanted to settle on something that was to be a corporate standard. Before Windows became a monopoly OS in the desktop arena, corporates had a huge diversity in systems and solutions.

Several companies I'd worked for had IBM equipment (mainframes and mid-ranges like the AS/400) for accounting, Windows and DOS for many office workers, Macs in the art department, Unix in engineering, and a mix of Unix, Novell and Windows NT in the server room.

The legal department would do their docs in WordPerfect, while other departments would pick and choose from the diversity of different solutions.

Finally, IT departments said enough is enough and CIOs forced Windows on everyone because that's what they used at home.

And now people buy home computers with Windows on them because that's what they use at work.

Add to that Microsoft leveraging their Windows desktop monopoly to promote Office and then leveraging their Office monopoly to promote Windows, and voila -- you have a company with a 90+% lock on the market, reaching towards 99%.

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[Ravnen]

I think most economists will agree that there are natural monopolies, i.e. markets which tend naturally towards monopoly, without any intervention from the state, because a single supplier is the most efficient way of meeting demand. With the scale advantages of a standardised computing platform, i.e. the Intel/Windows PC, the CPU and OS markets can perhaps be described as such.

Intel mostly deflected regulation of the CPU market by licensing its x86 architecture to AMD, but all of the other competitors have more or less fallen away. Without Intel's licensing of x86 to AMD, I suspect AMD would have fallen away too, and Intel would have developed a monopoly or near-monopoly in personal computer CPUs. It would probably then have been sued/regulated.

As for Microsoft, even though Microsoft Windows is not a monopoly in the strict sense, because there are competitors, it is dominant enough to be effectively a monopoly in practice. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the monopoly refers to the Windows OS, not to Microsoft itself, which produces products other than Windows. In any case, it can be argued that the benefits of standard operating system make the market a natural monopoly.

If a monopoly is the most efficient model for operating systems, then it is reasonable to allow a monopoly to exist. What got Microsoft into trouble was not this (near) monopoly, but rather the tying of other products to it. The most important was the web browser. Web browsers may, like operating systems, tend towards a natural monopoly, but using one monopoly (OS) to acquire another (web browsers) is considered abuse of a monopoly position.

As for the topic of this article, search engines may be yet another area in which there is a tendency towards a natural monopoly. The question then becomes, should the market be allowed to develop into a monopoly one? If a monopoly is the most efficient way of providing web searching, perhaps it should. However, efficiency is not the only concern here.

Even if a monopoly is the most efficient way of providing web searching, that doesn't mean it is the best way. Do we really want a private (and foreign for most of us) firm to control our access to the information stored on the web? I don't know. However, control of information is far more ripe for abuse than control of a CPU architecture or an operating system, so I find the idea of a Google monopoly more worrying than the ones that have come so far. I would be more comfortable with some sort of state oversight of information, particularly with respect to the protection of privacy.

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[shywolf9982]

Monopoly is NOT given by the state. Monopoly is a degenerated case that can happen in a very unbalanced market, but happens due to the natural evolution of said market rather then from a state decision.

I think that what caused said degeneration is the fact that every operating system, right now, has its own market, due to the fact they are largely incompatible with each other (eg. switching from Windows to Mac isn't a simple change of OS: you need to change all the programs too, and very few are cross platform).

Now, we have all seen how Microsoft waves the patent banner everytime someone builds a system that is compatible with theirs (Samba, Mono, etc etc), so we can also see how Microsoft tries to strangle any competition in its field: and when this "strangling" reaches a level where is currently impossible for any third party to compete, we have a monopoly.

At last, I have to say I'm not totally sure that right now Microsoft has a monopoly: the patent claims never resulted in any legal action and so on, so I guess we can't really call it, but it is, however, in a good position to quickly establish one.

By comparison, since all the services from Google do not constitute a platform as I said above (I could easily switch everything I have on Google to Yahoo tomorrow and I will not have to change browser or OS or anything else), there is no risk for Google to become as threatening as Microsoft was.

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[Old Benjamin]

First of all, I don't think that one search engine is any more or less efficient than many. However Google has been using their search engine monopoly to gain other monopolies (advertising, they have a large part of the online video 'market' etc.)

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[DeadChobi]

Actually, Google doesn't have a monopoly in the search engine market, as there are a fuckton of other engines available. A monopoly is defined as something like 80-90% market share. Thus, your argument that Google is abusing a monopoly position doesn't hold water.

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[lordmetroid]

Natural monopolies is an oxymoron... What people here seems to call a monopoly is just a big market share. If the company fucks up somewhere sometime they will easily be overpowered by their competitors. Just look at Sony's Playstation. I think it is reasonable to say by that defintition that console producing companies had monopolies on the market, yet there was competitors. Competitors equals the monopoly void. A monopoly is when there is no competitors. Microsoft isn't a monopoly, there was/is BeOS, Linux and Unix of all flavours, mac, OS/2 and so on and so on. Anyone have the choice to voluntary choose whatever software to run on their computer and will do so if Microsoft fucks up. Like the surge to Linux we have seen since Vista was released.

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[twistedsymphony]

I agree that there are benefits of a standard OS... but this can be achieved without a Monopoly. For instance if Linux was the standard OS users would have the choice of any number of distributions. Would it be so bad if Windows became Open source and allowed anyone to tweak it and provide their own distributions and flavors? Obviously that wont ever happen "naturally" but I think that is one way we could have mass market OS standardization without a monopoly.

As for the case of Google... their monopoly is by user choice. switching from google to yahoo MS's Live is as simple as typing a different word in your browser (those alternatives have less text to type too). It's not like swapping from Windows to say OSX where you'd have to buy all new hardware and all new applications and then the interface is completely foreign and you can't use half of your files from the old machine, etc.

It boggles the mind when you see overwhelming success from a company or tech like Google and the reaction from competitors is to kill it rather then take notes and figure out why users like it so much better then what they offer.

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[Eustace Tilley]

And yet Microsoft was and is a monopoly without that happening. Microsoft's monopoly rests on the state's enforcement of its copyrights. State power gives Microsoft sole-legitimate-supplier status in the developed world.

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[Ravnen]

I agree that there are benefits of a standard OS... but this can be achieved without a Monopoly. For instance if Linux was the standard OS users would have the choice of any number of distributions.

Well, the same advantages of standardising on a single kernel would apply to standardising on a single distribution, desktop environment, office suite, etc. The obvious disadvantage is that a monoculture is far more vulnerable to viruses and whatnot, but on balance this downside seems to be smaller than the upside.

As for the case of Google... their monopoly is by user choice. switching from google to yahoo MS's Live is as simple as typing a different word in your browser (those alternatives have less text to type too). It's not like swapping from Windows to say OSX where you'd have to buy all new hardware and all new applications and then the interface is completely foreign and you can't use half of your files from the old machine, etc.

True, it is easier than switching from, e.g. Windows to Linux. However, the financial value of a search engine is tied to its attractiveness to advertisers, which is tied to its user base. The paying customers, in this case, are not the people who use Google to search, but those who pay to advertise with Google.

If 65% of web users use Google to search, it is a much better place to advertise than the alternatives with 0-35%, 35% assuming a duopoly. This means advertisers will gravitate towards Google, allowing it to offer lower prices to them, spend more on advertising its own brand and simultaneously invest more in crawling/indexing the web, developing other 'free' services for customers, etc. Better brand awareness and more/better services will attract more users, leading to a virtuous cycle of higher market share and higher efficiency.

The search engine market may not necessarily operate this way, and hence may not tend towards a natural monopoly, but it's certainly a possibility. If it does tend towards a natural monopoly, it might also be a good candidate for regulation, given the importance in free societies of free access to information, and the growing role of the web in providing such information.

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[Eustace Tilley]

But the state didn't give it a monopoly on operating systems. It gave it a monopoly on the Windows code The state gave a monopoly on Windows-compatible implementations by using force to

• prevent reverse-engineering
• prevent anyone with an application from bundling the binaries required by that application
• prevent anyone from setting up an alternative distribution
• etc.

Re:Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[Ravnen]

Natural monopolies is an oxymoron.

No, this is not true. A textbook example would be a water utility. In order to deliver water, it is necessary to invest an enormous amount in capital, i.e. a network of storage sites, pumping stations and pipes to deliver water to the end users. Having two competing water utilities each invest in such capital would be extremely wasteful, and to the extent that water prices reflect the costs of operating and maintaining this infrastructure, competition would result in higher prices, not lower prices, for the buyers of water.

There are many other examples of natural monopolies. In such cases of a natural monopoly, the state typically grants an official monopoly to one supplier, in order to spur development which the threat of competition might otherwise prevent, and to regulate prices. The aim of regulating prices is to provide an incentive for the producer to produce at the socially optimal level, rather than at the level that maximises the producer surplus. In some cases, this even requires subsidies to the producer.

Many arguments in favour of the idea that operating systems are a natural monopoly have been put forward, and whilst the question is not settled, i.e. there is not a consensus, such arguments are often compelling. For example, with ten competing and incompatible operating systems, each with a significant market share, hardware developers would have to invest in developing device drivers for ten different driver interfaces, applications developers would have to invest in porting their software to ten different APIs, etc. This would effectively waste a huge amount of resources, impeding technological progress.

I agree that Windows is not a monopoly in the pure sense, even on the desktop: there are competing operating systems, so by definition, Windows is not a monopoly. However, the market shares of the others in the desktop, but not server, market are so small that it can reasonably be argued that Microsoft's Windows platform has effective monopoly power, in the sense that none of the other OSes is good enough to be a viable alternative. Even Mac OS X, which comes closest, operates on only a very small set of hardware.

Interestingly, if the PC operating systems market is a natural monopoly, then efforts to introduce competition will actually lead to less efficient allocation of resources, i.e. wasteful duplication of effort in developing several device drivers for each hardware component, porting applications to several APIs and so on. This could actually make end users worse off, and impede technological progress.

they won't have to

[froggero1]

when the general opinion of people turns to "google is too powerful and potentially evil" because there is choice, people will just stop using it. There's no lock ins (besides email, but even then, there's redirection, or just telling people that your email has changed).

