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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."
Man, i dread the day that they isolate the maybe 10,000 people on the planet who actually respond positively to advertising. What will we do with all the trees and bandwidth then? :-(
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
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.
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
No, SM, not big, just cookies that don't expire until 2038 and profiling users might be just a little naughty. An anonymising proxy based search plugin may well be the answer for Firefox users. Those without Firefox can still make use of Blackboxsearch - at least until something a little more ethical (than BlackBox or Google) appears.
FWIW, BlackBox is also slightly naughty. It's using Google's search technology without giving anything back. The disparity between getting a few links and giving up your right not to be profiled makes it the lesser of two evils, though.
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
We would be inclined to view antitrust charges as a "nice to have" type of problem.
OpenAds (formerly known as phpAdsNew) may be open source software, but it mostly relies on 3rd party ad sellers. It will allow you to sell ads on your own site, but as long as no advertisers are buying your ad space you have to rely on things like AdSense.
Also, open source software for rotating banners with click/impression counting has been around for ages, it's not new. phpAds was created in 1999.
Open source search engines. Well, the source might be open (just like htdig has been open source for ages). But it's not like any end user of search engines is going to run their own search engine, it's simply impossible for consumers to run their own search engine. Website operators may run their own search engine, but usually limited to their own site.
So the whole reference to open source "competitors" to google products is complete bullshit.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
no thing to see he remove a long
A long what????
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
What they say about Microsoft?
Google didn't do ANY evil to me, it is a free service for me.
Google won the search engine market by simply serving the best search results.
If i don't like Google, i could try other search engines.
Why do I still use Google? Because it is the best.
M$ on the other hand provides its mediocre software force-fed to me.
I cannot avoid it even when I want to.
Most software types already exist on Linux, but games are still scarce.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
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.
Deleted
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.
Interesting the speed of which they claim Google to be a monopoly.