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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne