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James Whittaker: Focus on Ads and 'Social' Destroying Google
theodp writes "In June 2009, Google welcomed James Whittaker as its newest Test Director. In February 2012, Whittaker rejoined Microsoft. On Tuesday, Whittaker explained why he left Google: 'The Google I was passionate about,' Whittaker writes, 'was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus ...The old Google was a great place to work. The new one? -1.' Welcome to the real world, quips CNET's Charles Cooper in response to Whittaker's still-awesome-even-if-a-tad-naive rant."
More from from his post: "It turns out that there was one place where the Google innovation machine faltered and that one place mattered a lot: competing with Facebook ... Google could still put ads in front of more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows so much more about those people. Advertisers and publishers cherish this kind of personal information ... Larry Page himself assumed command to right this wrong. Social became state-owned, a corporate mandate called Google+. It was an ominous name invoking the feeling that Google alone wasn't enough."
So he moved back to Microsoft? Huh? Don't get it.
Now he'll experience a "corporate mandate called $variable"
where $variable = { "the cloud" , "Windows 8" , "whatever marketing thinks up next" }
Who thinks they would have made that push into automated cars if they had the choice to rethink that today?
The whole company is getting focused on profits rather then innovation.
That might be valid. However, it might also be possible that the best way to ensure future profits is to take risks now on new ideas.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I liked middle school too. Nothing better than playing outside during recess.
Quite possibly the most immature thing I have read from a supposedly mature person. Outside of posts on Twitter from drunks at a Guns 'n' Roses concert.
Exciting startup with a couple of people does exciting things, attracts excited developers because they can do exciting things.
Over time company gets big, has to worry about shareholders and lots of internal politics with growing levels of management.
Company is grown up, things slow down, life becomes boring, bored developers seeking excitement move on to next startup.
Are there any exceptions?
James comes to us most recently from Microsoft. He has spent his career focusing on testing, building high quality products, and designing tools and process at the industrial scale.
Was he in charge of testing Vista?
Google could have become the every man's corporate replacement for systems like Autonomy and Endeca. They could have gotten super aggressive at making a turn key, highly scalable search product that everyone from a 20 employee company to a 200,000 employee company could use. They have the talent to make a product that can do that. Instead, they never really went hard after the enterprise market where they could have not only revolutionized things, but have left themselves fairly independent as a whole business on advertising.
The sad part is that they probably could have beaten Autonomy like a rented mule because Autonomy's documentation is pretty bad and not easily accessible to people who aren't firmly on the Autonomy reservation.
If Google can't compete with MySpace they're FINISHED!!!!1!!
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
They have a bunch of failed experiments--Buzz, Wave, Health, Google wifi, and probably 100 others that died in the vetting rooms at Google.
They also have some stunning successes that started out as private projects within the company--Gmail, notably.
That's not a sign of a dying company--it's a refreshing sign of a company that dares to experiment and isn't afraid to fail occasionally.
So this guy retreats back to a safe, old-school software corporation--Microsoft. 25 years ago, Microsoft must have been an exciting place to work. Today, it's stodgy, rigid, backward thinking, corporate-focused, a follower and not a leader in most areas. He'll feel right at home in his safe, easy corporate 9-5 job.
Google reminds me of the old AT&T Bell Labs organization, where you were expected to put 25-50% of your time into your own projects. It wasn't for everybody; some people need to be basically told what to do 8 hours a day, while other people could feel free to create amazing (or stupid) things, and management just knew that sooner or later something useful would result.
The real question is, how does a large corporation preserve its startup mentality. You really can't, but at least you can try to make the place fun for people who are chasing new ideas all the time. Me, I'd work for GOOG any time. It would be a blast being around so many smart people!
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
They push into automated cars because one of the co-founders is interested in it. The CEO mandates a vision,
and the peons have to work toward it. It doesn't mean, that they don't innovate, or do great things, but it isn't
"a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate".
Man goes to a company with a delusion purported by tech media, saw the reality, then left because reality didn't match the delusion.
