18 ms·

The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture

85 points by ajbatac 18y ago

bdfh42 18y ago
My brother has a site that has just gone dark on Google. This is a site that uses no SEO "techniques" - it's just a plain site with content and a form to buy a product (not software) that actually uses Google's own "Checkout". Oddly, it turns up OK on Google's image search but never makes it into the regular key word search results. Obviously, investigations are on-going but it is a worrying that a site supporting a legitimate commercial venture should just disappear from Google and thus (in effect) from the Internet.
- jacquesm 18y ago
  Maybe that's googles' subtle way of telling your brother to buy some advertising with them ?
- andreyf 18y ago
  This happens randomly. My Rutgers site (one page, edu domain), was de-listed for a couple of weeks (didn't exist, even when I specified "site:rutgers.edu"), then just re-appeared. I also noticed this with Oliver Steele's functional.js page - I was used to typing "functional js" into Google to find it, and at one point, it disappeared for a week or two from ranking alltogether, only to mysterious re-appear again. Maybe it's some clever way to check whether or not people track their SEO? De-list sites, and watch if the person reverts to an earlier version of the page, or submits it for Google to crawl?
lionhearted 18y ago
The single worst business decision I ever made was migrating a site on a .net extension over to the .com once the company bought it without making damn sure not to lose rankings in Google. I had heard that permanent redirects preserved pagerank/googleness, but dropped from top 5 on some important terms to outside the front page. This single poor decision/poor execution cost me and the company tens of thousands of dollars, which is orders of magnitude higher than the additional credibility the .com would've brought. I suppose I had to learn that lesson sooner or later, so I'll go glass-half-full and be grateful that it was on tens of thousands early in life, instead of more later. But that was a pretty expensive lesson.
- apollo 18y ago
  I was also under the impression that permanent redirects preserve pagerank... how are you supposed to execute a domain change like this properly?
  - Jasber 18y ago
    301 redirects are the suggested method for permanently redirecting pages for search engines. This will preserve pagerank, but not immediately. This means for a while (1 week-3 months), many of your pages will be dropped from their current rankings. They will be returned, eventually. But Google has to update their entire index before you'll start to see any improvements.
- prakash 18y ago
  can't you do a CNAME change? wouldn't that preserve google rankings?
- arohner 18y ago
  Naive question: Why is the immediate switchover necessary? Can't you run the same site on foo.net and foo.com, and turn on redirecting from .net to .com AFTER google updates its index?
- twopoint718 18y ago
  I also have a naive question, does a .com really have "additional credibility" over something else? Why? How about independent of what other websites are doing?
  - snprbob86 18y ago
    I assume there is some credibility to it. More importantly, it is the default extension tried/searched by browsers when the user doesn't specify a TLD.
  - froo 18y ago
    Its more due to the brand association people have with the .com domain. When you're telling friends about sites "I found this great site, its called facebook" - for those people not in the know, the natural thing people do is to use the .com extension. It's also why the .com domains command a higher premium on the domain name aftermarket.
bradtgmurray 18y ago
I'm not sure if Jeff knows what a monopoly is.
- raganwald 18y ago
  Google is effectively a monopoly, however the issue here is that they do not appear to be misusing their monopoly. Microsoft has been convicted of using illegal tactics to build and maintain their monopoly like licensing agreements that effectively shut competitors out of the OEM operating system business. Apple has been accused of abusing their monopoly by leveraging their position in music players into dominance in online music sales and then enchaining the two the way Microsoft enchained Office and Windows dominance. What, exactly, have Google done to shut competitors out of the search business? What agreements have they forced on advertisers to discourage them from advertising with anyone else? And while they ship other products that leverage their competence in search, they do not appear to enchain them. For example, they dominate in online search and have a strong position in online mail. And yes, they can leverage scale to sell advertising on both properties. However, their does not appear to be a link between the two products. For example, when I perform a web search it does not appear to use my mail inbox to influence the relevance rankings of online search. So far, Google appears to be following a different strategic path than Microsoft did.
  - jcl 18y ago
    On the other hand, they effectively pay Mozilla to make Google search the Firefox default homepage. They also distribute a free mobile phone operating system that is heavily integrated with Google services. And they make a web browser (advertised on the main Google page of other web browsers) that incorporates features important to widespread adoption of Google applications (Gears, high performance layout and Javascript engines, robust process model).
    - raganwald 18y ago
      Paying Mozilla to be the default search engine is merely using money from a successful business to promote the same successful business. They also distribute a free mobile phone operating system that is heavily integrated with Google services. You might have something there, that is very similar to some of the things Microsoft and Apple both do.
alexandros 18y ago
Google may not be a monopoly, but they are certainly a single point of failure for many businesses. As such, these businesses should not be happy that their continued survival depends on some algorithm not flagging them a 'false positive'. Monopoly or not, I can't help but think that this is not a healthy situation.
- coglethorpe 18y ago
  It's not a healthy situation, but that's largely due to the poor results other search engines provide. I tried using Yahoo! and Live for a while instead of Google. I had forgotten how awful the results were. It wasn't the formatting or the speed, but the lack of relevance the results had to my query. It's no wonder people don't use Google's competitors. In the mean time, the rest of us have to pray that our site is considered "relevant" in Google's eyes.
