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Google's Continued Growing Pains
eldavojohn writes "The Mercury News is reporting that Google's 500 percent growth since its IPO hasn't come without a cost. With the purchase of DoubleClick, Google is facing antitrust charges in both the United States and the European Union. And with their rising success, there are open source alternatives springing up."
I think this article is misleading. They talk about the antitrust investigation into Google's acquisition of DoubleClick... caused by:
... hypothetical. Wake me up when you have an actual search engine or advertising model. In the meantime, let Google buy DoubleClick. If they fail to deliver on either front, there are plenty of competitors who will willingly accept all their dissatisfied customers.
Complaints that "publishers might fear that if they did not deal with Google, their ranking in Google's search engine might be affected"
In other words:
Before Google ever drops my search ranking because I cancelled my DoubleClick subscription, I'm going to spread FUD about this hypothetical possibility, and insist the Government shut them down.
There is also the typically worries about privacy after Google knows not only what you search for, what AdWords you click on, but now what DoubleClick Banners and Pop-Ups you click on too. And they talk about some of Google's competitors, trying to find the next Google killer. They think Wikia and OpenAds will be more open-source (Google's PageRank is a "closely guarded secret") and won't collect any consumer information.
It's all just so
BTW: There are plenty of other open source and distributed search engines. For example this one.
"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Once you have everyone on earth (and beyond) looking at your info, selling ad-space (and data-mining info) allows you to purchase other indexers, data aggregators and information storehouses.
Google is beyond brilliant in cornering the market in data organization.
There is just too much info out there and it's the index that controls exposure.
Yeah, I'm sure that the reason companies have been pouring billions and billions of dollars into advertising for decades isn't that it works, but that nobody even though to check.
I'd say these 'growing pains' appear rather similar to the challenges faced by any corporation of similar size. Potential mergers with companies in the same field being investigated by the FTC? Welcome to the Fortune 100. Open source alternatives as a 'threat' to ubiquitous name recognition and >50% market share? Yep, that's a truly pressing problem most tech companies would love to face. Difficulties sustaining rapid growth when your market cap exceeds $150B?
Well, yes, it's difficult to grow rapidly when you're valued at over 1/400th of the gross world product. Pick a bigger planet next time, perhaps?
Honestly, did this article really say anything insightful or unusual? If it did, I missed it...
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
We would be inclined to view antitrust charges as a "nice to have" type of problem.
Google is an advertising company. It sells eyeballs, which it has a lot of in virtue of having a good search algorithm. How is there an open-source alternative?
Yeah, I'm sure that the reason companies have been pouring billions and billions of dollars into advertising for decades isn't that it works, but that nobody even though to check.
The thing that marketers are best at selling is...advertising. People say that, for example, suckers must be buying stuff from the spam emails they receive, or there wouldn't be spam - but that isn't necessarily true. Spammers only need to convince companies to pay them.
Personally, I'd be happy to just pay a couple bucks per show, or a penny per search, or whatever. I'd have cancelled my cable TV long ago if it weren't for my PVR.
Google DeathSquads(tm) are driving from campus to campus, slaying out of hand any student enrolled in CS, IT or Engineering fields.
And you thought those vans were just taking pictures.
No, Google's not doing crap to stop innovation/competition; there's just the usual, "But, but, it's Google! Waah! I don't want to work my ass off, I don't want to make something better, I just want to call them evil and tell them what to do as a non-shareholder!" crap going on here at Slashdot.
When Microsoft was originally established, in the era of IBM dominance over PC OS and software, their mission statement was to be everything IBM wasn't at the time... To cut the red tape, to avoid bureaucracy, to put human relations above legal stuff, to be the "people's company" that fights the IBM tyranny. And back then, in the late seventies and early eighties, it was. If you find it hard to imagine, just google the "Would you have invested?" poster.
Fast forward 20 years, and what do you see? Microsoft now is the Big Bad Suing-R-Us company, holding almost total dominance over the PC OS and other markets. It is the new Goliath. And then, comes the new David, Google, with the mission statement of "do no evil", in other words, "do no Microsoft", once again being the "people's company" that fights the MS tyranny.
Fast forward another X years... You get the idea.