Happens all the time. Move along.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Google has gone nuts with the ads. A few years ago there were plenty of text ads: nice and non-intrusive ones, but noticeable. Then they moved to images and then flash! It used to be the innocent child of the web, now it is the creepy old man hanging around the playground. I have been gradually moving away from their products - my default search engine is duckduckgo - but gmail still has me by the balls. Its only a matter of time though.
people. Until you got sick of their self-rightous attitudes. Mountain View now reeks of their stench and their attempts to extend their tendrils with private rail transports and their Google bikes abandoned on sidewalks blocking pedestrian walkways. Microsoft has a campus right next to them, and it appears to be populated by grownups.
To keep the profits growing, you have to innovate because the copycats come fast; especially with a non-tangible product - like everything software related.
If they were strictly focused on profits, they'd be making cuts exclusively to boost their bottom line - like what 90% of corporate America has been doing in the last few years. But that's pretty much a one shot deal - it's a just a bump in profits: not growth. Hence, that is one of the reasons (Asian operations is another for some) why corporate America has record profits -cuts mostly people. Now, we have this very high unemployment rate that for the life of me, I don't see how it's going to abate anytime soon - regardless of who's in the Whitehouse next year.
I am not sure if I would call gmail a sucess anymore.
It has a LOADING screen, has gotten slower (even though it may have more functionality, I want my email fast).
It sounds sad but Windows Live mail has been able to catch up and pass it.
Even without information gleaned from a social network, Google knows a lot about its users. Because the user searched for certain key words, Google knows that the user might be interested in a vendor's product. Depending on the product, that user is much more valuable to the vendor than is anything Facebook can provide.
Suppose I am selling snow blowers in Fargo ND. Would I rather spend my advertising dollars broadcasting to a certain demographic, or would I rather spend my bucks on someone who had actually expressed an interest in my product?
Google ads don't work for products like Coke or Pepsi. In that case, you're pretty much stuck broadcasting to a demographic.
Anyway, Facebook isn't likely to replace Google for the kind of advertising that Google does best.
I respectfully disagree. A CEO's "vision" is something like: "this is where I see our company in 10 years, and this is how we're going to get there." The car thing is sergei saying, "wouldn't it be cool if cars drive themselves?". Not the same as vision.
The problem is that they're letting some of those "experiments" contaminate their core search product.
Bell Labs never got in the way of your phone calls.
Uh, i'm sorry, the rants about Google innovating too much are down the hall? Whittaker is complaining that Google _used_ to be innovative, but now they're not. He's claiming that they used to let the engineers spend 20% of their time on whatever they thought was cool, but now there's an ultimatum (it's not clear if it's official or not) that everything has to be subservient to the goal of pushing "social" and "sharing" in general and Google+ in particular or it gets thrown under the bus. He's not complaining that they're innovating too much, he's complaining that things like Google Labs and other experimental projects have been killed.
I know that not RTFA is considered the norm, but how did you manage to interpret even the blurb as the exact opposite of what it said? Or did you just assume that if two different parties complained about google within 24 hours then they must be complaining about the same thing?
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Google should be all about advertising, because that is their only business which makes money: They made $35 billion or so last year on advertising, and $1.3B on everything else . Assuming 1 Billion on-line people, thats $35 a year for every man, woman, and child on the Internet.
And the way for more effective advertising is more effective stalking, err, profiling of people. Google is very good about tracking its users when there are advertisements, but was losing out to Facebook on non-advertising pages, thus the advent of +1.
It also explains a huge amount of the change in Google's privacy policy: before they would silo data, but now its all-inbounds. If its beneficial for them to data-mine your email (or email sent TO you from gmail users), including paid email accounts and to correlate it to the advertising tracking cookie for DoubleClick, they now can do it. Even services like Cloud Storage and App Engine are under Google's privacy policy. Fun, hu?
"Its hard to believe in a company that says 'Don't Be Evil' when they are busy firing a death ray"
Test your net with Netalyzr
Bell Labs, PARC, Cray Research, etc. Companies start with great innovation, then Wall Street forces the to focus on near-term profits instead. Ads are where the quick profits are, so of course Google will focus on ads. If history is any indicator, this is the early beginning of the end for Google as we knew it.
Actually, I think they are very much interested in innovation, just perhaps not in areas that might seem quite so obvious. Why else would they hire Regina Dugan, the outgoing director of DARPA? Somehow, I don't think it's going to be for the use of UAVs as an advertisement delivery mechanism...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
the internet of the late 20th century and the first few years of the last decade was you go find the information you want. Google flourished because they were able to organize it better to make life easier for you.