Microsoft however, way back in the day, when you bought a "Windows PC", you had a couple thousand dollar investment in the company, making it a sudo lock in. The comparison doesn't really apply here imho.

Re:they won't have to

[26199]

Huh? No offense, but... that's crazy talk.

1) Most people will never realise or care. 2) Of those who do realise and care, most won't switch until there's a competitor that's at least as good. I've yet to see another search engine as good as google, and their other offerings tend to be top of the pile, too.

Even with no lockin at all, it's very hard to take on google. The word "google" has become a verb! How's that for free advertising?

Re:they won't have to

[suv4x4]

when the general opinion of people turns to "google is too powerful and potentially evil" because there is choice, people will just stop using it. There's no lock ins (besides email, but even then, there's redirection, or just telling people that your email has changed).

Microsoft however, way back in the day, when you bought a "Windows PC", you had a couple thousand dollar investment in the company, making it a sudo lock in. The comparison doesn't really apply here imho.

So your point is Google is building and (actually mostly buying) all those google apps and services to create an evil lock-in?

You can't have it both ways.

On the other side of the comparison, a casual Windows user didn't pay "hundreds of dollars" to get Windows. He got a 20-30 USD OEM license fee on top of what was possibly a 600+ USD computer or 1000+ USD laptop.

Let's face it: all corporations want more profits, they all want a lock-in, and lock-in is a lock-in partially because it provides benefit for the users. Neither Google or Microsoft chained you and said "use our stuff". Instead we chose to, because we find something on the platform useful (be it services, quality, compatibility, whatever).

Re:they won't have to

[froggero1]

Huh? No offense, but... that's crazy talk.

none taken

1) Most people will never realise or care.

Never say never, when mainstream media has a constant flow of articles about how all your email is being read, google is profiling you... they're making deals with your employer to inform them of when you apply for a different job (that sort of stuff, you know, actually being evil), people will notice, and they will care, a lot.

2) Of those who do realise and care, most won't switch until there's a competitor that's at least as good. I've yet to see another search engine as good as google, and their other offerings tend to be top of the pile, too.

I suspect that the next "good" search engine will come from the open source community. When enough people with knowledge and capability group up against google, I'm sure they could come up with just as good or better of an alternative. Again though, they'd have to be motivated to do that to google, which will probably only happen if/when the majority of people shift from believing do no evil to don't get caught doing evil, but do it as much as possible.

Even with no lockin at all, it's very hard to take on google. The word "google" has become a verb! How's that for free advertising?

That can work both ways, some of my favorite profanities are verbs too :P

Re:they won't have to

[PoliTech]

I think that there have been rumblings about Google being "Not-so-great" amongst the web developer community for a few years (due to questionable pageranking, the clickfraud problem and whatnot), but the combination of the "Don't be evil" mantra and the China censorship deal triggered lots of people to take a closer look at Google and Google's business practices. People who otherwise never before cared about Google.

Now Google faces a similar problem to that of the main stream media news outlets. They are too left-wing for the right-wingers. They are too right-wing for the left-wingers (at least as far as business practices), and the volume of Google criticizing exponentially increases, whether accurate or not.

Along with the spotlight comes the scrutiny, (fair or not).

Re:they won't have to

[spottedkangaroo]

...next "good" search engine will come from the open source community.

Oh sure. I like to write open source stuff and release it in the wild and all, but it's never occurred to me to set up a million dollar server farm and stick it on the net for people to use as a search engine or whatever. And venture capitalists tend not to bother with companies that don't have a clear way of making money some day.

So, where does that leave us?

Re:they won't have to

[aussie_a]

Well if people care more about good search results then not "being afraid" then I'd suggest they go see a psychiatrist. If however they're not afraid of google, why would anyone switch?

Re:they won't have to

[Arimus]

I suspect that the next "good" search engine will come from the open source community. When enough people with knowledge and capability group up against google, I'm sure they could come up with just as good or better of an alternative. Again though, they'd have to be motivated to do that to google, which will probably only happen if/when the majority of people shift from believing do no evil to don't get caught doing evil, but do it as much as possible.

While I agree the OSS community could produce a search engine as good or better than google in terms of code etc - the biggest killer for any alternative not from a big company is going to be the server resources, bandwidth and all the other infrastructure type elements that require serious bucks to buy and maintain... The best we can hope for would be the OSS community to produce the software and firm like IBM to provide the infrastructure elements... And typing this another issue just occured to me: Google's index has been built up over many years, for any alternative to get to the same level of indexing as google will take a long time to be complete. (Yes, I know the web changes but a certain percentage is going to be static content.)

Re:they won't have to

[aussie_a]

So, where does that leave us? With a problem that requires an innovative solution. Good luck :)

Re:they won't have to

[Bert64]

On the contrary, i have often found myself forced to use microsoft products against my will.
How many times have you been send a file in a proprietary format, or gone to a non standards compliant website that forced you to use a microsoft browser.
This is why people hate them. Google on the other hand, don't force anything.

Re:they won't have to

[suv4x4]

How many times have you been send a file in a proprietary format, or gone to a non standards compliant website that forced you to use a microsoft browser. This is why people hate them.

So, people hate them since a 3rd party uses their products or doesn't support other browsers.

How on Earth can this be a reason to hate the tool provider. If you're so pissed off, call the guy who gave you the format or whose site you saw, and give him a piece of your mind.

He'll have to give you the said files in SOME kind of format though. I use and like Microsoft Office. If someone gave me files in Open Office format, should I hate Sun?

Re:they won't have to

[Architect_sasyr]

Well without thinking it out too much, all I'm thinking right now is a SETI @ ~/ style of search engine. Or maybe something like bittorrent. The whole problem I see with the internet is that, despite all our funky routing tricks, I still have to get from Australia to America to reach Microsoft.com. Bring on the distributed internets!

Disclaimer: Whilst I am a fairly decent programmer, I am nowhere near to the task of this. Do not message me with suggestions or sample code, I won't be able to help.

Back on topic: The people who aren't afraid of google are not the corporations (necessarily) or the home user, they are, quite frankly, those who aren't two things:

1. Paranoid enough to believe Google could be doing something evil [they are a corporation FFS!]
2. INFORMED If they're not informed then they can't possibly be 1.

Bring on the advertisements and the new search engine. Be glad to see it happen.

Re:they won't have to

[jZnat]

If Microsoft followed open standards in the first place, it wouldn't have been a problem to receive documents in "Microsoft Office format" (it could have been ODF, or Microsoft could have made it an open standard in the first place), or view IE-only webpages (which can only happen because Microsoft extended or created their own IE-only "standards" and then marketed the hell out of it; if they used open standards such as those created by W3C, which Microsoft is part of mind you, it wouldn't have been a problem). Instead, Microsoft focused on vendor lock-in via proprietary data formats and protocols. This is why we hate Microsoft more than the person/company using the product.

Re:they won't have to

[JKConsult]

Now Google faces a similar problem to that of the main stream media news outlets. They are too left-wing for the right-wingers. They are too right-wing for the left-wingers (at least as far as business practices),

And yet, for moderates (or even for those of us who can separate our leanings when we need/want to) they're neither. Hence their popularity amongst the mainstream. Unlike in politics, where a vocal minority can get past the apathy of the masses, Google's business doesn't require you to approve of them or search them out because you need to case a vote for someone. It just requires that when you need to search, you use them. You can disapprove of the way they run their business and still use them. You can not care, like most people, and still use them.

It's an unfortunate fact of modern political life that we've grown to accept the fact that "the right-wingers" and "the left-wingers" have a lot more clout than the vast masses of moderates/leaners. This is not yet a fact in the search engine business.

Re:they won't have to

[beyondkaoru]

i've always been curious as to how these search algorithms work; i've been thinking that it might be possible for a globally distributed search network running in the background on people's computers to replace google. then again, i don't really know anything about searching other than the google dance pagerank thing (which seems quite parallelizable).

this would be open source / free software and we could, you know, make sure it stays in the background and doesn't use too much space or bandwidth or processor power. just a thought.

Re:they won't have to

[Arimus]

In theory that sounds good - however speed of response would be an issue, how to distribute the index amongst the nodes would be a stumbling block... how many nodes should have the same parts of the index to avoid dead spots when people shut their PC's down...

Things like SETI can be distributed as the data set can be broken down into discrete portions and each client is reporting back to a central point...

Re:they won't have to

[beyondkaoru]

i'm kind of curious how much data would need to be stored; we can organize it such that we use distributed hash tables and have the daemons store data depending on how close some data's key is to the node's id. if the data to be stored is less than, say, ten times the amount of space the participants are willing to cache we'd be fine. it could be a somewhat probabilistic thing; each node should try to figure out what sorts of other nodes have similar id's and if someone logs off then others will have to try to compensate by caching additional copies of what he was caching (since hopefully others will already have copies).

it's true that this is very different from seti or folding at home, but it's probably not going to be terrible. if we use a 'pure' distributed hash table implementation, latency would be an issue ( log(n) expected time to get to what you want), but we could have nodes that specialize in knowing where other nodes are to decrease the height of a search tree.

the main danger of having it be distributed would likely be malicious influences on the indices, since there's no one controller of all the data (unlike current search engines)

Re:they won't have to

[beyondkaoru]

making a fully distributed search engine would be really cool; with seti or folding they have central servers that distribute tasks. what would be cooler would be to have individuals run nodes that have no real central leader. with search engines now, things are run from a central organization. this would be mutually beneficial cooperation between people. something to think about, maybe.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=234547&cid=191 05245

Re:they won't have to

[Aliriza]

If they can not deal with customer problems then an opponent will.This is how the system works , this applied to microsoft for the software part.Now it is their turn to be afraid.