  - inerte 18y ago
    It's not even the results for some people, but Google itself. I've seen studies where the researchers show Yahoo results on Google's template, and vice-versa, and people still thought that Google had better results. Google is a brand nowadays (and a verb ;). The tech will become secondary in a near future. It's like Coke vs. Pepsi, they taste 99% alike and blind tests show costumers have no preference on one over another. I am not saying they don't have an edge on quality these days, but in the future, just relevant links on the page that appears after you type your search terms will not be enough.
    - axod 18y ago
      Slightly off-topic, but: "It's like Coke vs. Pepsi, they taste 99% alike and blind tests show costumers have no preference on one over another." Sorry, but that's completely wrong. Pepsi is far sweeter. It wins on taste tests, whilst Coke wins in some tests where people drink an entire can. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cola_wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cola_wars
      - 18y ago
raganwald 18y ago
On Paul's disagreement scale this comment is right down in the sewer, but please pardon me while I vent: How come Jeff is always grumbling about Apple's "Monopoly" on music and now Google's "Monopoly" on search but he never grumbles about Microsoft's actual monopoly on desktop operating systems and office back ends? In this post he even calls out the people who grumble about Miscosoft and asks them to grumble about Google. But somehow, he never makes the connection that perhaps people who grumble about Apple and Google might want to do a little grumbling about Microsoft? > I find that talent is far less important than enthusiasm. --Jeff Atwood
- prospero 18y ago
  I think his stance is that there's (more than?) sufficient grumbling about Microsoft, and insufficient grumbling about Apple and Google. There's an obvious bias to his writing, inasmuch as he just takes this as a given and moves on, but that doesn't mean he's totally wrong.
  - raganwald 18y ago
    There's an obvious bias to his writing, inasmuch as he just takes this as a given and moves on, but that doesn't mean he's totally wrong. Solid gold, thank you. Putting Jeff aside, I prefer blogs that have a healthy amount of bias. Writing that tries to be judicious, dispassionate and balanced often ends up being dry and comes off with a pseudo-academic tone. A little bias adds passion and fire. As long as they aren't totally wrong, that's a good thing. A while back all the big companies were "diversifying" so that their stock would become immune to the vagaries of any one market or business unit. This was almost always a failure, because professional managers want to achieve diversification through their portfolio selection, where they can pursue their own mix and make changes by trading in the market, not through having business managers engage in lengthy and expensive M&A activity. Blogs are a little like that: If I want a balanced read I'd rather read several different posts about the same subject than try to find one person who tries to present the centrist view.
  - rbanffy 18y ago
    The fact Microsoft can still get away with their abuse of monopoly is sufficient proof there is not nearly enough grumbling about Microsoft.
KaiP 18y ago
The reason people find Google less objectionable than Microsoft is that it is far easier for the average consumer to switch search engines than it is for them to switch operating systems. So while Microsoft could force out better competitors, there's no way for Google to stop people from using another search engine. There just needs to be one that is worth switching to.
- peregrine 18y ago
  And there isn't even a company close to Google in search quality. Nor one with even a plan yet alone the budget.
- rbanffy 18y ago
  Google also has not yet been convicted on monopoly abuse charges. Microsoft has. More than once. And, quite frankly, their continuous defiance and misconduct does not help its image of a serious company.
- pj 18y ago
  There are a lot worth switching to. Cuil is nice. There are more to search results than speed of delivery. I monitor search term locations in several search engines and notice the numbers of results returned for relatively new terms will sky rocket on Google, then fall dramatically back, while the others would remain relatively stable. Why would that happen? I'm still trying to figure that out.
kleevr 18y ago
Any thoughts on how google-integrated tools like HNSearch (webmynd) will play a role in the present-future of the post-google-"search monopoly"?
jsdalton 18y ago
> I find it profoundly disturbing that if every other search engine in the world shut down tomorrow, our website's traffic would be effectively unchanged. Jeff missed a major point here. What is ACTUALLY a disturbing thought is that if Google decided for any reason to de-list stackoverflow.com they would lose 83% of their traffic. Like that, in an instant. Worse, they would be left with little or no recourse. Joel is probably enough of a big-wig that he could place a few calls in to Google or raise hell about it on his blog, but otherwise there is no one to talk to at Google or nothing to be done. I've read horror stories about this kind of thing here and there, and it's terrifying. The comparisons to Micrsoft miss the mark, because Google is a different kind of monopoly and poses a different set of problems to a different group of people.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
bo 18y ago
Have there existed good alternatives or proposals for alternatives to google that people haven't heard about possibly because google doesn't return them?
dmoney 18y ago
This page, linked from the article, is also a nice read: http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2008/03/mr-googles-guid.html http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2008/03/mr-googles-guid... Whimsley Hall is now strewn, like Miss Haversham's house, with cobwebs and dust. Most visitors no longer come in by the front door to take a tour. Instead, Mr. Google (a travel agent who doubles as our butler) directs them straight down to the basement where the family archives are kept and tells them to look at one particular historical document called The Netflix Prize: 300 Days Later. They read this and then they walk right out.

