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...

[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...

[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%.

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

[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

[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

[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)

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.

[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 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.

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.

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.

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

In Soviet Russia...

[daybot]

...Chuck Norris is afraid of Google!

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."

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 :

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.