5 ms·

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 con

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
    - inerte 18y ago
      I stand corrected, thanks for the Cola war insight :) I guess I let out my own personal taste and bias and some faulty memory...
      - axod 18y ago
        ;) I actually can't stand the taste of Coke, but love Pepsi with a passion. Some people think I'm weird/being petty, but it's just a different taste.
        zack 18y ago
        I don't think you're being weird. I do think you are conditioned by brilliant marketing. My Decision Making class did a taste test last quarter. The professor poured some Pepsi into 5 cups, and then poured some Coke into 5 cups, and then invited a student to do a taste test. Before the test began, she indicated a strong preference for Pepsi; then, after each cup, she was asked to indicate whether it was Coke or Pepsi. The result? She choose Pepsi/Coke with exactly 50% accuracy. Go figure. It's not a different taste. It really isn't.
        axod 18y ago
        (Reply to Zack who's comment is dead): You can tell even by the smell. Perhaps you think I'm lying, but when served a brown fizzy drink in a cup, I can tell with 100% accuracy wether it is Coke, Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, or Pepsi Max.
        twopoint718 18y ago
        I don't know exactly why but that sounds very funny to me. I would boast of this ability all the time.
        axod 18y ago
        The long winter evenings of blind taste testing at our house simply fly by ;)
  - Tichy 18y ago
    "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." Just to clarify, I suppose you mean people thought the Google site with the Yahoo results was better than the Yahoo site with the Google results?
    - inerte 18y ago
      Yes, that's exactly what I mean. Yahoo search results on a Google webpage were considered more relevant than Google search results on the Yahoo webpage! Google is a brand. Some people automatically think it's better.
    - deleted 18y ago
      [deleted]
  - chris11 18y ago
    I checked this out, searching for nytimes.com with yahoo google and Microsft. The results were mostly the same. All sets of top ten results were from nytimes.com. The layout was almost the same, in fact it looked like Google and Yahoo were based on the same template. The speeds for yahoo and google were basically the same. Microsoft seemed a tiny bit slower, but they didn't mention the actual speed of the search, so I don't know for sure. The number of results were different. Microsoft had 1.8million, Google had 32million, and Yahoo had 59 million. Google had a mini search bar under the first result, nytimes.com, that let you search in the site. That feature is nice. Even though the sites are almost identical, I still preferred Google's results. The other sites seemed ugly. I'm not sure why that is. It could be that I have used Google for awhile, and just gotten used to their format. Or, it could be that Google does more effective research on how users interact with the site. For example, I remember seeing the video from Google tracking eye movements while searching. The eye movements were mainly focused on the top left corner of the search result. Yahoo's site design interfered with that eye movement. They have a giant red Yahoo in the top right corner. It stands out, and I think it is annoying and distracting.
- aneesh 18y ago
  Try again now. Both Yahoo! and Live are pretty close to Google right now in terms of relevance. Branding is another story, but the results aren't bad.
- mhartl 18y ago
  A few months ago I switched to Yahoo! Search as an experiment. I'm quite confident that, if you'd replaced the Yahoo! branding with Google's, I would never have known the difference. But yet I switched back. Why? I was hosting the Silicon Valley Rails meetup, and our speaker Emmett Shear (of Justin.tv) had forgotten to bring his laptop, and had to borrow mine. I was so uncomfortable at the idea of my home page---Yahoo!, of all things, and not Google!---being broadcast to a room of Rails hackers that I changed it back to the Canonical Choice. And now inertia has returned, and I'm back in the warm bosom of mother Google. I'm pretty sure that Yahoo! Search and Live Search are basically as good as Google nowadays. When it debuted, Google was qualitatively better than any other search engine, but today Google's lead is based mainly on branding.
mechanical_fish 18y ago
Yes, I think it's important not to get dragged into a semantic debate over exactly how the word monopoly fails to describe this situation. Google's position may well be unique in human history, so it's not surprising that our existing laws and metaphors are inadequate to describe it precisely.
- pj 18y ago
  I think the change in the frequency of occurences of incidents of companies like google is a measure of something. It was the IBM era companies, then the Microsoft era, the Dell era, Google, then what is next? The technology is getting closer and closer to the end user, both in terms of breadth of knowledge and depth of knowledge. Ease of access. IBM's were big computers in corporations, Microsoft were pcs in the early adopter homes, dell in the mainstream homes, Google on the Internet. What's next? Mobile? Wireless? Cloud Computing? It's one hurdle after the next in both directions. Hardware footprint minimization, proliferation, and ease of use. Longevity. Functionality. People are going to get left behind. They're just not going to want to keep up. They'll reject the new way. The rational way. The more efficient way. The faster, more productive way. The enabling way. The way toward free will.
  - ryanwaggoner 18y ago
