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."

Comments

Competitors

[Arabani]

Apparently Yahoo! is catching up to Google, at least in terms of customer satisfaction, so I really don't think Google's dominance in search is that big of a deal. In advertising, maybe, but that's why the FTC and EU are looking into possible antitrust violations ... nothing particularly special there. Now, if they actually stopped the merger because of antitrust violations, THEN that's news. Until then, it's just hypothetical bullshit and dreams. The article does manage to make on good point, though, which is that sooner or later the market would manage to break Google's (hypothetical) monopoly. Heck, there's already countless startups all hoping to displace Google. Google does not come close to enjoying the dominance that Microsoft once did, which is why all this concern about Google shutting out the competition seems premature, at best.

Re:misleading "OpenSource" use?

[vidarh]

The point is that if the source to a competitive search engine was freely available, the cost of actually competing with Google is pretty low. Google has tremendous hardware costs, but mostly due to scale. The minimum cost to start indexing the web is pretty modest - you can crawl at least tens of millions of pages a day on a single Xeon box (been there, done that), and you can create a search index from tens to hundreds of millions of documents in a day on a single box depending on how good your indexer is (again, been there, done that) and how much metadata etc. you want to index. As such, you could get going with a dozen EC2 licenses or a few thousand a month in hosting fees.

The sticking point is search quality. That's a hard problem. And that is what is limiting most of the companies trying to compete with Google: Finding ways of getting results that are as good as or better than Google's without having Google's resources available.

The crawling, the indexing and returning basic results is easy. Back in '97 I shortly did a Linux specific search engine. It took only about a week to write the basic elements, and I indexed about a million pages to test it. Today it would've taken more care, as the number of documents you'd need even for a narrow niche vertical search engine is far higher, but there are also more off the shelf full text engines available that can easily handle at least up to the tens of millions, some into the hundreds or more (though _all_ of them are slow) if you don't want to do the work yourself. But that part is not hard work.

Most of the rest of what Google does well is scale the system, and that contributes to their margins, but it's something any competitor would have a lot of time to figure out too. Besides, over the next few years we're going to see a huge number of ex-Google employees who have learned a lot about scaling from Google's system, and who are back in the job market for various reasons, or looking to start their own companies.

Re:Google's master plan.

[somersault]

Yep, I don't get the 'googleisthenewmicrosoft' tag in this article. People hate Microsoft because they make shoddy products, and still dominate the market. If they made decent products, people really wouldn't care so much. I wouldn't anyway. A good product deserves to dominate. Poor products dominating purely through marketing and underhanded tactics is what is disgusting, but google's products are actually pretty useful, stable and have decent interfaces.

So, compete with them

[Colin Smith]

Join Majestic 12 and contribute to an alternative search engine. You can have your machines index a certain amount per day and contribute the result to the index.

Having alternatives is what keeps companies honest. Government regulation just makes the regulators a target to be corrupted.

Re:I used to share your misconception ...

[jollyreaper]

I used to share your misconception. My undergraduate was Computer Science, however now I have had some graduate level marketing classes and I was surprised to find out how quantitative professional marketing is. There is massive experimentation to determine what works and what does not. Really? Wow. My undergrad marketing class confirmed everything I'd suspected. We had several case studies to present as group projects. One in particular was presenting a new frozen food product in supermarkets. I asked him how we were supposed to go about surveying the market to figure out if there was even a demand for what we were selling before we pitched the board, i.e. him and the other groups. "Just make up the figures," he said. "The important thing here is the exercise in making the presentation." Doing my damnedest to keep my smart mouth shut, I went along with it. But seriously, what the fucking fuck? Sure, we did a bang-up job of selling the idea to the class, we got an A on the project, but the facts we presented were all bullshit. I had no more idea of whether or not the product would succeed than before I started the project.

I'd hoped that this was just a poor class and that marketing professionals would actually know what the hell they're doing. Sadly, it hasn't been the case. I worked my way through college and I've seen advertising and marketing done by mail-order catalog companies, dot.coms, homebuilders, etc. I could gather all those marketing people together in one room and you wouldn't find a single clue in the entire lot. When I was still in school, I was working in one marketing department as a jr. report cruncher. Now the way I learn things, I cannot go by rote. I need to know why we're doing things, how the process works. If I just get a series of steps handed to me like a magical incantation, devoid of rational explanation, I'll never remember it. So I ask tons of questions, ask the why's, and end up pissing people off because they think I'm using socratic questioning to point out how big of dumbasses they are. That isn't even the case! I'm just sitting there wondering why nothing makes sense. By the time I realize it's because nobody knows what the hell they're doing and I should just shut up, they're already put me on their shitlist.

What the other poster said about marketing types being good at selling their ideas, that's exactly right. The marketers I've worked with have all been con men, good at backslapping and getting an idea sold but unqualified to even understand if the idea is a good one.

I'm sure there are marketing professionals out there, somewhere, who are actual professionals. But in my experience, sales and marketing is where football jocks go when they get fat.