Re:they won't have to

[chris_eineke]

If Microsoft followed open standards

HAHAHA, oh wow! You had me up until that part.

Re:they won't have to

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the os community could think outside the square when developing an index.

Give them a symbolic link to our firefox temp cache folders, and trade url's automatically in some tricked out p2p client...

*tin foil hat*

Re:they won't have to

[starkravingmad]

Just off the top of my head, something like a distributed page rank might work.. each node crawls a certain number of pages depending on the resources available to it. It shares its top keywords and associated scores with its neighbours. The neighbours then send the top keywords out of their own crawl set combined with those of their neighbours to their other neighbours and so on..

When a node gets a query it generates it's top 40 results and passes the query and result set on to the neighbours it thinks would have the best results for the query. As the query passes from node to node the result set gets refined until a certain threshold is reached, at which point the results are returned to the user..

When a node drops out its neighbours adjust their top keyword list by adjusting the scores of the keywords given by that node. When a node changes its crawl set it initiates a top keyword exchange with its neighbours..

Just an idea, but I'd be happy to work on something like this if other people are interested..

Re:they won't have to

[Breakfast Pants]

Just to a add a bit on email--if you use gmail for your domain there is absolutely no lock-in at all. You just point the DNS mail records over to whichever other provider you want, or to your own machine.

Re:they won't have to

[Breakfast Pants]

Someone sent me a link with directions to their house, and it was a google maps link!@!!! I was locked-in because I couldn't extract the street address from the URL. Google is EVIL! The URL didn't comply with any standards.

Re:they won't have to

[VENONA]

Google started with a few PCs under a desk, and PageRank. It took them a few years to come out of the blue and become a verb. I was using Google from the early days, just as I was using Inktomi before it was widely known, way back when.

What might supplant Google is probably going to equally as surprising to most people. Perhaps something from researchers at a university connected to Internet 2, enjoying huge bandwidth. Surely that's something that should make Internet search engine research easier?

The need is there. I have a *huge* bookmark collection. So large that it's often faster to search rather than drill through the collection--though the bookmarks are still valuable in terms of providing direct links to fundamentals. I do a lot of research, but also some education. So it's worthwhile for me to direct links to fundmental references to, say, the Law of Large Numbers. We're talking non-Wikipedia here, as Wikipedia references can change overnight, due to internal wars. References to fundamental papers better meet my needs.

Most people probably don't have that need. Bookmarks, for the mass audience, seem likely to become largely a thing of the past. I can certainly envision a future where large numbers of people prefer to maintain a dozen bookmarks rather than be overwhelmed by complexity. *If* bookmarks do become less relevant to the mass audience, then search grows proportionally, and all is in a state of constant flux, right? I see problems with that scenario. There's entirely too much scope for Googlewashing, etc.

Perhaps the next great search engine advance is a way to weight authoritative references against pop references. Even that would be a stopgap. How do you weight political references? And how do you do something like that while maintaining something like privacy, vice the context of a Google that 'wants to know all about you'? Or is that even possible? Oracle's Ellison has famously declared that there is no privacy, and we should get over it, but as the CEO of the leading DB vendor, he's hardly a disinterested party.

I suspect that the fortunes will be made by quantitative analysis and AI folk.

The future will indeed be intersting.

Re:they won't have to

[FrostedChaos]

The need is there. I have a *huge* bookmark collection. So large that it's often faster to search rather than drill through the collection--though the bookmarks are still valuable in terms of providing direct links to fundamentals. I do a lot of research, but also some education. So it's worthwhile for me to direct links to fundmental references to, say, the Law of Large Numbers. We're talking non-Wikipedia here, as Wikipedia references can change overnight, due to internal wars. References to fundamental papers better meet my needs.

1. Buy an el-cheapo 200 GB hard disk
2. Download the research papers on to it
3. Buy a search appliance and set it up
4. Instant searchability

or, if you don't want local copies:

1. Set up a mysql or postgresql database with fields like author, field, related work, keywords, etc.
2. Use this database as your bookmarks
3. If you really care enough, write an HTML frontend, or a mozilla plugin frontend

What might supplant Google is probably going to equally as surprising to most people. Perhaps something from researchers at a university connected to Internet 2, enjoying huge bandwidth. Surely that's something that should make Internet search engine research easier?

What makes search engine research easier is having a huge corpus of data, and gobs and gobs of money. Advantage: Google.

Perhaps the next great search engine advance is a way to weight authoritative references against pop references. Even that would be a stopgap. How do you weight political references? And how do you do something like that while maintaining something like privacy, vice the context of a Google that 'wants to know all about you'? Or is that even possible? Oracle's Ellison has famously declared that there is no privacy, and we should get over it, but as the CEO of the leading DB vendor, he's hardly a disinterested party.

Nobody who matters is interested in maintaining privacy, at least in the 20th century sense of the word. Corporations realize the money to be made on profiling customers. Governments want to send spooks after terrorists. The general public doesn't understand or care about the issue because they don't understand data mining. The advocate of 20th-century-style privacy is in the same position as a well-meaning pacifist in the 19th century saying "don't use these new artillery pieces to redraw the political maps, mkay?" Databases of personal information are inevitable; what we should be pushing for is a transparent government that we can monitor in turn.

I suspect that the fortunes will be made by quantitative analysis and AI folk.

Google opened an office in Pittsburgh specifically to do AI research. They are trying to stay on top of this field, too.

Arguably, most of what Google does falls under the category of AI-- their search engine backend is a machine which tries to sift through the detritus of the internet in search of meaningful content, using proprietary heuristics. Their gmail system employs a spam filter which does a similar thing. Their AdSense system takes some text and tries to associate relevant advertisements with it. The holy grail of search is a computer system which cannot be "gamed"-- which assigns the same rank to pages that a moderately intelligent human would. This is basically the turing test restated for 2007, and I'm sure they realize it.

Re:they won't have to

[VENONA]

"Nobody who matters is interested in maintaining privacy, at least in the 20th century sense of the word. Corporations realize the money to be made on profiling customers. Governments want to send spooks after terrorists. The general public doesn't understand or care about the issue because they don't understand data mining. The advocate of 20th-century-style privacy is in the same position as a well-meaning pacifist in the 19th century saying "don't use these new artillery pieces to redraw the political maps, mkay?" Databases of personal information are inevitable; what we should be pushing for is a transparent government that we can monitor in turn."

I suspect that these things may run in cycles. Of course, that could just be wishful thinking. I'd agree that the general public, except for older people such as myself, don't currently care about privacy the way people, say 20-30 years ago did. Nor do I have any confidence in the results of any effort at teaching even the rudiments of data mining. But I have every confidence in the ability of corporations and governments to eventually go too far, and stir resentment.

Things like receiving a notice from an HMO that your rate has increased due to your being in a higher risk group because data collected via a grocer's affinity card indicates that you eat red meat, etc. That's a stretch, for several reasons--but I'm sure you get the idea.

Actually, I think that my confidence in the ability of corporations and governments to screw things up is very nearly limitless.

Re:they won't have to

[Bert64]

Microsoft intentionally created proprietary formats to make it harder to clone their products, and to force others to buy their products when they receive such files.

Those third parties usually have no idea anything other than microsoft exists, and i still usually give them a piece of my mind.

In cases where standard files are already prevelent, i have absoloutely no problem accepting files from people using microsoft products, or any other vendor's products. However, microsoft usually have much smaller market shares in areas where standard files are prevelent (due to the inability to lock people in to inferior products and/or raise the barrier of entry to competitors?). One such example i can think of, is image files. Almost all images sent around the internet are JPEG, PNG or GIF and load perfectly into whatever viewer or editor i choose.

You'l also notice that in all the markets microsoft are aggressively pursuing, they have created proprietary formats, often providing no benefit over existing formats, to try and create a lock over that market (see their new image format, wmv, wma).

Re:they won't have to

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect that the next "good" search engine will come from the open source community.

Sorry dude, if I you find someone who has the drive to market a new algorithm that beats Google, they sure aren't going to open source it.

The drive to succeed includes a drive to succeed.

Re:they won't have to

[FrostedChaos]

I suspect that these things may run in cycles. Of course, that could just be wishful thinking. I'd agree that the general public, except for older people such as myself, don't currently care about privacy the way people, say 20-30 years ago did.

People 20-30 years ago were just as willing to fill out income tax forms with tons of personal information, have their phone numbers and addresses printed in telephone directories, and support governments which conducted extensive surveillance operations. The only thing that's changed is that information technology got better.

Nor do I have any confidence in the results of any effort at teaching even the rudiments of data mining. But I have every confidence in the ability of corporations and governments to eventually go too far, and stir resentment.

A lot of things stir up resentment. The drug war stirs up resentment. Military actions stir up resentment. Whenever a new Wal-Mart moves in, it stirs up resentment. Do you see any of those things ending soon?

Things like receiving a notice from an HMO that your rate has increased due to your being in a higher risk group because data collected via a grocer's affinity card indicates that you eat red meat, etc. That's a stretch, for several reasons--but I'm sure you get the idea.

Why would the HMO bother to tell you the reasons why it decided on a given rate? Car insurance companies don't.
Anyway, normal quantities of red meat aren't bad; you have fallen for one of the many nutritional myths that have been in circulation over the last century.

Re:they won't have to

[VENONA]

"People 20-30 years ago were just as willing to fill out income tax forms with tons of personal information, have their phone numbers and addresses printed in telephone directories, and support governments which conducted extensive surveillance operations. The only thing that's changed is that information technology got better."

I don't regard filling out income tax returns as much of a personal decision--unless you're into some sort of tax protest thing. Phone directory listings are a case where for most people, the benefits of giving away some basic contact information outweighed privacy concerns. So I don't think those two arguments have much merit. As to supporting governments that conducted extensive surveillance campaigns, you are demonstrably incorrect. The FBI got in trouble for it, as did the NSA. It was these debacles, amongst others reported to the Church Committee, that were the direct cause of the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

"A lot of things stir up resentment. The drug war stirs up resentment. Military actions stir up resentment. Whenever a new Wal-Mart moves in, it stirs up resentment. Do you see any of those things ending soon?"