Facebook, twitter and the rest of social is the new internet. You "like" or follow brands and then read the stream of their updates/news feed. sort of like a custom RSS feed. the point is that you no longer find the information, you are fed a stream of data. just like TV of the 20th century where you sit in front of a box and consume the content.
this is where google is having problems. the whole idea of fighting spam in gmail was to force those companies to use google for advertising. Yes, all the shady loan companies and no prescription drug companies used google almost 10 years ago to advertise. but with SEO the spam problem is coming back and the only way to solve it seems to be social where people crowd source the content filtering.
that's the whole point of Plus, to filter the content. but lately Plus is crap as well. Just a bunch of bloggers/internet oprahs and you are supposed to comment on how cool they are when they post something
I use for reverb when recording.
When Google took over search engines- there were other companies at play- but no-one had an emotional attachment to them.
Now Google wants to take over social media- but Facebook is entrenched. It's different than conquering the search world because Facebook has an emotional value for people- and the less technical people that anchor it are less likely to switch than the early adopters of the internet that switched to Google's search engine.
Going social and creating Google+ was a good idea too late for Facebook. If they wanted to do it they should have done it before every non-techie auntie and granny had it.
(I still refuse any social network of that ilk)
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
If Google reminds you of Bell Labs, that is a very bad omen for Google. Last I heard, Bell Labs only had four scientists remaining on their staff, and it no longer engages in basic research, only doing work in immediately marketable areas. If Google is Bell Labs, maybe Whittaker chose the right time to leave.
I've moved to Opera, sold my Android phone and bought an N900. As for the search, I'm torturing myself too with DDG, whose results clearly are no match for Google, especially when it comes to searching non-English content(in my case, German). Also the lack of an image search and an advanced serch is frustrating as hell, so every time DDG fails, I have to return to Google, there's no escaping from that for now.
Reading Charles Cooper's banal and juvenile rant reminded me of why I never read C|Net. Now I have to start looking at where links from /. articles go. :-P
"The mind is a terrible thing to, um, uh, oh bollocks." -- Me
Cnet, the dinosaur of a website that bundles spyware with their downloads, hardly has any room to be giving people words to live by.
Typical sign of being run by managers, not engineers. Shortsighted focus on fad-of-the-day profits, complete ignorance of the future. Driving the company's future into the ground for a few more dollars this quarter.
Another Google will arise. It wasn't the first nor will it be the last. And hell, after Microsoft went that way it's still alive today.
You're correct, that's exactly what the article is saying. And the gp is correct about MSFT.
As a (recent) ex-employee I can testify that there is definitely nothing exciting or innovative about MSFT now, coupled with the age-old problem of thinking if it compiles then ship it (that's why I left). As far as products go, they're stuck in the backwaters of stale tech and middle management seems to be ok with it as long as the big dollar enterprise contracts are renewed.
Of course the research division is fine but outside of Kinect, very little ever seems to produce revenue. Employee morale is even lower than the Vista days which is amazing since Win8 isn't too bad. Larry Page had better hope that Google never comes close to being the type of company that Microsoft has devolved into over the last 10 years.
Bottom line is that absolutely nothing can save them from drifting into obscurity while Ballmer remains at the helm.
Let's call it a draw.
The CNet reply was immature, scarcely germane to the highlighted quotes to which Cooper was trying to respond, and very repetetive. I can't believe I read the entire thing. There's nothing wrong with lamenting a company for losing its character and transforming into something not resembling its former self. We all do this every day, almost every hour. "Things just aren't as good as they once were". Unless you're 15 years old, that sentiment rings true for most aspects of our lives. Let's face it, guy is just ticked this ex-Googler went to MS. So sick of this anti-MS bullshit. I use it and I get along just fine. You don't use it, you get a long just fine. It's not a fucking religious war here people, for God's sake we're supposed to be more intelligent and civil than the rest of the school, but we spend all our time in rant wars about god damn software we don't even use??
New ideas, like Android and Google Plus.
Whittaker explained why he left Google: 'The Google I was passionate about,' Whittaker writes, 'was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate.
Whittaker rejoined Microsoft.
