4 ms·

This guy seems to forget that the reason Google won was because they actually presented search in a usable, non-intrusive way. They were the first company to do

This guy seems to forget that the reason Google won was because they actually presented search in a usable, non-intrusive way. They were the first company to do search _well_, providing good, reliable results, and also the first company not to surround their search box with a border full of ads. To me this makes his assertion, > There's no more reason to expect search breakthroughs from Google than there is to expect electric car batteries to be made by Exxon. fall a bit flat, since in the 90's and 00's, Google was exactly the counter-example to his proposal that there is no profit in enhancing the quality of search: Google was the company that proved that doing search well was exactly what people wanted and needed. Now, if he was targeting Yahoo or another "search portal" that used to bombard users with ads, maybe he'd have a point. But Google? They're the ones that changed the playing field.

danso 15y ago
My thoughts exactly. Here's an excerpt from "In the Plex" http://goo.gl/5YPtb http://goo.gl/5YPtb "Bell was visibly upset. The Stanford product was too good. If Excite were to host a search engine that instantly gave people information they sought, he explained, the users would leave the site instantly. Since his ad revenue came from people staying on the site—“stickiness” was the most desired metric in websites at the time—using BackRub’s technology would be counterproductive. “He told us he wanted Excite’s search engine to be 80 percent as good as the other search engines,” says Hassan. And we were like, “Wow, these guys don’t know what they’re talking about.” " I hate to apply the fallacy of argument from authority here, but I wonder what OP's history with Google is? Not in the sense of, is he a good engineer...but whether he was with Google in its early, reportedly idealistic days? And if so, does his leaving Google indicates that those ideals are now gone? Or was he a relatively recent hire of Google before going to Microsoft? I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he's not doing this just to boost up Microsoft's image. --- And you don't even have to go back into Google's origin stories to see that they've consistently tried to minimize users' search durations: http://www.google.com/insidesearch/instant-about.html http://www.google.com/insidesearch/instant-about.html
- lambda 15y ago
  I'm not so sure you should be giving him the benefit of the doubt. He worked for Microsoft for a few years http://www.linkedin.com/pub/james-whittaker/13/878/229 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/james-whittaker/13/878/229, then moved to Google, and then moved back to Microsoft, writing a scathing article http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-... about Google in the process. It feels to me like he was using his time at Google to get a promotion at Microsoft.
  - danso 15y ago
    Well, I just didn't want to go too far into making the debate about the OP personally rather than just evaluating the merits of his claim. It's possible that Google killed his dog and that his anti-Google argument has merit.
- Lewisham 15y ago
  When he was last talked about on HN, I think he was with Google for about 3 or 4 years before he left to return to Microsoft earlier this year. He seems to have an axe to grind on Google, he seems to write negative stuff about them.
dcminter 15y ago
I don't think Google were the first to do search well - in my opinion that was DEC's AltaVista. But Altavista and the other keyword matchers suffered from the later pollution of their results by spammers and then compounded the problem by polluting their own search results with barely distinguishable adverts. We stopped trusting them. Google was giving better search results during their rise to prominence because PageRank wasn't as vulnerable to spamming. They also chose to make their adverts unobtrusive and very clearly distinguished from the search results.
- dredmorbius 15y ago
  Altavista's search was fast. It was a showcase for DEC's 64 bit Alpha and Ultrix technologies, and the ability for the systems to place the entire search index in memory (as I recall). The search syntax was also pretty advanced. You had parenthetical grouping, logical operators, and if I recall, the +/- include/exclude syntax originated with (or was at least used by) AV. What AV wasn't was particularly relevant. You needed that advanced search syntax to be able to narrow down what you were looking for, and you still usually had to go through a few pages of results to find the right stuff. When Google first hit public beta, it was immediately and compellingly superior to anyone else's search. I remember giving it a few tries, and switching within a matter of a week or so. It just gave me what I wanted. It took a long time for anyone else to get off the "but we need to keep users on our pages for ad clicks" mindset, and by then it was too late.
  - dcminter 15y ago
    I don't really disagree with anything you're saying there - but if AV hadn't fouled their results I doubt I'd ever have bothered to try Google.
roc 15y ago
All the author really did was restate the innovator's dilemma for this specific case. Yahoo's directories were more profitable to it than search and thus search innovations were a threat to existing revenue. (See also: pg's Yahoo article about Yahoo's ad sales) So innovation in search (and ads) came from outside Yahoo. Similarly, any innovation that fundamentally threatens Google's ad revenue is unlikely to be pursued by Google itself. So there's no good reason to expect that sort of innovation to come from them. Hence the example of Siri turning a spoken query into a vocalized answer (whenever it can), rather than a list of links with ads around them. Though the author is off a bit when they imply there's no room for ads in the process. As most use of Siri still involves looking at the screen, on which it would be trivial to drop a narrow banner ad or promoted link.
snowwrestler 15y ago
Not to mention that he does not seem to understand the Google ad model. From the post: > Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles the number of sponsored links you get paid for. Google gets paid when their search ads get clicked, not when they get displayed, so to maximize profit it is in their best interest to serve the absolute best results first.