No. Those are examples of the sort of thing that causes me to have a high order of trust in the ability of governments and corporations to go far enough to stir resentment. You gave three examples. Of the three, the only one where I don't see at least something of a backlash is the 'war' on drugs. Military actions are *certainly* causing one, and there seems to be a building backlash against Wal-Mart. IMHO, the summation would seem to support my cyclic viewpoint, which is precisely why I see a reasonable possibility of the same thing happening regard privacy issues.

"Why would the HMO bother to tell you the reasons why it decided on a given rate? Car insurance companies don't.
Anyway, normal quantities of red meat aren't bad; you have fallen for one of the many nutritional myths that have been in circulation over the last century."

That an HMO probably would not (willingly) tell me is one of the reasons I called that example a stretch. On the other hand, they might be forced to, as either part of a backlash, or as a completely stand-alone issue. That's further off into speculation than I'm willing to go, and one of the reasons I called my example something of a stretch.

So far as the red meat issue--I'm not prepared to argue that. From my perspective, perhaps you're correct, perhaps not. That discussion might hinge on what constitutes a 'normal' amount, whether there are any genetic factors involved, etc. Frankly, it's not something that concerns me enough to try to follow, and attempt to weigh, the latest research. One more ongoing time sink isn't something I need just now.

Good examples on either side of this argument will probably be tough to find. Possibly impossible, in that one person's idea of a backlash will probably be another's inneffectual non-starter. The only way to know is to see what the privacy landscape looks like in, say, 2030. As I said in a previous post, the future will indeed be insteresting.

So... It's simple.

[Colin Smith]

Build me a better search engine...

Re:So... It's simple.

[Timesprout]

Whats not so simple is how you fund this endeavour. Google have been successful with targeted ads because they keep and analazye lots of data which is what's raising concerns now. What I find surprising is that many in the tech community are only becoming concerned about this now. While my geek griends were happy to get them, several of my non tech friends immediately turned down invites to GMail years ago as soon as they read the T&C. The T&C with the failed Google web accelerator were even worse. This is not a new issue.

Re:So... It's simple.

[owlnation]

Of course, that isn't simple.

I love Google, but in truth we do very much need someone to do that.

1. Search, regardless of Google, or politics, or anything else, does NOT meet most peoples' needs. There's far too much gaming, far too much blackhattery, and image search is a complete lottery (although Ask seems to do a much better job of this than the others).

2. It's been around ten years since there was any significant breakthrough in search technology. While it IS hard, that's still kind of lame. I suspect part of the reason for lack of development is that search, you know, kinda mostly works, and Google, kinda mostly, does an ok job. If it totally sucked, I bet we'd have new tech by now.

3. Evil or no, competition is healthy. Google needs serious challengers to evolve. It's good for them, good for us all.

4. Few people know how to legitimately promote a website on Google. If you are de-ranked, most people don't know why, or how to solve that problem. Your site is vulnerable to your competitors deliberately Blackhat SEO-ing your site to de-rank it. There's nothing you can do about it. Your business can be destroyed. No-one to appeal to, and no way of finding why, or what happened. That's too much power.

I'm inclined at this point to say that the situation was healthier, if more time consuming, in the days before Google. I always searched in Yahoo, Infoseek, Altavista and MSN. Between these four I would find what I was looking for by page 3 or 4 of the results, and sometimes curiously serendipitous results would take me off somewhere more interesting.

I find that most searches I perform in Google these days have to be qualified with -ebay, -amazon, -wikipedia, -about, etc. to find relevant results. I'm still faced with about five SEO link farm sites per page for most searches.

For example, try searching for a celebrity's name. You'll get an (usually very useful) Imdb entry, a wikipedia entry (that's usually copied and pasted from Imdb), and then dozens and dozens of SEO link farms or celebrities picture page scams (there's so many of these that they are hard to filter). If you are very lucky you might find the celebrity's own website by page 4 or 5. You might also begin to see interesting fan pages by that time too. You'll be 10 or 20 pages in before you start seeing things like legitimate newspaper or TV reports about that person.

No folks, if you are are currently working on new search tech, please I beg you, work faster!

Re:So... It's simple.

[Vexorian]

The word you tried to spell was "paranoid" not concerned. Seriously people get serious.

Re:So... It's simple.

[Kijori]

I have a slightly different theory. If you look at what's changed in the past few years, you'll see that this engine-spamming has increased massively. People now devote their days to trying to fool Google into listing them higher than they deserve. Taken in this context, the quality of result moving up slowly sounds pretty good - if the results are improving, despite the efforts of thousands of people and companies to reduce their quality, the technology behind the search must be moving forwards fairly quickly.

Re:So... It's simple.

[garcia]

1. Search, regardless of Google, or politics, or anything else, does NOT meet most peoples' needs. There's far too much gaming, far too much blackhattery, and image search is a complete lottery (although Ask seems to do a much better job of this than the others).

It doesn't meet people's needs that haven't a clue what the fuck they're doing. Generally if you are searching for something simple (which is what MOST people do) Google will return it in the top 10 results and more than likely the top 3. For the rest of us, Google offers some really fucking cool searching (like inurl) that lets you do some deep digging for XLS/CSV dumps of databases that makes my job easier.

The basis of your argument is correct -- we always need better searching abilities (and they probably will come) but to say that it's not good enough for most people is just nuts.

2. It's been around ten years since there was any significant breakthrough in search technology. While it IS hard, that's still kind of lame. I suspect part of the reason for lack of development is that search, you know, kinda mostly works, and Google, kinda mostly, does an ok job. If it totally sucked, I bet we'd have new tech by now.

Instead of sitting here bitching, why aren't you developing new search algorithms that work better?

3. Evil or no, competition is healthy. Google needs serious challengers to evolve. It's good for them, good for us all.

Definitely and while they're snapping up all the good engineers, I think that someone will either leave Google and start their own shit or they'll just decide that they can do better themselves from the get-go.

4. Few people know how to legitimately promote a website on Google. If you are de-ranked, most people don't know why, or how to solve that problem. Your site is vulnerable to your competitors deliberately Blackhat SEO-ing your site to de-rank it. There's nothing you can do about it. Your business can be destroyed. No-one to appeal to, and no way of finding why, or what happened. That's too much power.

Then beat them out at their own game and either learn or hire someone else to do it. Just like your competitors beating you out with conventional advertising because your marketing department sucks, you have to hire a team that will handle that stuff for you.

I find that most searches I perform in Google these days have to be qualified with -ebay, -amazon, -wikipedia, -about, etc. to find relevant results. I'm still faced with about five SEO link farm sites per page for most searches.

What the fuck are you searching for? I *never* run into this problem. Please provide some real world examples other than searches about celebrities.

Re:So... It's simple.

[Snaller]

"Instead of sitting here bitching, why aren't you developing new search algorithms that work better?"

How old are you anyway? 10? People do not have to be programmers to point out something is not working so well.

"What the fuck are you searching for? I *never* run into this problem."

No, but then you are either a moron or a paid shill.

Re:So... It's simple.

[Gorimek]

2. It's been around ten years since there was any significant breakthrough in search technology. While it IS hard, that's still kind of lame. I suspect part of the reason for lack of development is that search, you know, kinda mostly works, and Google, kinda mostly, does an ok job. If it totally sucked, I bet we'd have new tech by now.

Just because the result page looks pretty similar doesn't mean there hasn't been huge technology improvements on the server side.

You may remember search as being just as good 10 years ago. But I'm sure you'd change your mind if the tech got reverted to that stage. You are aware that Google is less than 9 years old?

3. Evil or no, competition is healthy. Google needs serious challengers to evolve. It's good for them, good for us all.

Google has very serious challengers. Microsoft and Yahoo are throwing billions at that problem right now. As is Google itself. Ask is also in the game.

4. Few people know how to legitimately promote a website on Google. If you are de-ranked, most people don't know why, or how to solve that problem. Your site is vulnerable to your competitors deliberately Blackhat SEO-ing your site to de-rank it. There's nothing you can do about it. Your business can be destroyed. No-one to appeal to, and no way of finding why, or what happened. That's too much power.

That may not be a solvable problem.

I'm inclined at this point to say that the situation was healthier, if more time consuming, in the days before Google. I always searched in Yahoo, Infoseek, Altavista and MSN. Between these four I would find what I was looking for by page 3 or 4 of the results, and sometimes curiously serendipitous results would take me off somewhere more interesting.

Is anything stopping you from doing this now? Other than that it would suck so much more than just using Google?

Re:So... It's simple.

[Vexorian]

seriously, "-amazon -ebay -wikipedia", that guy is on crack or something, google would max show 2 results per site, and it doesn't really burn too much neurons to go to the second page...

Re:So... It's simple.

[LionKimbro]

4. Few people know how to legitimately promote a website on Google.

No, they know how. They just don't want to.

My friend with his company calls me, asking about different SEO options. I say, "(A) Change your title from (default) to the actual title of your website, (B) buy Google key words. Guaranteed, number one."

He'd much rather shell out thousands for SEO, than buy google key words.

Re:So... It's simple.

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of sitting here bitching, why aren't you developing new search algorithms that work better?

Maybe because he's not a search engine algorithm researcher? Or maybe he is -- what the hell do you know?

Seriously, why is it that someone has to reply to every single Slashdot post with this utterly moronic non sequitur? It's too dumb to even deserve a response.

What the fuck are you searching for? I *never* run into this problem. Please provide some real world examples other than searches about celebrities.

Yeah, because normal people would never search for celebrities. Why, that's just unthinkable! Normal people-- you know, the kind you just said search "just works" for.

