5 ms·

I'm wondering when, if ever, the general public will start recognizing Google as one of the "big brothers". Somehow it's still perceived as this "cool" startup

by fear91 9y ago

I'm wondering when, if ever, the general public will start recognizing Google as one of the "big brothers". Somehow it's still perceived as this "cool" startup but they squash small businesses, avoid taxes, are in bed with intelligence agencies, etc.

quickben 9y ago
I'm old enough to remember the techies backlash over targeted advertising in Gmail. It seemed the google's PR started throwing cash at it for years to "educate" the public. The general public appeared to be a complacent herd of sheep like creatures that would embrace convenience over everything. Maybe in your circles Google is "cool". In my circles it's necessary evil. The platform/network effect is so strong there is no escaping it. The US is invested my money wise too deep and won't do what they had the backbone to do with SO and the rest. So, "when, if ever", won't be anytime soon. Meanwhile, innovation suffers. They killed chat protocols interfaces (pure monopoly abuse since they have most users), the buried end-to-end encryption, they killed bunch of competing businesses by promoting their side businesses on the search page higher, etc. Http2 could have had things for the users in it (if one goes through the troubles of upgrading a network layer). Instead it had "cut off download at instant if requested" and other features that made web crawling (though not necessarily browsing and developing) easy. Going forward, they will be cleaning the advertising agency landsccape to get rid out of competition with : Amp ( since they de facto own mobile browsing and Android). Desktop displayed ads (they announced as blocker in chrome, and guess twice whose ads will be allowed through). I can enumerate all day. TLDR: they are out of the 'cool' startup area, and firmly into the deep monopolistic abuse waters.
- PaulHoule 9y ago
  In the 1990s VCs openly stated they would not fund Microsoft competitors. There is a huge hole of companies that never started to compete with Google today, just the VCs don't talk about it today.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    Pretty big moat though, right? What would the minimum investment be to build something, for just search, that was technically just on par with Google?
    - quickben 9y ago
      Off the top of my head, few millions in hardware? Going over people's "Google=internet search"... Infinite? Microsoft is still attempting it.
      - tyingq 9y ago
        I meant more about achieving comparable relevancy and feature parity (kg, snippets, widgets). I assume it's a big number since existing players are unable to match those.
        quickben 9y ago
        Probably, but then, what's the added business value from them really? Few percent at best? Zero at worst? On a similar note: Yahoo had their "verticals", and when they had to cut something, these search addons were the first to go. I tried to start a search engine twice so far in fact. The first attempt was a decade ago, for a small country. I had objectively much better and cleaner index then Google. Perfect native language support. All spam removed. Other features that Google didn't. People have me honest feedback actually (it was a different time for them then). Basically, I got 30 daily users, and a lot of "yes but why bother when Google already exist" type of answers. What I got out of it, was that technical superiority didn't enter into it. One simply can't break on marketing and business with Google around. In any case, it was an amazing experience, and a great interview taking point afterwards. Landed me all the jobs I wanted ever since. So that being said, I don't think the search features matter that much. The mountain to climb over is their integration on Android, inside other services, and more along these lines.

by fear91 9y ago

quickben 9y ago

I'm old enough to remember the techies backlash over targeted advertising in Gmail. It seemed the google's PR started throwing cash at it for years to "educate" the public. The general public appeared to be a complacent herd of sheep like creatures that would embrace convenience over everything. Maybe in your circles Google is "cool". In my circles it's necessary evil. The platform/network effect is so strong there is no escaping it. The US is invested my money wise too deep and won't do what they had the backbone to do with SO and the rest. So, "when, if ever", won't be anytime soon. Meanwhile, innovation suffers. They killed chat protocols interfaces (pure monopoly abuse since they have most users), the buried end-to-end encryption, they killed bunch of competing businesses by promoting their side businesses on the search page higher, etc. Http2 could have had things for the users in it (if one goes through the troubles of upgrading a network layer). Instead it had "cut off download at instant if requested" and other features that made web crawling (though not necessarily browsing and developing) easy. Going forward, they will be cleaning the advertising agency landsccape to get rid out of competition with : Amp ( since they de facto own mobile browsing and Android). Desktop displayed ads (they announced as blocker in chrome, and guess twice whose ads will be allowed through). I can enumerate all day. TLDR: they are out of the 'cool' startup area, and firmly into the deep monopolistic abuse waters.

PaulHoule 9y ago
In the 1990s VCs openly stated they would not fund Microsoft competitors. There is a huge hole of companies that never started to compete with Google today, just the VCs don't talk about it today.
- tyingq 9y ago
  Pretty big moat though, right? What would the minimum investment be to build something, for just search, that was technically just on par with Google?
  - quickben 9y ago
    Off the top of my head, few millions in hardware? Going over people's "Google=internet search"... Infinite? Microsoft is still attempting it.
    - tyingq 9y ago
      I meant more about achieving comparable relevancy and feature parity (kg, snippets, widgets). I assume it's a big number since existing players are unable to match those.
      - quickben 9y ago
        Probably, but then, what's the added business value from them really? Few percent at best? Zero at worst? On a similar note: Yahoo had their "verticals", and when they had to cut something, these search addons were the first to go. I tried to start a search engine twice so far in fact. The first attempt was a decade ago, for a small country. I had objectively much better and cleaner index then Google. Perfect native language support. All spam removed. Other features that Google didn't. People have me honest feedback actually (it was a different time for them then). Basically, I got 30 daily users, and a lot of "yes but why bother when Google already exist" type of answers. What I got out of it, was that technical superiority didn't enter into it. One simply can't break on marketing and business with Google around. In any case, it was an amazing experience, and a great interview taking point afterwards. Landed me all the jobs I wanted ever since. So that being said, I don't think the search features matter that much. The mountain to climb over is their integration on Android, inside other services, and more along these lines.