I'm not trying to discredit anything he's said, but how is Microsoft better than Google? (or vice versa?) :/
You just switched from one corporate entity to another
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
There aren't too many organizations public or private left in the world, that can replicate Google's indexing capabilities. That index has unimaginable untapped value and it needs to be opened up (unlimited api access). It's value can never be tapped by a couple hundred engineers sitting inside Google. Giving a small group within Google complete access to it, is equivalent to only giving a couple scientists access to human DNA data. I hope they find a way of opening it up before the regulators do. If there is anything worth building a platform around. more than a Google+ or an Android or TV or googledocs or chrome or youtube it is that index. I don't know how it would work but they need to start thinking about it as an end goal.
Personally I think that breaking stuff that used to work is destroying Google...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
...is that now they are making interfaces changes that make no sense, or add little value over the previous interface. Google has taken a page from FaceBook and begun pushing some horrible page design onto unsuspecting users. And no amount of complaint helps. Their support just laughs because they know there are no other real options to run to.
Bearded Dragon
We'll see, I hope you're right.
We count upon large corporations for doing the research that moves our society forward. So it is sad when they lose all ambition to innovate.
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Well i certainly agree that in terms of actually _producing_ new technology Microsoft is pretty far behind the curve. However it does seem like Whittaker feels that currently Google is actually suppressing innovation in areas that it doesn't believe will help it in the social/Google+ arena. It is possible that he feels he'd rather work at a company that does interesting research that never sees the light of day than at a company that he feels has become to focused on "directed" research intended to produce or bolster revenue generation.
It definitely does seem like Google is in a lose-lose situation, with people like the ones in the article yesterday complaining they're blowing too much money on stuff like automated cars and people like Whittaker complaining they're killing too much blue sky research.
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Google could still put ads in front of more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows so much more about those people.
Knowing nothing of James Whittaker other than what is in the summary, and having not RTFA, I'll assume he is a very intelligent and successful person.
He is also missing the obvious (and he's not the only one).
Facebook knows more of what people want other people to know. Google knows about what is really going on with people. People lie in surveys, whether it's to say what they want to be true or what they think is expected. Facebook is like a survey you create yourself.
Facebook has your holiday photos, knows you've been to an island, like partying on the beach. Google knows you're reading up on herpes treatments.
Maybe Facebook knows you're married. Google knows you're trying to find a divorce attorney.
If Google is relying on + to compete with Facebook, it has already lost the battle.
Dear Google, Stop being creepy. Love, Someone who switched to Bing
Didn't RTFA, comment assuming exactly the opposite of what it says, get modded +5.
Oh slashdot!
It depends more on the subject of the motto "don't be evil." If you read it as applying to the death-ray holder, it's like those anger management mantras: "dont be evil, don't be evil, BURN THEM ALL!! oh wait, that was evil, mustn't be evil." If you consider it referring to everyone else, it's much easier "Don't be evil, or you'll feel the pain of my death ray!"
It's all about context, and Google hasn't clarified which.
I think Regina Dugan's reputation at DARPA relates directly to the focus Page has been seeking at Google with his "more wood behind fewer arrows" approach (which has, no doubt, been disruptive to many Googlers and is a change of focus.) Dugan's reputation has been one of fostering innovation, but focussing on quick return of value to the core mission from innovation, rather than blue-sky projects.
The death ray was to be used for good, not evil!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HgejSCHRi8
This relies on a misconception of what Google+ is. Google+ isn't a distinct set of pages on Google that presents a Facebook like interface (though that's part of it, though its rely the tip of the iceberg.) As Google reps have said many times, Google+ is "the next version of Google", and the focus for Google+ is integration of data across Google services and integration of social features with existing Google services.
So, while Google is relying on Google+ to compete with Facebook, its not the "Google+" that you seem to be thinking of, its the Google+ that leverages all the advantages that you cite in your post as Google's natural advantages outside of what you think of as "Google+".
Google+ is awesome, it's a great way to talk to Google employees.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
BTW, this is not true. I work for Google, have a 20% project that has nothing to do with social or sharing (in fact it's an open source Bitcoin related project), and before this one I had a different 20% project which now has a team of two full time engineers on it, which is also not related to sharing or social.
The guy who wrote this blog was not actually an engineer. As somebody who is, I can say that at least in my part of the company 20% time is alive and well. It has not been killed. It requires managerial "approval" only in the sense that your manager needs to know about it, but they aren't allowed to pick/choose your 20% projects or tell you what to do. As a way to stimulate research it's very effective and one of my favourite things about working here.