Google stands down

[noidentity]

In response to claims that it is too good for its own good, Google is voluntarily scaling back its search engine to version 1.0. This move will allow other search engines to gain a larger share of the search market, and end Google's monopolistic practice of making a good product that makes rational people unable to avoid using. Even though users will have to accept this step backwards in search quality, this is necessary to make it a more even playing field for other companies. Google is also providing a search engine randomizer to further avoid any one engine becoming too dominant.

Re:Google stands down

[Anonymous Coward]

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General...

~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007)

Re:Google stands down

[rabbit78]

Version 1.0? You are saying this isn't beta anymore?

Failures with delusions of self-entitlement

[Anonymous Coward]

privacy experts, advertisers, startups, and Hollywood executives

Privacy experts are worried about all search histories and to be fair, Google is the only major search engine that refused to freely surrender search terms. Advertisers are scum who are pissed off that google is a less scummy advertiser than they are. Does anyone give a shit about Hollywood while they continue churning out the same tired crap and why are startups pissed at google?

This 'tides are turning for Google' is getting tired, they have the best search. Wake me up when one of these bozos does something proactive like setting up as serious competition. It's not even comparable to the MS monopoly because Microsoft never had the best operating system and they're still peddling shit. Try 'tides are turning for Microsoft' and I might agree.

Re:Failures with delusions of self-entitlement

[Anonymous Coward]

"This 'tides are turning for Google' is getting tired, they have the best search."

Umm, no. It's best for you, because it's free and economics is part of your equation. Your "best" is being defined like GM or Toyota are best solely because people buy them the most.

"Best" nowadays is being number one relative to the competition, not the optimal setup. It's like people who say the ipod is "best" when they haven't done a lick to look at other options, just buying because everyone else is promoting it. That's more like a mob vote than something best based on merit. Previously, best with google was more defined with that merit vote aka "geek vote" (i.e. circa year 2000 a lot of people were recommending google to friends). Now, it's a function of economics--market share, or because everyone else is using it or people don't know any better--that is closer to a MS OS mentality.

*I* no longer consider the "best" when it gets in my way; even Altavista's search didn't piss me off as much as google's does, but Altavista just become irrelevant because they didn't adapt. Some of the crap I'm seeing on google is what I was seeing on Excite back in the day the latter was relevant--2nd or 3rd links linking to the 1st link returned (just saw one yesterdaying doing a search for "XP clock too fast" or something for one of my boxes).

And google's doesn't rule all search. A lot of people like google scholar. I hate it--you get a lot of crap and a lot of commercial only/have to buy the damn article returns. OTOH, you want to find some nitty gritty minor article, you won't find it on scholar but you can find it through general search, although it's hit or miss with a general google search (pretty easy to prove--find a more or less unique short 2-3 word phrase in the very article google reveals, search for it, and google won't find your article again), but a complete miss on other search engines. OTOH, if you want to consider web search, I think pubmed (even though google includes them in results) gets more relevant hits from people doing more serious research (not to mention you get more relevant terms using your university's privately purchased/leased/rented database search getup).

Images on google suck compared to other, even experimental engines, that have been covered on /. are better than anything google seems to have in alpha, beta, or whatever.

So saying flat out "best search" is more about you proving you're fan boy, nothing more. (Heck, I've actually search on google and looked at the right column for the ads primarily, because I started noticing the advertisers were giving more relevant results than the regular results/bulk of the page--this obviously will be seen by some as a plus to their argument of google's dominance since the ads are still via google, but others will see it more properly as the failure of the main engine.)

Re:Failures with delusions of self-entitlement

[DrEldarion]

So saying flat out "best search" is more about you proving you're fan boy, nothing more ... and by you typing out that huge diatribe without actually showing any examples of which sites are "better", you're proving yourself to be an anti-fan boy, nothing more. So where are we left, here?

Not flamebait to say that only corps hate G

[Anonymous Coward]

The +Flamebait moderators are really on crack.

How can it be flamebait to point out that only other corps hate Google at the moment, and not the hundreds of millions of individuals who love it, so far?

After all, it's done no evil to any non-corp person so far, except in China. And even there it claims to be balancing the greater good against the censorship which it is fully acknowledging that it is doing, so whether it's "evil on balance" or not in China is at least debateable.

The parent is not flamebait. In fact, it's pretty insightful, for a 1-liner.

Re:Not flamebait to say that only corps hate G

[UncleTogie]

After all, it's done no evil to any non-corp person so far, except in China. And even there it claims to be balancing the greater good against the censorship which it is fully acknowledging that it is doing, so whether it's "evil on balance" or not in China is at least debateable.
I'd have to say that trading someone's rights for corporate profit is bad on any level, but many would disagree.

Re:Not flamebait to say that only corps hate G

[Anonymous Coward]

Done No Evil? Shouldn't we consider the collection of everything we do on Google as evil. Then Google wants to make all public records easily available, oh boy, thats a great idea. So the next time someone steals your identity from a single Google search, you can say. At least Google did no evil. Maybe when the FBI shows up at your door because you had a term paper about terrorism. I guess that would not be evil either. Any time a corporation considers your private information as theirs to do with what they will. They have done evil, and Google has really crossed that line.

Search engines tend to regulate themselves...

[3seas]

The bigger they get the higher the likely hood that the results won't be what the searcher is wanting.

So this is really not about search enignes but about googles incomming advertising dollar and perhaps what they chose to do with it.

Or in a word to express the competitions POV "envy"

...when their customers can't do without it

[Bandman]

Gee, I'd love to email you, but google's down. Sure I could use my yahoo mail, but you're on google too. I guess I could call you, but your contact information is in my spreadsheet on Google Documents. Damn.

Re:...when their customers can't do without it

[redbaritone]

Only thing is, has Google ever been down, that you can remember? With thousands of linux boxes and connections to several redundant internet trunks, it's not likely to happen. What's more likely is that the user's connection will go down. In this case, it's a dependence on the internet, not Google per se, that's the problem.

Re:...when their customers can't do without it

[perkr]

There gmail has gone down for sure. Although only in the order of minutes as far as I've experienced.

Re:...when their customers can't do without it

[The Cisco Kid]

More importantly, is your contact information at google (or documents, or email messages, or anything else) locked into a proprietary secret format that is non-trivial to convert away from?

I think you'll see that the answer is 'no'. Compare to documents created and stored in one of MS-Word's many formats.

This is not like david vs goliath

[gunnarstahl]

This "fight" is about goliath vs goliath.

In the original story david was a person who tried to free his people. He even was willing to put his own life to risk to safe his people.

For some reason or another I don't think that these "davids" have the same altruistic motives...

Yt,

Gunnar

Re:This is not like david vs goliath

[Antique Geekmeister]

David was a lucky bastard who took on an arrogant giant and got in a lucky shot. He also turned out to be one of the worst kings in Biblical history: kind of like Bill Gates and his early effective defeat of IBM in the small computer market.

Re:This is not like david vs goliath

[Anonymous Coward]

David was hardly one of the worst kings in Biblical history. I don't know any measure that would put David anywhere near "worst."

From a moral perspective, he managed to commit adultery and basically murder a guy to cover it up. He also ticked God off with some census thing. Other than that, he's portrayed as nigh on perfect. Certainly not as bad as Jeroboam, Omri, Ahaz, Ahab, Mannaseh, or a host of others.

From a political perspective, he expanded the borders of the Kingdom (given, this was via war, so some might argue that its bad, but certainly no worse than any other ancient king) and stockpiled resources for his son to build a temple to his god. He also managed to get himself a palace.

From a social perspective, he has come to be known as the best damn king in the Deuteronomistic history. He is constantly the one that other kings are compared to. They all pretty much fall short, at least until Hezekiah.

So, I doubt one could say David was the worst king in Biblical history. You might think he didn't do a good job, or you might think that he was just horrid. It's also possible you don't think he ever actually existed in any form. Regardless, he is portrayed as the model King in the Biblical history to which you refer.

In Soviet Russia...

[daybot]

...Chuck Norris is afraid of Google!

Re:In Soviet Russia...

[Anne Thwacks]

Mod parent up. Its just so cool...

Re:In Soviet Russia...

[Anonymous Coward]

google searches you!

Re:In Soviet Russia...

[inAbsurdum]

to be over-the-top geek-cliché, that line should read: In Soviet Russia, all your Google base are belong to Chuck Norris!!!

Re:In Soviet Russia...

[daybot]

Yes, but that'd be off-topic :D

Epitome of Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

Madison Avenue and Hollywood are the epitome of evil. This is just good vs. evil play itself out here.

Auto insurance...

[scooter.higher]

Maybe Google should take a tip from auto insurance companies advertising... "We not only give you our results, but the results of our competitors."

Re:Auto insurance...

[Sergeant Pepper]

They already do - all the competitors are "Powered by Google".

Re:Auto insurance...

[Anonymous Coward]

"'Google', not 'gecko'!"

Wake up you morons :

[unity100]

"when Google becomes so dominant that customers cannot do without it."

that point is long past.

Re:Wake up you morons :

[wbren]

Not necessarily. Bottom line after two weeks Google-free:

So, the question on everybody's mind. Will I be unblocking Google? Has my blockade been fruitless? Although I miss the fantastic search results, I would have to say "No, and no". I've found that I can get by, and even be more productive, without Google. "Don't Be Evil" is a great motto to have. However, I consider gathering every move I make on the internet to be evil and a violation of my privacy. I don't want this to turn into a political discussion about Google's data gathering, as there is a time and place for that.

Something to think about anyway...

Re:Wake up you morons :

[aussie_a]

Oh really? Because I can do without Google just fine.

Re:Wake up you morons :

[Kijori]

I really don't understand what they've written there. They miss the fantastic search results, but not having them makes them more productive? I have a feeling they're just trying to besmirch Google's reputation and are willing to say whatever it takes, whether it's true or not.

Re:Wake up you morons :

[ClaraBow]

I really don't understand the writer's motivation. He left Google for Yahoo over privacy concerns, but Google went to court and fought to have their customers' private data from being handed over to the U.S. government, while Yahoo happily handed over info to the government without a fight. I don't know what this guy is trying to accomplish.