    That's a lot of sentence fragments and I still have no idea what you're trying to say.
    - pj 18y ago
      What I am trying to say is that Google won in a blue ocean of internet advertising. Internet advertising didn't exist at one time and in it Google prospered. Same thing happened with IBM, there weren't computers in corporations before them. There weren't computers in homes before Microsoft. There wasn't a computer in /every/ home before Dell. Now there are several blue ocean opportunities being created. Cloud Computing is bringing scalability to the masses. Essentially we are looking at what Microsoft and Dell did for PC proliferation, cloud computing could do for web based information management. Mom and pops can use the same quality software that the Fortune 500 use. They can be efficient. We are going to see a rising and thriving of small businesses because now they to can have the same tools that the big companies have. Big companies spend millions and millions of dollars on software every year and throw it away. When small businesses can spend $50/mo for the same functionality, a new playing field will open. The mobile market could reach every human alive via wireless. We have netbooks selling like crazy. The workforce is becoming more mobile as well. Things are changing very quickly and there are lots of opportunities for the next google. The Google of the era when consumers become willing to pay for content and services on the web. We see great things in offerings in the SaaS market for example that consumers are willing to pay for. Google makes money on tiny fractions of huge volume. There are huge markets out there where each click, each page view, each morsel of information is much more valuable to the customer. Think about it this way, Google gets its money from advertisers, not consumers. So Google profits indirectly through the attraction of customers to the advertisers sites. Today, there are more sites that are able to make money directly from the consumer, so the numbers are way way less than google's and the google model is getting gamed. It's not free to do SEO compatibility and keep content fresh and all that. Adwords aren't so great anymore. Too expensive and no one clicks... Just like social sites are great in the beginning, those who mastered SEO in the beginning won, but it's not so great anymore for newcomers. Their algorithms like old sites that have been around for a while, so newcomers are looking for other ways to build organic traffic. There's a lot of room for another google and I suspect that as time continues, the rate at which new google's appear will become more frequent as technology become ubiquitous, smaller, and easier to use. Companies are going to make a lot of money doing things we can't even imagine right now. Shoot, this is the first president that uses email... We can live and work anywhere. We can hire anyone anywhere. Borders are coming down. I could move to Eastern Europe, Asia, Australia, South or Central America, or any number of places and have a way more fantastic life than I could afford in the U.S. and work entirely on the internet. Why wouldn't I do that? There are plenty of Twenty and Thirty somethings that would do just that, gladly and in a heart beat and they will. If you boil it down, Google isn't an internet company. They don't have scale because everyone at google still goes into the office. They don't work on their own schedule. They are bureaucratic. They are becoming a code shop. The Google model is dead. The please the investors model is dead. The focus on the customer is alive and thriving and prospering. There are countless companies out there who are making way more money in revenues than it costs to run their businesses. Google isn't one of those businesses and the way they make money... I don't know how long it can live. For companies to survive, they have to have something their users are willing to pay for. I highly doubt any of google's users would pay for google. Live search is fine, Cuil is good. Yahoo isn't half bad, in fact I like what a lot of Google's competition is doing in search, maps, images, etc. If Google topples, so will an entire ecosystem of consultants, programmers, designers, and startups that make money there. They'll be looking for something new and something new will be created to satisfy them and those who follow them to new oceans of opportunity.
yters 18y ago
It can be considered a natural monopoly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
joe_the_user 18y ago
The thing about Google is that rather than seizing a market, they created it and their continued growth involves them improving their product so that they are used even more. Sure, businesses depend on Google but Google was the first search that could be depended on. Google was the first search entity of any sort that allowed the web to be effectively monetized. They are that "???" in the three step plan "1. Get attention, 2.??? 3. Profit". Google did not create the web but they certainly "grew" it and thus they are currently the "good" kind of monopoly, one which aims to sell as much as possible, rather than the bad kind of monopoly which aims to extract the most rent possible from selling the same amount of stuff year-in, year-out (the model for a bad monopoly would be an unregulated electric company. Microsoft only partly fits this model but MS is still clearly closer to being a rent-extractor than Google).
c00p3r 18y ago
Google is a brand with good karma, like Nokia or Apple. That's not enough to stay alive, but no idea works standalone. Google did many smart steps to attract the geeks, and it is how they probably will win the battle for SMB market.