The cycle never ends, and indeed it is pretty much natural. Once a company grows from a small enthusiastic community (which Google once was, which Microsoft even earlier once was, etc) to a big faceless corporate conglomerate, there will come a new player, making up with agility what he lacks with force. And the new David vs. Goliath battle ensues, until David grows up to be so big and fat you can't tell him apart from Goliath anymore, and the next David candidate takes on the role.
The text you quoted was (fairly clearly, at least to my eyes) sarcasm.
Actually, marketing such as you see on TV only works insofar that you and/or your product get the air time instead of someone else.
Advertising is like an arms race; everyone is doing it (and spending way too much on it) just because everyone else is.
People in general respond negatively to advertising. However, it is generally true that a bad reaction is better than no reaction at all; even if they're annoyed by a commercial, people are still more likely to buy a product they'd heard about (or of) in a commercial than a product they'd never even heard of before.
Furthermore, since everyone is doing it, people are annoyed more or les equally by all companies, so the negative effect (annoyance) is diminished/shared, while the positive effect (people hearing about your product) is retained.
Basically, if everyone stopped playing the advertising game... nah, sorry, it would start all over again. Same dealers, new suck^Wplayers.
Ignore this signature. By order.
If you don't think advertising works you must not have an adsense account that earns money. Advertisers pay on a per click or per view basis and can calculate their profit based on advertisement clicks.
I'm sure you're not saying that the reason billions are spent on advertising is that advertisement media producers are just really good salespeople, but that's how it sounds.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
I heard somewhere that the expectation is somewhere around four replies per million e-mails (I can't guarantee the figure but it's in the right order of magnitude). For normal advertising this would be hopelessly inefficient but with automated spam you can make money even with such a low return.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Microsoft Windows is free software to me. I buy a PC, and it comes with Windows. Sure, HP or Dell has to pay for it, but I don't.
My sarcastic comment, above, is parallel to your comment about Google Search being free. Someone is paying for Google Search, and the costs are most certainly being passed along to the consumer somewhere along the line. Just because you don't see it itemized doesn't mean that you aren't paying for it.
So why, again, is Google so good, and Microsoft so evil? Because Google plays the shell game better?
That's why I use tor if I'm browsing anything remotely dodgy.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The new Microsoft, eh? That's an interesting tag for Google. Big is apparently evil? Certainly, the bigger you are, the more careful you have to tread, lest you squash the ants under your feet. It's not necessarily evil if you do squash an ant; it is evil if that was your purpose. Likewise Google and Microsoft. It's not necessarily evil if many people use your software or services; it's evil if you try to destroy your competition. I'd say Google has a long way to go, to be truly compared to Microsoft.
It's funny the timing of this article, because I've just completed my final interviews with Google for a job there. I'm usually a small/mid sized company person, because I hate big company environments. Google is the first large company to convince me that it'd be worth working with them. They really seem to allow employees to spread their wings and do their thing. They don't seem to try to squeeze every drop of productivity from people, and may possibly get things done better because of it. I know I certainly am more creative with my problem solving, if I'm in a relaxed and fun environment. Anyway, if I get this job, it'll be very interesting to see how Google copes with allowing such freedom at work. Maybe they've invented a way to herd cats.
You're forgetting that Google has one large disadvantage. Being the top search engine means the best traffic. So all of the "SEO" people and aspiring blogs/estores/media attempt to push their pages to the top of the list. As such Google's search quality has degraded significantly.
Their algorithm is also showing significant weaknesses. If you Google a term like a historical figure or a popular person's name, a wikipedia result is always near the top. This isn't necessarily bad as a good portion of the time a person may want to read the wikipedia article. But what if you've already read the wikipedia article or have no use for it and were intending to find other resources? Suddenly that search result was useless. Wikipedia is already well known that I don't feel that it's search result needs to be included in the search results; most people already know when they want to look something up on wikipedia.
So with these two combined facts, I find that the first page of results on Google is becoming more and more useless. I continually have to keep playing tricks with Google to get the first search results to be useful, but I'm knowledgeable enough to get by. Many other users are probably hopeless in getting adequate and useful search results from Google anymore.
Google is degenerating into a marketing battleground and there is no significant hope for things improving anytime soon... unless a couple of guys startup their own search engine in a basement that is vastly superior to what's currently out there and then make money off of advertising...oh wait.