Re:Wake up you morons :

[DrEldarion]

The motivation is to bash Google no matter what. He says that "evil" is keeping track of your searches/emails/etc. No, that's not inherently evil. As he gets at himself, to avoid it, one just has to stop using Google products. If you use their products, you play by their rules. That is not evil unless you're being forced to use them.

Almost everybody should be

[Anonymous Coward]

If you regularly use many of their services, they have recorded data on you about

- interests, tastes, hobbies, obsessions, illnesses, allergies, addictions, fetishes, celebrity crushes, ...
- your friends, colleagues, acquaintances, physician, garage, bank, pizza delivery, ...
- where you live, work/study, plan to go to (gmaps) and actually went (if you loggin in gmail from there)
- email and chat transcriptions from gmail and gtalk
- plans and schedules from gcalendar
- private documents like personal finance plannings or job applications from goffice

I don't believe any company or organization in history has ever recorded so much private information on so many individuals as Google.

Re:Almost everybody should be

[aussie_a]

And yet people give it to Google willingly. Yes, Google's services are just THAT good.

Re:Almost everybody should be

[anandsr]

That is a side-effect of being on-line.

At-least Google doesn't roll over at the slight request from government like the other companies.
Or do you think that Yahoo, MSN, etc don't save your searches. What about your bank, your doctor,
are you sure they keep your data safe. At least Google tries to fight, where the rest of them would
actually sell your data. Google at least knows that they can directly make more profit from your data
without selling it, and will protect it for that reason.

I don't really expect the future to provide us any privacy, I just hope that everybody is equally violated.
That way the more popular people are going to get the worse end of it including government officials
compared to a no-name person like me.

Who?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know the answer.. "search me". Oh crap, I was going to use my user_id, but then, I got worried what you would find.

I am not (only) afraid of Google

[Anonymous Coward]

I know about the dangers of Google. But I also see the dangers of all those who seem to be less important, less greedy, less dangerous, though they are using the verified data you gave them to collect highly specific data. And often enough don't tell you and don't get in trouble if you complain, because it's just local.

cb

Ha Ha!

[16K Ram Pack]

"The list of detractors is longer than other search providers, though; privacy experts, advertisers, startups, and Hollywood executives are all frustrated with the company for one reason or another. "

privacy experts - don't use it. You have other choices.
advertisers. Waaa waaaa. Sorry, someone came along and disrupted your business.
startups. What's their complaint? That Google does stuff better? I keep trying new search engines, and none of them are any better, so why would I switch?
Hollywood executives. Start to recognise that tools like YouTube are free PR.

It's Google that's with the consumer. They provide great search, great email, great maps. That's why they get lots of eyeballs. When they stop doing so, and just sit back and get complacent, they'll go down the tubes.

Look at Microsoft. It's hard to believe, but they were once considered as quite cool. They gave businesses a value proposition. Now, I know IT managers who only use them because of lock-in and legacy in-house applications (over time, as rewrites become inevitable, this will change). Google doesn't really have that. Their lock-in is the time it takes for someone to change their default browser URL.

Re:Ha Ha!

[swillden]

Look at Microsoft. It's hard to believe, but they were once considered as quite cool.

When was that? When Win2K came out? No they were already known as the evil empire by then. Win95? Maybe a little cool, but not very much, and only among people who didn't know about anything else. Honestly, I think Microsoft's "coolness" probably peaked at about Windows 3.1, and that mainly because computers were new and cool to most people, and Microsoft drafted in. SOL.EXE is about as much coolness as MS ever mustered, and that was because you could play while pretending to work.

Well, no. Of course it isn't that simple

[Colin Smith]

Otherwise it'd have been done by now.

What I want though is a personal search engine. Where I can perform an initial search, have some likely candidates returned to me and then I can say yea like this, or nay not like that and the search engine will go off and find me more candidates which were like the ones I do want and less like the ones I don't want. Then I want it to keep my searches recorded and update them every so often as it indexes more sites.

Re:Well, no. Of course it isn't that simple

[DrEldarion]

You mean like Google's Web History? :)

no comparision to MS

[timmarhy]

1. google supplies a free service, an MS computer was a $2000 investment.

2. you were tied to windows, there was no software then that could do the job, and changing required another huge investment of cash. changing search providers is as easy as typing in a new url.

Re:no comparision to MS

[Timesprout]

changing search providers is as easy as typing in a new url.

Thats funny cos when MS wanted to default IE search to MSN in the same way Firefox defaults to Google it was a big deal apparently to change it.

Re:no comparision to MS

[the100rabh]

Guess u know y...not billions of dollars...thats because most of the users just wanted it as default...I just fail to see evil in that....But then firefox also provides some other search engines by default

Google ain't that bad...

[Xiph1980]

The fact that I read this article thru my iGoogle homepage, and the fact that google actually took the US government to court when they wanted to have google's search commands, shows me enough.
Google might have done stuff like cooporating with the Chinese government in censuring search results on the google.cn webpage, but I happen to agree with google there. If a company wants to do business in a foreign country, they'll have to agree with those foreign laws. In the case of China, that means certain subjects are taboo, and talking about certain subjects could get you killed. Is that fair? No ofcourse not, but it's the way that country works. Atleast they have a good search engine now.

If you hate Google for cooporating with this stuff, you'd better also hate Apple, for manufacturing there, and about every toy manufacturer.
Quite likely all bolts and screws in your car are probably manufactured in china aswell. Or how about the casing of your computer speakers and monitor?
If you hate google for that, hate all the companies for dealing with china, because the simple fact is, they all have to comply with Cn. laws and hence all do stuff that would make the hairs in our neck stand straight up.

How long would it take?

[Glowing Fish]

If for some reason, google ends their five to ten year winning streak, and starts being evil, or perhaps just bad, how long will it take people to switch off of it?

I imagine that it would start in places like Slashdot. and within a month or so, propelled by snarky comments and funny .sigs, the cognoscenti would realize that google wasn't cool anymore. From there, the regular, but not hardcore net users would start drifting off, and after a year or so, only the people who were clueless or didn't care would still be using it.

This is what I guess because this is how, for example, yahoo was slowly deserted in search, and mail, and maps, etc., by google.

Re:How long would it take?

[David Off]

> and after a year or so, only the people who were clueless or didn't care would still be using it

AKA the Microsoft demographic.

Re:How long would it take?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you haven't been paying attention, but Google's been evil for quite some time now. (evil)

And filling itself with less-than-competent mouth-breathers for a while now also. (bad)

Don't be quick to assume that people really care.

Re:How long would it take?

[Anonymous Coward]

AKA the Microsoft demographic. Too true. And we'd be getting some work done while the "other" demographic farks around with making a new search engine from scratch (why not start with assembly lang?). Good luck with that by the way. Lemme know when you get it out of beta and I'll start using it. All I know is, my important work will NOT be held hostage by experimental crap, I'll stick with Google as long I get results from it. And to HELL with its philosophies and its hordes of fanbois and antifanbois. Make a good product, test it to oblivion, if it survives contact with the end-user, you win! If not, feel free to sulk in the corner and cry about "mom, they're not using my software WAAAAAAAA". By the way, the gp was probably (I hope, for his/her sake :P) being sarcastic about the fate of Google being decided here :P. Anyone reminded of middle school when you read that paragraph (by gp?)

I imagine that it would start in places like Slashdot. and within a month or so, propelled by snarky comments and funny .sigs, the cognoscenti would realize that google wasn't cool anymore. From there, the regular, but not hardcore net users would start drifting off, and after a year or so, only the people who were clueless or didn't care would still be using it. So, it's really not about functionality is it? It's the same old stupid crap like boycotting the GAP or buying "fair trade" coffee. Feel good, guilt relieving useless circle-jerk? It's not fashionable?

Power corupts...

[Coraon]

So let me see if I have got this? google corupts, and monoploy google corrupts absolutly? See the thing is I havnt seen them do something specficaly evil yet...so I think I'll reserve judgment until then...

hate google?

[DaMattster]

I don't hate Google like I do Microsoft. I staunchly disagree with Google's censorship of information in China, but, Yahoo does it too so that is not reason alone to hate either of them. I hear people grousing about Google's "monopoly." No, you have a number of choices: Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos, and Webcrawler (note: I am not endorsing any of these.) This is quite unlike the Microsoft of the 1990s. Linux was still quite immature and you really needed a stronger compsci and UNIX background. BSD was and still is a viable choice but it really took more advanced users. As much as I hate to admit, Microsoft was unfortunately, the only real choice for the non technically savvy until recently.

So, why do I hate Microsoft? They stifle innovation under a pretext of encouraging it. As other Slashdotters have noted, Microsoft takes the embrace, extend, and patent attitude towards open source. This is what happened with Kerberos and the infamous PAC. They extended the olive branch to MIT then effectively changed Kerberos enough to make it their own. If that wasn't IP theft, it damn well should have been. Beware of any project sponsored by Microsoft as, "the appearance differs from reality." My eye is presently on the XORP Extensible Open Source Router Project as Microsoft has taken a keen interest. Fortunately, there exists an implementation of BGP and OSPF that has been around longer than XORP and already outperforms it. See the OpenBSD project. Google, thus far, hasn't behaved quite like Microsoft; the coming years remain to be seen.

I would find it hard to do without Google

[BrentRJones]

I hope that it does not fall into the hands of those who are only seeking "Shareholder Value", then all users lose and a few wealthy people gain more cash.

Re:I would find it hard to do without Google

[falconwolf]

I hope that it does not fall into the hands of those who are only seeking "Shareholder Value", then all users lose and a few wealthy people gain more cash.

When users loose, so does the investors.

Falcon

A nicer try

[Mateo_LeFou]

The point is that the distinctively Microsoft practice of leveraging their control of the Windows code to crush competition in new markets (Cf. browser wars) depends on the government-granted monopoly called copyright.