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
  - inerte 18y ago
    I stand corrected, thanks for the Cola war insight :) I guess I let out my own personal taste and bias and some faulty memory...
    - axod 18y ago
      ;) I actually can't stand the taste of Coke, but love Pepsi with a passion. Some people think I'm weird/being petty, but it's just a different taste.
      - zack 18y ago
        I don't think you're being weird. I do think you are conditioned by brilliant marketing. My Decision Making class did a taste test last quarter. The professor poured some Pepsi into 5 cups, and then poured some Coke into 5 cups, and then invited a student to do a taste test. Before the test began, she indicated a strong preference for Pepsi; then, after each cup, she was asked to indicate whether it was Coke or Pepsi. The result? She choose Pepsi/Coke with exactly 50% accuracy. Go figure. It's not a different taste. It really isn't.
      - axod 18y ago
        (Reply to Zack who's comment is dead): You can tell even by the smell. Perhaps you think I'm lying, but when served a brown fizzy drink in a cup, I can tell with 100% accuracy wether it is Coke, Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, or Pepsi Max.
        twopoint718 18y ago
        I don't know exactly why but that sounds very funny to me. I would boast of this ability all the time.
        axod 18y ago
        The long winter evenings of blind taste testing at our house simply fly by ;)
- Tichy 18y ago
  "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." Just to clarify, I suppose you mean people thought the Google site with the Yahoo results was better than the Yahoo site with the Google results?
  - inerte 18y ago
    Yes, that's exactly what I mean. Yahoo search results on a Google webpage were considered more relevant than Google search results on the Yahoo webpage! Google is a brand. Some people automatically think it's better.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
- chris11 18y ago
  I checked this out, searching for nytimes.com with yahoo google and Microsft. The results were mostly the same. All sets of top ten results were from nytimes.com. The layout was almost the same, in fact it looked like Google and Yahoo were based on the same template. The speeds for yahoo and google were basically the same. Microsoft seemed a tiny bit slower, but they didn't mention the actual speed of the search, so I don't know for sure. The number of results were different. Microsoft had 1.8million, Google had 32million, and Yahoo had 59 million. Google had a mini search bar under the first result, nytimes.com, that let you search in the site. That feature is nice. Even though the sites are almost identical, I still preferred Google's results. The other sites seemed ugly. I'm not sure why that is. It could be that I have used Google for awhile, and just gotten used to their format. Or, it could be that Google does more effective research on how users interact with the site. For example, I remember seeing the video from Google tracking eye movements while searching. The eye movements were mainly focused on the top left corner of the search result. Yahoo's site design interfered with that eye movement. They have a giant red Yahoo in the top right corner. It stands out, and I think it is annoying and distracting.
aneesh 18y ago
Try again now. Both Yahoo! and Live are pretty close to Google right now in terms of relevance. Branding is another story, but the results aren't bad.
mhartl 18y ago
A few months ago I switched to Yahoo! Search as an experiment. I'm quite confident that, if you'd replaced the Yahoo! branding with Google's, I would never have known the difference. But yet I switched back. Why? I was hosting the Silicon Valley Rails meetup, and our speaker Emmett Shear (of Justin.tv) had forgotten to bring his laptop, and had to borrow mine. I was so uncomfortable at the idea of my home page---Yahoo!, of all things, and not Google!---being broadcast to a room of Rails hackers that I changed it back to the Canonical Choice. And now inertia has returned, and I'm back in the warm bosom of mother Google. I'm pretty sure that Yahoo! Search and Live Search are basically as good as Google nowadays. When it debuted, Google was qualitatively better than any other search engine, but today Google's lead is based mainly on branding.

mechanical_fish 18y ago

Yes, I think it's important not to get dragged into a semantic debate over exactly how the word monopoly fails to describe this situation. Google's position may well be unique in human history, so it's not surprising that our existing laws and metaphors are inadequate to describe it precisely.

