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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.
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 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.
Yeah, and apparently it's led by someone that understands that the way to a continued successful growth is to be nice to your employees, to treat your customers with respect, and well, generally Do No Evil. Everyone understands that they want to make money. It's no charity. What makes them different from virtually every other major IT company out there is that people don't hate them, which is why, whenever there's talk about Google, the Do No Evil mantra comes up.
c++;
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.
which is totally what she said
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
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?
You know, back in the dot-com days, I was in the business of selling eyeballs. To my surprise and the horror of most companies, "eyeballs" apparently was not meant in the literal sense. I don't know what the police did with my jar, but I never did hear from any of the hobos whose eyes I scooped out.
:(
I hope they're ok.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
That's why I use tor if I'm browsing anything remotely dodgy.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.