85 points by ajbatac 18y ago

My brother has a site that has just gone dark on Google. This is a site that uses no SEO "techniques" - it's just a plain site with content and a form to buy a product (not software) that actually uses Google's own "Checkout". Oddly, it turns up OK on Google's image search but never makes it into the regular key word search results. Obviously, investigations are on-going but it is a worrying that a site supporting a legitimate commercial venture should just disappear from Google and thus (in effect) from the Internet.

jacquesm 18y ago
Maybe that's googles' subtle way of telling your brother to buy some advertising with them ?
andreyf 18y ago
This happens randomly. My Rutgers site (one page, edu domain), was de-listed for a couple of weeks (didn't exist, even when I specified "site:rutgers.edu"), then just re-appeared. I also noticed this with Oliver Steele's functional.js page - I was used to typing "functional js" into Google to find it, and at one point, it disappeared for a week or two from ranking alltogether, only to mysterious re-appear again. Maybe it's some clever way to check whether or not people track their SEO? De-list sites, and watch if the person reverts to an earlier version of the page, or submits it for Google to crawl?

lionhearted 18y ago

The single worst business decision I ever made was migrating a site on a .net extension over to the .com once the company bought it without making damn sure not to lose rankings in Google. I had heard that permanent redirects preserved pagerank/googleness, but dropped from top 5 on some important terms to outside the front page. This single poor decision/poor execution cost me and the company tens of thousands of dollars, which is orders of magnitude higher than the additional credibility the .com would've brought. I suppose I had to learn that lesson sooner or later, so I'll go glass-half-full and be grateful that it was on tens of thousands early in life, instead of more later. But that was a pretty expensive lesson.