Over the years I've read a lot of stuff about 20% time and how it's supposedly just a scam, or whatever. I think a lot of the confusion stems from the fact that it's always been somewhat vaguely defined. As far as I know there's no precise, written set of policies for 20% time. It's just a tradition that's always been there. The result is that whether you succeed with it or not is largely up to the individual - you need a certain amount of confidence and drive to make it happen. And bad managers can potentially try and discourage you, even if they aren't supposed to, or give you insane deadlines so you feel you can't use it. But there are ways to report such situations and try to fix them.
If increasingly the currency of the digital world is information aggregation, collection, and targeting, won't people eventually start to realize that *this* is their valuable asset and they should be compensated for giving it up, assume control in some meaningful way of their online persona?
I know there are several startups trying to move in this direction, and I don't know if any of them have it figured out yet, but it seems that Facebook's blunt approach and Google's ham-handed attempts should eventually be beaten out by a more crafty, nuanced approach, assuming the market mechanism still works in this realm and the network effects aren't as strong as many people assume they are (and the history of the online world, and of social networking, tells us they aren't).
I'd put a billion dollars and 1000 devs on taking Open Office and making it way better than MS Office, and making it work seemlessly with Google Docs and GMail. This would steal Microsoft's main cash cow.
Why the hell aren't they doing this?
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
There's also the fact that people need to choose to take this 20% time. Not every manager or team are fully supportive of it and it's easy to just say "oh, well, nevermind". Or "I don't have time".
It can also be hard for me to carve out time as an SRE. But in 2005/2006 I helped out on street views, which turned out awesome.
Considering the source company, it's kind of hard to say this isn't more about spreading FUD over Google's ability to offer exciting new products, than it is about telling how things really are.
We count upon large corporations for doing the research that moves our society forward.
Well, there's your mistake. Nowadays, we count on large corporations to outsource, litigate, and obsess over their stock price, not innovate.
I count on the two smart, ambitious guys in a garage to innovate.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Well this isn't the first time i've heard a Google employee (ex or otherwise) complain about Google+ distorting Google's priorities. Given the size of the company and the fact that, as you say, the 20% thing is rather vaguely defined, i expect that the perspective of the average Googler on what is allowed/encouraged in that regard varies a lot depending on what area of the company they're in and who they report to. And certainly Whittaker was reporting to a very different set of managers than the "common joe" googler.
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Would someone pass this on to Google? Surely someone here has a connection. Sorry for posting as AC, but I feel more comfortable with some anonymity. You never know who is watching your every move.
Dear Google:
We're through. Once I loved you, but now it's over. Oh, it will take me awhile, a long while, to get shut of you, but make no mistake, it's over.
It's not me, it's you. I haven't changed, but you have. Once the deal was you gave me free email, news, and search and I looked at your ads, and I paid you for online photo storage, and you gave it to me. Oh, and you also promised not to be evil.
Now I can't tell what our deal is, but I'm pretty sure what you're offering is that you will gather every bit of information you can find on me through any source possible, and sell it to anyone who will pay for it, and sometimes, you'll just give it away. Every where, all the time, forever. In return I get access to your decaying product base.
Yes, you want it all. Just about every web site I go to, you've got your slimy little fingers there, tracking me. And on my phone, if I have GPS on, you are literally recording every step I take. So basically you are trying to completely record every possible thing you can about me. Oh, and screw you and your privacy policies. I know corporate doublespeak when I see it.
Yes, your product base is decaying. I haven't seen much new or interesting in awhile. Gmail has some strong points, but certain features have been missing so long its obvious that you don't care about the products. For instance, there's no way to automatically save sent items in the inbox. So every so often, I move messages manually. Forever. Let's talk about news. Have you actually looked at Google News lately? It's actually gotten pretty lame when compared to other news sources. There's just not much there. And Picasa. Wow, you *really* made a mess on that one. Picasa had promise, but in the last year or so all the Picasa efforts have gone into Google Plus. What do I know, but I have no use for Google Plus for sharing photos. I share photos with my family, and my volunteer organization. I was pretty happy with the way it was. G+ is certainly NOT the answer. Everything I ever wanted to do with photos, you've broken it. Google Sites. Pathetic. Google maps. Once pretty clever, now a technology laggard. And Android. I curse you Google at least once a day. First there was the inexplicable Google Talk authentication error that went on forever. Oh wait, before that. Has it ever occured to you that people might want to sort their address book by last name? You know that's how we've been doing it for quite awhile now, right? And "Google Play". Pathetic. The name makes me ill.