danso 15y ago

My thoughts exactly. Here's an excerpt from "In the Plex" http://goo.gl/5YPtb http://goo.gl/5YPtb "Bell was visibly upset. The Stanford product was too good. If Excite were to host a search engine that instantly gave people information they sought, he explained, the users would leave the site instantly. Since his ad revenue came from people staying on the site—“stickiness” was the most desired metric in websites at the time—using BackRub’s technology would be counterproductive. “He told us he wanted Excite’s search engine to be 80 percent as good as the other search engines,” says Hassan. And we were like, “Wow, these guys don’t know what they’re talking about.” " I hate to apply the fallacy of argument from authority here, but I wonder what OP's history with Google is? Not in the sense of, is he a good engineer...but whether he was with Google in its early, reportedly idealistic days? And if so, does his leaving Google indicates that those ideals are now gone? Or was he a relatively recent hire of Google before going to Microsoft? I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he's not doing this just to boost up Microsoft's image. --- And you don't even have to go back into Google's origin stories to see that they've consistently tried to minimize users' search durations: http://www.google.com/insidesearch/instant-about.html http://www.google.com/insidesearch/instant-about.html

lambda 15y ago
I'm not so sure you should be giving him the benefit of the doubt. He worked for Microsoft for a few years http://www.linkedin.com/pub/james-whittaker/13/878/229 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/james-whittaker/13/878/229, then moved to Google, and then moved back to Microsoft, writing a scathing article http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-... about Google in the process. It feels to me like he was using his time at Google to get a promotion at Microsoft.
- danso 15y ago
  Well, I just didn't want to go too far into making the debate about the OP personally rather than just evaluating the merits of his claim. It's possible that Google killed his dog and that his anti-Google argument has merit.
Lewisham 15y ago
When he was last talked about on HN, I think he was with Google for about 3 or 4 years before he left to return to Microsoft earlier this year. He seems to have an axe to grind on Google, he seems to write negative stuff about them.

dcminter 15y ago

I don't think Google were the first to do search well - in my opinion that was DEC's AltaVista. But Altavista and the other keyword matchers suffered from the later pollution of their results by spammers and then compounded the problem by polluting their own search results with barely distinguishable adverts. We stopped trusting them. Google was giving better search results during their rise to prominence because PageRank wasn't as vulnerable to spamming. They also chose to make their adverts unobtrusive and very clearly distinguished from the search results.

dredmorbius 15y ago
Altavista's search was fast. It was a showcase for DEC's 64 bit Alpha and Ultrix technologies, and the ability for the systems to place the entire search index in memory (as I recall). The search syntax was also pretty advanced. You had parenthetical grouping, logical operators, and if I recall, the +/- include/exclude syntax originated with (or was at least used by) AV. What AV wasn't was particularly relevant. You needed that advanced search syntax to be able to narrow down what you were looking for, and you still usually had to go through a few pages of results to find the right stuff. When Google first hit public beta, it was immediately and compellingly superior to anyone else's search. I remember giving it a few tries, and switching within a matter of a week or so. It just gave me what I wanted. It took a long time for anyone else to get off the "but we need to keep users on our pages for ad clicks" mindset, and by then it was too late.
- dcminter 15y ago
  I don't really disagree with anything you're saying there - but if AV hadn't fouled their results I doubt I'd ever have bothered to try Google.

roc 15y ago

All the author really did was restate the innovator's dilemma for this specific case. Yahoo's directories were more profitable to it than search and thus search innovations were a threat to existing revenue. (See also: pg's Yahoo article about Yahoo's ad sales) So innovation in search (and ads) came from outside Yahoo. Similarly, any innovation that fundamentally threatens Google's ad revenue is unlikely to be pursued by Google itself. So there's no good reason to expect that sort of innovation to come from them. Hence the example of Siri turning a spoken query into a vocalized answer (whenever it can), rather than a list of links with ads around them. Though the author is off a bit when they imply there's no room for ads in the process. As most use of Siri still involves looking at the screen, on which it would be trivial to drop a narrow banner ad or promoted link.

snowwrestler 15y ago

Not to mention that he does not seem to understand the Google ad model. From the post: > Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles the number of sponsored links you get paid for. Google gets paid when their search ads get clicked, not when they get displayed, so to maximize profit it is in their best interest to serve the absolute best results first.