apollo 18y ago
I was also under the impression that permanent redirects preserve pagerank... how are you supposed to execute a domain change like this properly?
- Jasber 18y ago
  301 redirects are the suggested method for permanently redirecting pages for search engines. This will preserve pagerank, but not immediately. This means for a while (1 week-3 months), many of your pages will be dropped from their current rankings. They will be returned, eventually. But Google has to update their entire index before you'll start to see any improvements.
prakash 18y ago
can't you do a CNAME change? wouldn't that preserve google rankings?
arohner 18y ago
Naive question: Why is the immediate switchover necessary? Can't you run the same site on foo.net and foo.com, and turn on redirecting from .net to .com AFTER google updates its index?
twopoint718 18y ago
I also have a naive question, does a .com really have "additional credibility" over something else? Why? How about independent of what other websites are doing?
- snprbob86 18y ago
  I assume there is some credibility to it. More importantly, it is the default extension tried/searched by browsers when the user doesn't specify a TLD.
- froo 18y ago
  Its more due to the brand association people have with the .com domain. When you're telling friends about sites "I found this great site, its called facebook" - for those people not in the know, the natural thing people do is to use the .com extension. It's also why the .com domains command a higher premium on the domain name aftermarket.

bradtgmurray 18y ago

I'm not sure if Jeff knows what a monopoly is.

raganwald 18y ago
Google is effectively a monopoly, however the issue here is that they do not appear to be misusing their monopoly. Microsoft has been convicted of using illegal tactics to build and maintain their monopoly like licensing agreements that effectively shut competitors out of the OEM operating system business. Apple has been accused of abusing their monopoly by leveraging their position in music players into dominance in online music sales and then enchaining the two the way Microsoft enchained Office and Windows dominance. What, exactly, have Google done to shut competitors out of the search business? What agreements have they forced on advertisers to discourage them from advertising with anyone else? And while they ship other products that leverage their competence in search, they do not appear to enchain them. For example, they dominate in online search and have a strong position in online mail. And yes, they can leverage scale to sell advertising on both properties. However, their does not appear to be a link between the two products. For example, when I perform a web search it does not appear to use my mail inbox to influence the relevance rankings of online search. So far, Google appears to be following a different strategic path than Microsoft did.
- jcl 18y ago
  On the other hand, they effectively pay Mozilla to make Google search the Firefox default homepage. They also distribute a free mobile phone operating system that is heavily integrated with Google services. And they make a web browser (advertised on the main Google page of other web browsers) that incorporates features important to widespread adoption of Google applications (Gears, high performance layout and Javascript engines, robust process model).
  - raganwald 18y ago
    Paying Mozilla to be the default search engine is merely using money from a successful business to promote the same successful business. They also distribute a free mobile phone operating system that is heavily integrated with Google services. You might have something there, that is very similar to some of the things Microsoft and Apple both do.

alexandros 18y ago

Google may not be a monopoly, but they are certainly a single point of failure for many businesses. As such, these businesses should not be happy that their continued survival depends on some algorithm not flagging them a 'false positive'. Monopoly or not, I can't help but think that this is not a healthy situation.

coglethorpe 18y ago
It's not a healthy situation, but that's largely due to the poor results other search engines provide. I tried using Yahoo! and Live for a while instead of Google. I had forgotten how awful the results were. It wasn't the formatting or the speed, but the lack of relevance the results had to my query. It's no wonder people don't use Google's competitors. In the mean time, the rest of us have to pray that our site is considered "relevant" in Google's eyes.
- inerte 18y ago
  It's not even the results for some people, but Google itself. I've seen studies where the researchers show Yahoo results on Google's template, and vice-versa, and people still thought that Google had better results. Google is a brand nowadays (and a verb ;). The tech will become secondary in a near future. It's like Coke vs. Pepsi, they taste 99% alike and blind tests show costumers have no preference on one over another. I am not saying they don't have an edge on quality these days, but in the future, just relevant links on the page that appears after you type your search terms will not be enough.
  - axod 18y ago
    Slightly off-topic, but: "It's like Coke vs. Pepsi, they taste 99% alike and blind tests show costumers have no preference on one over another." Sorry, but that's completely wrong. Pepsi is far sweeter. It wins on taste tests, whilst Coke wins in some tests where people drink an entire can. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cola_wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cola_wars
    - 18y ago