Oh yeah, about the don't be evil part. When we were young it was kinda cute. Sure, it was naive, but it seemed your heart was in the right place. Now it's taken on tones of doublespeak. You know, "war is peace". Like that. Now when you say "don't be evil", what you mean now is "Here at Google we aren't evil because we've moved past all that. Evil is a concept for mere mortals. We have higher standards. Besides puny humans, who are YOU to judge ME? Muah, hah, hah, hah!" Attempting to track my every move is by definition evil. It creates a power differenial that I can't mitigate. Your desire to collect everything reminds me of totalitarian states. Communist Russa. communist Romania, for god sake. North Korea. And I won't even mention you-know-what. Godwin's law, you know.
Oh, and Facebook? That you want to be so much like? They're evil, too. By the way, social media as a concept isn't evil, it's wanting to track people that's evil. Create a Facebook killer that doesn't track its users, and Facebook will become a distant memory.
There's only one way to deal with a power imbalance. Guerilla tactics. First of all, I'm going to do my best to never look at an ad you serve, ever again. And if I do, I'll write the ad buyer a
There aren't too many organizations public or private left in the world, that can replicate Google's indexing capabilities.
It's not necessary to have a company the size of Google to do Google's web search. CPU power and disk space have been increasing faster than the amount of content on the web. Indexing the web isn't all that big a job any more. Cuil, despite their problems, did it with about $20 million, 50 people and about 1000 servers. Their relevance algorithm was terrible and their crawler hit the same pages too often, and by the time they had those fixed, it was too late for them. But they did index all the pages they could reach.
Common Crawl, which is a modestly sized nonprofit, maintains a crawl of the whole web. So does Archive.org Neither maintains a search engine, though.
The next frontier in web search is to crack the provenance problem - figure out which pages are derived from other pages, and list the original source first. Google is not good at this. There are constant complaints on Google support forums about scraper sites outranking the original source. Google doesn't get this right for video, either. A video search system which found the best copy of something and discarded all the copies with ads, logos and recompression would be far better than what Google provides.
Google can't do that. They make money off AdSense ads on third-party content. Scraper sites are a gold mine for Google. 30% of Google ad revenue is from AdSense. Much of that is from copied content.
In fact they do make a product like that; its called the Google Search Appliance.
Yeah, that's the speculation being put forward - that she'll be working with Sergey Brin on the GoogleX projects, which is a pretty obvious assumption given what DARPA do. The bit that struck a chord with me though was that she has a suck it and see approach - "Failure isn’t the problem, it’s the fear of failure.” was the quote to All Things D - which aligns very well with Google Labs' way of working. Try it, and if we get the next Backrub or GMail then that's just great, if not scrap it and move on to something else. The big question is, will she be required to work to the Google+ Social Media agenda or free to pursue whatever bluesky projects she wants? If the latter, now might be a good time to buy some GOOG.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
No, it doesn't, at least not in the advice page you link. That page provides a "heat map" that shows what Google believes are, in general, the relative values of different placements of ads on a page relative to a typical "nav bar across the page near the top, primary content in the middle both vertically and horizontally, footer across the page near the bottom" layout, it doesn't recommend placing ads in all of those locations at once.
Reading comprehension is useful.
My problem with Google's attempt to be "social" its that it makes their already spam-infested search results even worse, and it's difficult to opt-out. With all the effort that they claim to expend in fighting spam, why is it still so easy to game their system?
I agree about crawling. I was talking about building the index. Google does that better than anyone (by a long short) and still doesn't get it right. Because they are one "small" company in the large scheme of things. Look at WolframAlpha and Freebase. There are so many different ways of dealing with search and Google needs to stop believing it can figure them all out on its own. Developers should be allowed to create local branches of the index and work on them. Google should try letting go of some of the control, to allow innovation, else innovation is constrained by the number of people they can afford to throw at the problem. And most of the people they throw at the problem spend most of their time keeping things from falling apart. Right now developers aren't allowed to "scrap" the index. This doesn't make sense in terms of allowing innovation in search. My assumption is that, a developer (with experience in data analytics) in a small town in Alaska, if given access to the (realtime) index of data Google has collected on her town, can extract value relevant to that town, better than anything Google can achieve.
