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Just watching as an interested outsider for all these years and partly based on the paper quoted above, much of Google's early energy and innovation was based o
by ferdo 13y ago
Just watching as an interested outsider for all these years and partly based on the paper quoted above, much of Google's early energy and innovation was based on the simple idea of extending and applying knowledge of the new field in service to users.
When that focus shifted to exactly what Page and Brin had criticized themselves in 1998, we can clearly see that it's not the interests of the users being served anymore.
The decline of 20% time appears to go hand in hand with this shift from the focus on the user to focus on the advertiser and other interests first. I'm not claiming direct correlation but it's not a stretch to say there might be some connection.
- api 13y agoI sometimes do wonder what would have happened if they'd decided to charge for their search engine. Of course, putting it behind a paywall would have been a failure. But they could have possibly done a freemium model, offering better and more detailed search capability for a small monthly or yearly fee.
- freshhawk 13y agoIf they hadn't done advertising then many of the non-search products (Gmail especially) could have been behind a paywall. The brand recognition from search would build the other businesses for them. All the analytics, google alerts, etc would have been non-free products as well. It just would have made them much, much, much less money. But god damn that search engine would be amazing by now.