raganwald 18y ago

On Paul's disagreement scale this comment is right down in the sewer, but please pardon me while I vent: How come Jeff is always grumbling about Apple's "Monopoly" on music and now Google's "Monopoly" on search but he never grumbles about Microsoft's actual monopoly on desktop operating systems and office back ends? In this post he even calls out the people who grumble about Miscosoft and asks them to grumble about Google. But somehow, he never makes the connection that perhaps people who grumble about Apple and Google might want to do a little grumbling about Microsoft? > I find that talent is far less important than enthusiasm. --Jeff Atwood

prospero 18y ago
I think his stance is that there's (more than?) sufficient grumbling about Microsoft, and insufficient grumbling about Apple and Google. There's an obvious bias to his writing, inasmuch as he just takes this as a given and moves on, but that doesn't mean he's totally wrong.
- raganwald 18y ago
  There's an obvious bias to his writing, inasmuch as he just takes this as a given and moves on, but that doesn't mean he's totally wrong. Solid gold, thank you. Putting Jeff aside, I prefer blogs that have a healthy amount of bias. Writing that tries to be judicious, dispassionate and balanced often ends up being dry and comes off with a pseudo-academic tone. A little bias adds passion and fire. As long as they aren't totally wrong, that's a good thing. A while back all the big companies were "diversifying" so that their stock would become immune to the vagaries of any one market or business unit. This was almost always a failure, because professional managers want to achieve diversification through their portfolio selection, where they can pursue their own mix and make changes by trading in the market, not through having business managers engage in lengthy and expensive M&A activity. Blogs are a little like that: If I want a balanced read I'd rather read several different posts about the same subject than try to find one person who tries to present the centrist view.
- rbanffy 18y ago
  The fact Microsoft can still get away with their abuse of monopoly is sufficient proof there is not nearly enough grumbling about Microsoft.

KaiP 18y ago

The reason people find Google less objectionable than Microsoft is that it is far easier for the average consumer to switch search engines than it is for them to switch operating systems. So while Microsoft could force out better competitors, there's no way for Google to stop people from using another search engine. There just needs to be one that is worth switching to.

peregrine 18y ago
And there isn't even a company close to Google in search quality. Nor one with even a plan yet alone the budget.
rbanffy 18y ago
Google also has not yet been convicted on monopoly abuse charges. Microsoft has. More than once. And, quite frankly, their continuous defiance and misconduct does not help its image of a serious company.
pj 18y ago
There are a lot worth switching to. Cuil is nice. There are more to search results than speed of delivery. I monitor search term locations in several search engines and notice the numbers of results returned for relatively new terms will sky rocket on Google, then fall dramatically back, while the others would remain relatively stable. Why would that happen? I'm still trying to figure that out.

kleevr 18y ago

Any thoughts on how google-integrated tools like HNSearch (webmynd) will play a role in the present-future of the post-google-"search monopoly"?

jsdalton 18y ago

> I find it profoundly disturbing that if every other search engine in the world shut down tomorrow, our website's traffic would be effectively unchanged. Jeff missed a major point here. What is ACTUALLY a disturbing thought is that if Google decided for any reason to de-list stackoverflow.com they would lose 83% of their traffic. Like that, in an instant. Worse, they would be left with little or no recourse. Joel is probably enough of a big-wig that he could place a few calls in to Google or raise hell about it on his blog, but otherwise there is no one to talk to at Google or nothing to be done. I've read horror stories about this kind of thing here and there, and it's terrifying. The comparisons to Micrsoft miss the mark, because Google is a different kind of monopoly and poses a different set of problems to a different group of people.

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]

bo 18y ago

Have there existed good alternatives or proposals for alternatives to google that people haven't heard about possibly because google doesn't return them?

dmoney 18y ago

This page, linked from the article, is also a nice read: http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2008/03/mr-googles-guid.html http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2008/03/mr-googles-guid... Whimsley Hall is now strewn, like Miss Haversham's house, with cobwebs and dust. Most visitors no longer come in by the front door to take a tour. Instead, Mr. Google (a travel agent who doubles as our butler) directs them straight down to the basement where the family archives are kept and tells them to look at one particular historical document called The Netflix Prize: 300 Days Later. They read this and then they walk right out.