Google is evil.
Companies that don't have profits, don't stick around to "innovate" anything. Seriously, it is the reason for a companies existence. Not to give you free stuff.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
The thing I've seen her most praised for in her work at DARPA has been specifically shifting away from blue-sky projects to projects that rapidly provide value to business end of the organization the research arm serves (warfighters, for DARPA.)
I can't imagine that she would be brought to Google to drive more effort behind pure blue-sky projects, rather than finding a way to keep innovation going in a way that rapidly returns value to the business end of the organization, as defined by the organizational leadership.
Finding the balance between the openness that keeps innovation active and the focus that gets it returning value and doen't sink lots of resources into things that aren't relevant to the organizational mission is tricky (the "more wood behind fewer arrows" approach was obviously a reaction to the perceived lack of focus, but the perception that it has so far been unbalanced in the opposite direction may well be valid.) Expertise in managing that balance is something Google may well benefit from.
Microsoft has a large number of researchers working on a lot of things that never say the light of day, or if they do are usually just pulled to be a piece of vaporware, but they're doing plenty of crazy things there. The Kinect comes to mind as one of their more successful endeavors, both in terms of sales, and the amount of hobby development that's sprung up around it. Microsoft's problem is that for most of the stuff they invent, they really don't know what to do with it because Balmer is an idiot that lacks vision. I'd bet good money that the Kinect came from some project that was floundering along until someone higher up decided they needed some motion controls for their Xbox because the Wii was eating their lunch in terms of sales.
You're not getting advances in genetic engineering, cpu design, or a thousand other fields out of a garage.
Again, it took google dumping billions into that whole automated car project to get it to work. And then we have Richard Brandson with his Virgin Galactic nonsense... we do depend on these institutions to innovate. Hate on them all you like but like a group of men sitting around dissing women... or vice versa... understand that at the end of the day you need them. You will come back to them and you will make peace because there is just no alternative.
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Where did I say they should give anyone free stuff?
Charge me for it. Make a mint off it. The whole patient system exists to help companies and individuals get rich off of innovation. We give them a MONOPOLY on the invention for 14 years. What more do you want?
Don't assume I'm some punk demanding free loot unless otherwise stated. It is quiet annoying to be so wildly and unjustifiably misunderstood.
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I have to return to Google, there's no escaping from that for now.
Try ixquick. Apparently, it'll even offer to aggregate google searches for you, over https.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I disagree on three fronts.
Google is a web search company that learned how to use advertising to fund their services. Their constant efforts, until recently, to diversify into other fields is heavily based upon that core point: it should be R&D, not D&R. D&R leaves you to optimum hills, but it ignores entire mountains beyond the valleys. R&D leaves you to expand into wholly new fields and to then see how, if at all possible, to support those ideas financially.
More to the point, though, just because Google today makes ~$35 billion/year on advertising doesn't mean it will tomorrow. The next "threat" like Facebook might severely undermine their business, and it's not like they can simply take their "monopoly"--read pile of cash--and buy or out compete a new competitor in a new field just because they were "the" darling of R&D for years. It's that think that lead to the actions of IBM and Microsoft and lots of other companies. Instead of either accepting that they were good and what they were good at and not expanding or trying to expand into another, unrelated field, a lot of money is wasted trying to remain king in a field where it's not even clear if there's a real threat--Facebook may "steal" some of their profits, but it's more than likely that Facebook will do more to grow the advertising pie than anything.
Finally, web searches and advertising may just be the low hanging fruit. 3M didn't start out making scotch tape. IBM used to be more about machines than service. It doesn't take much to realize that Google may have a lot of winners in its R&D that may, in the long term, outstrip what advertising has to offer. Even if it doesn't, there's still a lot of potential for that revenue to be in addition to advertising and to help weather any real or imagined market uncertain about advertising as a stable base for the company's future. You know the saying about not putting all one's eggs in one basket...
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Automated cars are googles answer to drivers being too distracted to pay attention to their advertisements.
*Why else would they hire Regina Dugan [allthingsd.com], the outgoing director of DARPA?*
to get government contracts and research money? isn't it obvious?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I can give you scenarios, but they all involve the unemployed becoming self-motivated and performing a lot of hard work for little short-term gain. Sadly neither quality is cultivated in the American middle class, so we're probably hosed.