Likewise their attempts to nip Samba in the bud, and constant efforts to keep Samba falling behind through fire and motion.

Re:A nicer try

[Elektroschock]

Or that governments let make it happen. Its nothing to invest 1 billion in an alternative operating plattform.

governments can do. I means imagine we got 50 developers who work on getting Windows application run with Wine. governments can be it, its peanuts.

but they prefer to pay license fees and enslave us all.

Me!

[XnavxeMiyyep]

I'm not afraid of Google!

Google and Necessity

[Thumper_SVX]

Honestly, this article is really a bit of a shill. It's probably an article that was commissioned by Yahoo or Microsoft to try to "get the word out" that "Google is Not the Best". Well, to be fair to both of those search providers they're not bad, either... but neither of them really "gets" why Google IS the best search engine.

At the moment, Google has a database size that's "just right". Too much larger and results become muddled and inaccurate... too much smaller and you may never find what you're looking for. Yes, they wield a lot of power in this area because a de-listing or a reduction in your search placement will have an effect on your business. Deal with it... if your business is being reduced in priority it's because either (a) people aren't going to your site anyway or (b) you're doing something with your site to game the algorithms and Google's just changed them. That's life, that's business. If you want primo placement, you advertise with Google... that means you pay them. Everyone wins.

Now, another thing Google does right is they keep it simple. Their home page is fast, quick to load up and simple. When I'm using my cellular modem (UMTS) to connect and search, I don't want a graphics-heavy front page or graphics-heavy results pages. I want text, I want stuff I can cram down a thin pipe with some alacrity without waiting for the banner graphics to load up (I'm looking at you, Yahoo!) and I don't want my searches interspersed with flash animations that have nothing to do with the search I've submitted (Live!). Google does a lot of stuff right because they GIVE THE CUSTOMERS WHAT THEY NEED. Not what the company behind it wants to give them.

I'm not saying Google is perfect; it's not. Its search algorithms though are extremely good, and a quick search returns a good number of relevant searches. There are easy and well documented ways to get more targeted results (putting phrases in quotes for example) and generally only a few minutes of searching will turn up anything you want on all kinds of esoteric subjects. And if you can't find it under "Web", you can probably find it under "Groups" (Usenet). The only thing that sometimes skews those results are the Usenet aggregation sites, but they're usually easy to spot because you've received multiple hits that all contain exactly the same preview text. And who knows? They might be relevant.

In my job as an IT guy, I use Google daily. Multiple times daily, in fact. When I upgraded my work laptop to Vista lately I started giving Live a shot simply because it was the default. Sorry, Microsoft... it took me longer to sift through the results and fewer of them were relevant in my opinion. I switched my default search back to Google and the world has become a better place. Well, not really... but I at least get the consistency of results I've come to expect.

If someone creates a better search engine that fits my needs, let me know. I've tried them all. Back "in the day" when Yahoo! became popular, I was using Alta Vista because its results were more relevant. They lost their way... it's possible Google will... but for the foreseeable future I'm going to continue to use them.

And as for those who scream about the data gathering, the privacy stuff and so forth I say fine. If they're using that information to better tune the search results to my needs, then like an artificial intelligence Google is becoming even more useful to me. I really don't care if they accumulate stats on me... it's not like there aren't people out there doing it anyway, even without Google. We live in a world of advertisers, of corporations and data mining. We live in a society that has in a sense sold a bit of its soul to "the man" in order that we may lead comfortable lives for what we consider to be a reasonable cost. If you don't like it, opt out... but realize that opting in is what allows you to function in this society, allows you to buy things, do things and raise a family. I may not like it, but I live with it. I know I should try to change it... but at this point in my life raising my kids in the Midwest, why should I? It meets my needs today. Tomorrow? Who knows.

Google Is Vulnerable

[chromozone]

Google doesn't just censor in China it does so in the US as well but follows it's own agenda at home. Even it's own board of directors objected to a proposal to block pro-active censorship: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/googles-boar d-objects-anti-censorship-proposal/story.aspx?guid =%7BE4924442-BA3A-4F47-A5B8-DCA66F1A9CB0%7D Google also wants to index more government records at home while working to censor abroad. I think Google hs been going down a slippery slope, and when Google's own actions are considered against the governmnets desire to force Google to be an investigative/monitoring tool I think Google is more vulnerable to a viable backlash then Microsoft ever was. In any case that "do no evil" bit doesn't work anymore.

Hear hear!

[Snaller]

You can stay logged in to the search engine - then why the hell can't you block sites you never want to see again?

Why can't you define standard exclusion sets for quicker supressed of stuff you don't want?

Presumably because google want you to say logged in to get an advertising profile, not because they really care.

After all Google thinks censorship is good for business.

simply innovating

[smiltee]

When you look at Google from another POV, it is not becoming evil at all. Google is pushing new technologies where "old" companies just let it go - and some people are seeing this as evil. We still have liberty to choose. The companies fear Google because they used innovation before all, and it seems that it worked. Only time will tell.

I hate Google as much as the next guy, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

... well, that's it.

Why not mention the actual Davids hunting Google?

[Paradox]

What confuses me most about that article (besides the ugly picture of the inverse hydra) was that they sort of implied that it's impossible for any small company looking to oppose google to make any kind of capital, but nothing could be further from the truth.

What google has done to that space is remove all the BS, not all the "oxygen" as the article quotes. Your product has to be good, your plan has to be merciless, your people have to be dedicated not just to making a new product, but also to actually taking on the giant reverse-hydra on its home turf and its core competency. It's not impossible, it's not even unreasonable, it's just very hard.

As for the salary issue they mention, that confuses me. Who goes to a startup to make a higher salary? People who join startups join for the stock, not the awesome monthly compensation.

Powerset, the company I work for, is a real-life david-size phenomenon. It confuses me that the SF chronicle didn't even mention the SF-based startup that isn't dealing in billions of dollars to do what Microsoft is apparently struggling to do.

Oh no--they even pay engineers really well!!!

[Brian_Ellenberger]

James Currier, a former venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur who sold the social networking site Tickle to job site Monster.com, said that a company on whose board he serves recently lost a prospective employee to Google. The worker, whom he described as a genius, turned down an offer of $120,000, plus stock options, in favor of a $375,000 salary from Google.

Oh No! You mean Google is willing to pay engineers the amount of money normally reserved for empty-suit MBA manager types? The HORROR of having to pay the people who actually build the product. What will the Yale and Harvard grads do now?

Standing on the shoulders of geeks

[Coolhand2120]

The only reason google is this prominent is because geeks (like me) told all our friends 'Use google!' There are only a few features that really set google apart from other searches, when someone duplicates these then google will not be so prominent. Let's face it google really has 0 intellectual property. The only IP I actually use (besides the search) is the toobar and that's easily replaced as I only use the spell check and 'click word search/highlight'. I could write a toolbar that does that in my sleep so I don't really see any 'technological' edge. The few 'features' that google has is really a lack of features:

1: Only relevant text is displayed, no 'you may also like!'
2: No graphical ads, no moving or blinking 'text' NO FLASH!
3: OK search results (just as good as Ya! or MS)

IMHO adwords (google's ad program) is the beginning of the end for the company. More than anything else adwords has created the 'evil' in google. That's exactly why google was so ready to work with red China on blocking 'evil words like democracy and freedom'. Don't forget that Bill Gates snubbed the Chinese president (or whatever he is called) in one of their last meeting over human rights issues, while google was busy constructing their word filters for the communist party. Google is happy to grab up all the videos on the internet and redistribute them with their crummy flash player (may flash burn in hell), meanwhile Bill Gates comes out and says 'DRM is dead' while google is working on their next inception of 'How to DRM everything, even though we don't actually own it'. Not that MS has abandoned DRM but you don't get people like Sergey Brin or Lawrence Page steping out and saying 'DRM is evil and we shal abandon it's use', rather they embrace it's evilness. They also don't say 'Sorry filtering words like "freedom" and "human rights" is evil' when everyone was hoping they would say that.

As soon as the geek community find a more appealing search google will be history, just as google was created it can be uncreated - word of geek.

Incompetence or evil?

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently attempted to make an on-line purchase. I have a paypal account but decided to take advantage of the Google checkout service promotion. I already have a Google account and setting up went fine. Shortly after concluding the purchase I got a notice that the purchase had been blocked by my CC company. I called my CC company and authorized the transaction and according to Google Checkout's instructions I resubmitted the charge. GC never once actually resubmitted the charge and any attempt to contact a living breathing person was thwarted. I seriously doubt they even have breathing resources alloted for this service. I ultimately had to cancel the order and reorder 2 days later. I opened a complaint with the BBB in CA (I live in Texas) and all I ever got in response was 2 form letters. The BBB just closed the complaint without me ever getting an actual response. If they are really serious about expanding this is NOT the way to go about it. I have a LONG memory and it will be a cold day....before I even consider using this service again.

monopolies and the state

[falconwolf]

Monopoly is NOT given by the state. Monopoly is a degenerated case that can happen in a very unbalanced market, but happens due to the natural evolution of said market rather then from a state decision.

Oh but states, government, does give or create monopolies. Take the cases of electrical transmission, cable tv/net access, and landline phone service. In each of these cases the local government granted the companies an exclusive right to use the right of way to lay their cables or fiber. No place I've ever lived did I have a choice as to who I got these services from.

Falcon

Re:monopolies and the state

[shywolf9982]

Indeed that is true. My point was that monopolies are not always given by the state. And when the state does, well, that's extremely sad, but i see how that cannot be too uncommon.

I've yet to see another search engine as good as

[falconwolf]

google

It really depends on what you're searching for. Most of the tyme I start a search with Google myself however sometimes I find Alta Vista is better. I've done searchs with Google that didn't return any results but I would get some at Teoma, before Ask.com bought it out, or Mooter. And for a couple of areas of searchs I start right away with About.com. Actually it was Google that led me to using About.com. Googling for archeology/anthopology led me to About's section on it. A later Google led me to About's photography section.

