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

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

[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

[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.

So... It's simple.

[Colin Smith]

Build me a better search engine...

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!

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.

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

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.