Two smart, ambitious guys in a garage can only innovate when there's low hanging fruit that corporations can't figure out how to grasp. The low hanging fruit is mostly gone until we have new tech to capitalize. Green energy is moving much slower than demand, so don't expect anything from guys in garages there. Maybe bio-engineering, but I imagine pharma-laws will slow us down there. The only hope I have is in a food revolution, but currently that's mostly about taste and not about fixing supply chains.
Methinks you have no idea how large corporations function. For starts, R&D cannot drive a company. Without obtuse patent law or a very understanding angel investor, there's no long-term strategy in R&D.
Your misunderstanding is that Google has been profit focused at least since they went public. Innovation is not profit and Google is now starting to see a lot of wasted innovation hurting them. That they are cutting innovation to focus on what they're good at? That's called smart business.
Read in between the lines. The GP is more correct than not. James Whittaker is just bitching that the Google he wants is not the real Google.
That's incredibly shortsighted and naive. I don't disagree that some in google might see it that way however it is the innovation that makes the profits possible.
We would not have the society we have today if we just stuck with stone age technology. The innovation allowed entirely new heights of wealth to be possible.
So innovation might not create wealth but it enables it.
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Two smart, ambitious guys in a garage can only innovate when there's low hanging fruit that corporations can't figure out how to grasp. The low hanging fruit is mostly gone until we have new tech to capitalize.
You'll never convince me of that. Pessimists and people with no vision believe that sort of crap.
Have you heard of Facebook? A couple or three guys whip up this thing in their dorm rooms, and since they understand their market, it's now out for a multi-billion dollar IPO. Yeah, you and I may think it's !@#$, but Zuck figured out how to sell it to two camps that complement each other; advertisers and clueless users. History's made.
Maybe there's even lower hanging fruit that all the corps and specialists have overlooked so far. Maybe you just need a brilliant salesman like Chris Columbus to convince one deep pocketed patron.
By the way, AT&T Bell Labs, in my opinion, worked on the same principle. Find smart people, give 'em some room, and miracles happen, often. What's that corporate monolith Microsoft come up with lately?
Corporations cannot keep up with nimble startups. Cf. Kodak.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Doubt it. DARPA with its well deserved reputation for fostering science projects is just viewed as a good source of new Googlers. An easy sell to the hiring committee.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Yes, Google has been sending out notifications encouraging sites to fill more of the screen with Google ads. I'm trying to find the link where someone reported getting a notification that they should put more ads on their page, because they had less than 3 "ad units". That included the "heat map" referenced above. I haven't found that yet, but I found this Google video "Monetize your content". "Ideally, every page on your site should have some form of AdSense on it". Yes, the Google sales rep actually says that.
In related news, Google is dropping their "domain parking" business, where Google hosts ad-filled pages for parked domains. Not because domain parking is evil. They're just outsourcing the hosting. Google suggest using another domain-parking company like Sedo, which serves Google ads.
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Maybe Facebook knows you're married. Google knows you're trying to find a divorce attorney.
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Your post's insight is a rarity. It's what an old (Score:5) used to provide in rare value, extraordinary incisiveness. If I ever meet you in person I will buy you dinner and all the Chimay you can drink! I promise. I haven't chimed in with _such_ acclaim in a decade. Godspeed.
Microsoft wrote some good libraries for the Kinect (human pose detection, etc), but the hardware tech and low-level depth-map drivers came from PrimeSense:
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/06/19/kinect-how-it-works-from-the-company-behind-the-tech/
ultimately even by your own logic that requires corporate sponsorship.
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You made two separate but related contentions, with their own links.
The response here is not relevant to the contention regarding layout and its relation to the link cited in support of it that was challenged in GP, but to the other contention which GP did not challenge.
Again, reading comprehension is useful.
Actually...Regina Dugan is well-known for changing DARPA's focus from a high-risk/high-reward mentality that only seldom produced useful technology (and when it did, it was MAJOR leaps forward) to producing less-leap-forward but more consistent results. One can make a (very good) argument that this is exactly what DARPA needed to be relevant right now, and this is exactly what Google appears to be doing with all of their changes over the past couple of years. It's actually a really good fit for their current direction and her history at DARPA.