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

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.

Wake up you morons :

[unity100]

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

that point is long past.

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: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.

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

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: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.

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.

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.

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

[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)