pj 18y ago
I think the change in the frequency of occurences of incidents of companies like google is a measure of something. It was the IBM era companies, then the Microsoft era, the Dell era, Google, then what is next? The technology is getting closer and closer to the end user, both in terms of breadth of knowledge and depth of knowledge. Ease of access. IBM's were big computers in corporations, Microsoft were pcs in the early adopter homes, dell in the mainstream homes, Google on the Internet. What's next? Mobile? Wireless? Cloud Computing? It's one hurdle after the next in both directions. Hardware footprint minimization, proliferation, and ease of use. Longevity. Functionality. People are going to get left behind. They're just not going to want to keep up. They'll reject the new way. The rational way. The more efficient way. The faster, more productive way. The enabling way. The way toward free will.
- ryanwaggoner 18y ago
  That's a lot of sentence fragments and I still have no idea what you're trying to say.
  - pj 18y ago
    What I am trying to say is that Google won in a blue ocean of internet advertising. Internet advertising didn't exist at one time and in it Google prospered. Same thing happened with IBM, there weren't computers in corporations before them. There weren't computers in homes before Microsoft. There wasn't a computer in /every/ home before Dell. Now there are several blue ocean opportunities being created. Cloud Computing is bringing scalability to the masses. Essentially we are looking at what Microsoft and Dell did for PC proliferation, cloud computing could do for web based information management. Mom and pops can use the same quality software that the Fortune 500 use. They can be efficient. We are going to see a rising and thriving of small businesses because now they to can have the same tools that the big companies have. Big companies spend millions and millions of dollars on software every year and throw it away. When small businesses can spend $50/mo for the same functionality, a new playing field will open. The mobile market could reach every human alive via wireless. We have netbooks selling like crazy. The workforce is becoming more mobile as well. Things are changing very quickly and there are lots of opportunities for the next google. The Google of the era when consumers become willing to pay for content and services on the web. We see great things in offerings in the SaaS market for example that consumers are willing to pay for. Google makes money on tiny fractions of huge volume. There are huge markets out there where each click, each page view, each morsel of information is much more valuable to the customer. Think about it this way, Google gets its money from advertisers, not consumers. So Google profits indirectly through the attraction of customers to the advertisers sites. Today, there are more sites that are able to make money directly from the consumer, so the numbers are way way less than google's and the google model is getting gamed. It's not free to do SEO compatibility and keep content fresh and all that. Adwords aren't so great anymore. Too expensive and no one clicks... Just like social sites are great in the beginning, those who mastered SEO in the beginning won, but it's not so great anymore for newcomers. Their algorithms like old sites that have been around for a while, so newcomers are looking for other ways to build organic traffic. There's a lot of room for another google and I suspect that as time continues, the rate at which new google's appear will become more frequent as technology become ubiquitous, smaller, and easier to use. Companies are going to make a lot of money doing things we can't even imagine right now. Shoot, this is the first president that uses email... We can live and work anywhere. We can hire anyone anywhere. Borders are coming down. I could move to Eastern Europe, Asia, Australia, South or Central America, or any number of places and have a way more fantastic life than I could afford in the U.S. and work entirely on the internet. Why wouldn't I do that? There are plenty of Twenty and Thirty somethings that would do just that, gladly and in a heart beat and they will. If you boil it down, Google isn't an internet company. They don't have scale because everyone at google still goes into the office. They don't work on their own schedule. They are bureaucratic. They are becoming a code shop. The Google model is dead. The please the investors model is dead. The focus on the customer is alive and thriving and prospering. There are countless companies out there who are making way more money in revenues than it costs to run their businesses. Google isn't one of those businesses and the way they make money... I don't know how long it can live. For companies to survive, they have to have something their users are willing to pay for. I highly doubt any of google's users would pay for google. Live search is fine, Cuil is good. Yahoo isn't half bad, in fact I like what a lot of Google's competition is doing in search, maps, images, etc. If Google topples, so will an entire ecosystem of consultants, programmers, designers, and startups that make money there. They'll be looking for something new and something new will be created to satisfy them and those who follow them to new oceans of opportunity.

yters 18y ago

It can be considered a natural monopoly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

joe_the_user 18y ago

The thing about Google is that rather than seizing a market, they created it and their continued growth involves them improving their product so that they are used even more. Sure, businesses depend on Google but Google was the first search that could be depended on. Google was the first search entity of any sort that allowed the web to be effectively monetized. They are that "???" in the three step plan "1. Get attention, 2.??? 3. Profit". Google did not create the web but they certainly "grew" it and thus they are currently the "good" kind of monopoly, one which aims to sell as much as possible, rather than the bad kind of monopoly which aims to extract the most rent possible from selling the same amount of stuff year-in, year-out (the model for a bad monopoly would be an unregulated electric company. Microsoft only partly fits this model but MS is still clearly closer to being a rent-extractor than Google).

c00p3r 18y ago

Google is a brand with good karma, like Nokia or Apple. That's not enough to stay alive, but no idea works standalone. Google did many smart steps to attract the geeks, and it is how they probably will win the battle for SMB market.