Not hard to improve search if not selling ads

[Animats]

It's not all that hard to improve search. The problem is improving search when you're really in the business of selling ads.

With Yahoo, this is painfully obvious. Yahoo has a good search engine, but their home page and search result pages are so ad-heavy that they're annoying to use. Google has so far resisted the temptation to run picture ads, but there's heavy pressure for them to do so, from both investors and advertisers. The smaller search entrants tend to have more ads; they need the revenue.

As a technology demo, we have SiteTruth, a consumer-oriented search and rating system, in alpha test. We rate commercial web sites based on "business legitimacy". That starts with finding the business name and address of the organization behind the web site. That bypasses most "affiliates", "doorway pages", and similar junk sites, and gets you to the actual site selling something. As we take this further, we'll be validating incorporation status, business licenses, business credit ratings, and the other things one checks when checking out a business. You know, all that stuff you're supposed to check, but nobody ever does.

Then we push the sites with bad ratings to the bottom of the search results and off into obscurity, where they usually belong.

Site rating has been tried before, but usually based on user recommendations. User recommendations are too easy to fake; most of the people who write them are interested parties. (Our neighborhood video store is offering a free rental if you say good stuff about them on Yelp.) And coverage is usually narrow; there are more sites than people rating them.

Big difference between Microsoft, AT&T, and Go

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is free unless you want to advertise with Google. Microsoft's Windows products, and AT&T circa Ma Bell was not. YouTube is free, Blogger is free, Gmail is free. It's Google who is on the pulse of the internet society. Plus while Google does hold the power of privacy, they fought to protect that info. Now Google has done some despicable things like censor for China, and use DRM, but then so does every competitor of Google, so you might as well log out of the internet! If I had to choose to side with a Golith, I'd rather have Google backing me up than Microsoft or AT&T, because Google at least remains free unless you want to advertise and you can leave at anytime... And even Google's AdWords thing is probably the least intrusive ads I've ever seen and have occasionally clicked on and interesting one.

bah

[Danzigism]

tired of this propaganda.. it's like that stupid ass documentary "Google Behind the Scenes".. it seems that if you use just the right wording, you can make anyone look bad.. thank you typical media!! please let us not forget that people hardly knew what or who Google was 5 years ago.. it's inevitable that with all the technology that exists today, that some company has tons of information regarding you.. Walmart probably knows more about you than Google does.. as long as Google keeps my information private, then there's nothing I'm afraid of.. and if they go against their motto, then they will feel the karmic wrath..

Re:bah

[Alt321]

The problem isn't apparent when everything is hunky dory ... it's when things go tits up that the problem reveals itself.
Think of any country which had a benign leadership and which was subsequently replaced by a bunch of a-holes ... it happens.

Ask

[falconwolf]

Google has very serious challengers. Microsoft and Yahoo are throwing billions at that problem right now. As is Google itself. Ask is also in the game.

I don't think Ask presents much of a game. It used to be that when I googled for something but didn't get any results I'd go over to Teoma and I'd get results there. However since Ask bought Teoma it has gone downhill. I've found another SE that returns results when Google doesn't, Mooter.

Falcon

Re:Why not mention the actual Davids hunting Googl

[ScrewMaster]

People who join startups join for the stock, not the awesome monthly

More to the point, the creative minds in startups do it because they have ideas that they care about, and want the ability to bring those ideas to fruition on their own terms. Maybe their stock options become worth something, maybe they don't, but money is not always the most important reason. Maybe it never is. Page and Brin formed Google, rather than taking their ideas to an established search company. They got lucky: most startups fail. Most people who have a product idea, good or bad, know that before they even try to make something out of it. They go for it anyway, because it's more about creative control than money, about doing it your own way.

Phasing out Google ...

[Alt321]

But he cautioned that the warning sign will come when Google becomes so dominant that customers cannot do without it. How well will Google deal with its customers' problems then?'"

This is so completely on point and timely, from a personal point of view.

I definitely classed myself as love-struck, dumb-struck Google fanboy ... but just a few days ago Google Checkout customer care annoyed me so completely to the point where I am now phasing out Google.

I'll still use their search option, because I still class them as the best in that department (alternative suggestions welcome) but everything else has a better, and usually open source alternative.

Greatnews RSS Reader.
Block Google via hosts.
Etc.

For me, Google overstepped the mark. Sure, their high and mighty may still give a damn. But I got rough end of the stick. And I got to thinking about how much power and info they had in that situation. Ten years down the line and they'll probably be more powerful, and give even less of a damn. And the transformation will be complete. I don't want to be just another cog in their power play.

The only positive side of this is that they opened my eyes up to open source, secure, locally hosted alternatives out there that are ... better.

If anyone could suggest an alternative to Gmail, I would appreciate it ... I definitely got sucked into that one hook, line, sinker ...

Cheers

Google tracking

[falconwolf]

I don't believe any company or organization in history has ever recorded so much private information on so many individuals as Google.

However nobody is forced to use Google. Their terms of use are pretty clear and if you don't like them then you can use another search engine. And at the same tyme Google was the only major SE to refuse to turn over to the government thier records of people's searchs.

Falcon

Lessons from last time around, swordplay ends in

[Anonymous Coward]

Just so you know... when executives pick up the sword it ends with two automatic tek9's on new interviews day downtown... if you don't remember last time around.

I know people hate grammar/usage nazis like me....

[Anonymous Coward]

but ... "sudo" = utility to execute programs as root (or other users) on a *nix system "pseudo", on the otherhand, = prefix meaning false. See http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pseudo-

Who Isn't Afraid of Google?

[ScrewMaster]

I'm not. Virginia Woolf now ...

Ads by Google ...

[Laxator2]

I find it funny that at the end of a story questioning Google's position I found some ads by none other than ... Google !

Goliath?

[Octavian]

Shouldn't it read Gooliath?

We should all be so unsuccessful

[ediron2]

...few [google applications] outside of search have much of a following...

Yup. Just a few. Gmail, maps, froogle: I can't live without 'em. That's the few that have a solid following. Then there's phone-based search, the apps, code, blogs, google finance's awesome graphs/data. They're a bit more obscure. And finally, there's the rather substantial mountain of up-n-coming things: radio and TV ads, blogs and scientific journals, content of books, video, and the dozen(s) of other API's and products on the 'more' list when I pull up google to do a search. Yeah, they're small niches individually, but they're strong competitors in many of those niches.

Come to think of it, YouTube and google video earn it a more-than-a-few count for how many apps have much of a following.

**AA hates Google, that makes me love them ;-)

[anandsr]

The article gives 4 groups that are afraid of Google.
1) MS, Yahoo - MS I hate. Yahoo I don't care. In all it is positive.
2) Raised salaries - I am a programmer, I love them.
3) MPAA and RIAA are afraid - This makes me love Google more than anything else.
4) Privacy Advocates - I think this is a bit of a problem, but going forward,
I believe that privacy will only be a figment of our imagination.
I would just hope that all people have equal venues to violate privacy of others,
rather than having one group more equal than others.

Re:Why not mention the actual Davids hunting Googl

[anandsr]

Actually they did go to Yahoo etc, with their ideas, but everybody turned them down.
All they had wanted was a measly 1 million dollars for their algorithm.
Actually for some researchers creating an startup is too much of an effort, but if they can get their research out to the people by selling it, they will be very ready for it.

How to regain trust in people

[Anonymous Coward]

I suggest Google starting to create secure opensource automatized and self contained services.

This way it could regain the trust, by letting everyone look at the code, and get reassured this way.

--
http://id3as.livejournal.com/

Most wanted slashdot feature

[sinewalker]

An author filter. Zonk still posts fud drivel it appears...

Bruce Schneier

[Polly_Morf]

Bruce Schneier once hashed googles databases, and the Hash just said "Bruce Schneier"...

No such thing as MS lock-in

[Anonymous Coward]

Despite the fearmongering of the anti-MS crowd, there was no such thing as "MS lock-in". Companies were LITERALLY fleeing into MS's arms in order to get stable and easy support products. Word Perfect, while loved by secretaries, was hated by IT staff since it was a buggy, poorly-written, clunky piece of trash. Lotus was garbage. Netware was extremely outdated, expensive, and hard to manage; same with Unix.

MS has always succeeded with the exact same strategy: put out a reasonably good product with features your customers are looking for, continue to add in requested features and steadily improve the product... then simply wait for your competitors to fail.

Google succeeded because they were ahead of the curve: they saw how important search was to internet usage, and went with it. My problem with Google has nothing to do with their success: if someone puts out what customers want (like Microsoft), they deserve their success.

My problem with Google lies with their BS "don't be evil" claim, a mantra they parrot at every opportunity. Their strategy seems to be that if they say it loud enough and often enough, people will eventually believe it. Google's record on privacy is questionable at best. Why use cookies which last 35 years? Why store such an amazing amount of user data on every search? Do they really need to record the IP address, MAC address, time, etc of every single search request? Now that they have GMail, they are storing every single email you send and recieve... forever (just because you hit delete doesn't mean it's gone). Gmail also lets them tie your MAC address to your communications, as well as giving them your name. Google Wallet or whatever it's called gives them your name, address, and financial info. Now they know where you live, where you work, and through GMail, they now know who you associate with... and what THEY are searching for.

Oh... but since they say their corporate motto is "don't be evil"... they obviously won't violate your privacy by tying all that info together.

Yeah, right.

What happened to the dominance of Altavista

[East Coast Models]

Back in the early days of the Internet when Netscape was king and Geocities was awash with individuals poor attempt at a homepage there was Altavista. Now I know its still with us, but back then it was by far the most used search engine - possibly website - there was. Is there any chance of another search engine coming from nowhere and taking over from Google? I find it hard to see how, but nobody seems to be trying very hard...

east coast models