5 ms·
Facts about Google and Competition
- jgalt212 13y agoHow would they know this for sure if they are only supposed to be storing searches for 18 months?
- skj 13y agoWhen we're talking about billions of queries per day, aggregate data is the only kind of data that is worth anything.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- carbocation 13y agoA Bloom filter, for example, would permit them to know this without retaining any searches.
- 3pt14159 13y agoOr even statistical sampling.
- tonyfelice 13y agoI'm sure they are storing term volume indefinitely, considering google.com/trends.
- vdaniuk 13y agoThey are anonymizing queries after 18 months, not deleting them.
- danso 13y agoI wonder how many of them are literally "new", as in, "What cures a hang over" versus "What cures a hangover", and how many of them are "new" by the time Google's computer breaks it into a normalized query? I guess to the engineers designing that process, it's all new data that their algorithm has to deal with. But it'd be interesting to see the vitality of the search for new concepts and knowledge among Google's users.
- sillysaurus2 13y agoOne measure of "newness" is if the top 10 results are the same as other queries. After all, if two queries produce the same list of results, then aren't they the effectively the same query? I doubt that's what's being used here, though.
- drakaal 13y agoI work at http://samuru.com http://samuru.com we have about 70% unique searches. With out the hordes of default install users who type in the product slogan of every commercial, or try to get the Jeopardy questions before the clock runs out, we don't have a great cache hit ratio. Combine this with the fact that Google is doing more and more to get Cache Collisions in their results (returning results that don't contain all the words in your search because it deemed word unimportant, or using synonyms) and it is hard to compete on speed. That's why we don't. We compete on the idea we have better results.
- breck 13y agoA few years ago it was reported at being 20-25%. http://searchengineland.com/google-25-of-queries-are-new-adding-question-engine-11535 http://searchengineland.com/google-25-of-queries-are-new-add...
- hrasyid 13y agothis may be a stupid question, but what does the link have to do with "Google and Competition"?
- yohui 13y agoThe previous title was: Google: "15% of the searches we see everyday we've never seen before." The linked page does come from Google's "Facts about Google and Competition", but the section "About Search" appears to be interesting for broader reasons.
- jfoster 13y agoThis is a classic "made for regulators" set of pages. The title lets regulators know that it's for them, but the content has to explain Google's business as simply and positively as possible. You'll also notice that when you click through each of the pages, almost every criticism that could be lobbed at Google by a 3rd party is countered in some way. Also note that the page came about mid-2011, around the same time when Microsoft was beating their "Google is a monopoly" drum. http://web.archive.org/web/20110826063413/http://www.google.com/competition/howgooglesearchworks.html http://web.archive.org/web/20110826063413/http://www.google....
- wmf 13y agoThis is a response to http://www.fairsearch.org/ http://www.fairsearch.org/ which was created by a coalition of Google's competitors to try to convince governments to regulate Google.
- nextstep 13y agoCompletely off topic, but why can't I keep the page zoomed out far enough to view the entire width of a paragraph? I'm on my iPhone; is Google doing something screwy to fuck with iOS users?
- Mikeb85 13y agoUsually these issues are due more to browser settings...
- tedunangst 13y agoSafari on iOS doesn't have many settings... The page is just broken.
- Mikeb85 13y agoI mean Safari might be rendering it wrong by default. The fact there are few settings is a limitation which may or may not impact the rendering... Either way I doubt it's any sort of ploy to fuck with iOS users...
- r0h1n 13y agoDoesn't align properly on Android/Firefox too
- tinbad 13y agoI have the same problem. I also thought Google is punishing me for using an iphone, just like they did with maps ;)
- gettheyayo 13y agoFunny but this search looks very, very different and worse now http://www.google.com/competition/images/search-algorithms.png http://www.google.com/competition/images/search-algorithms.p... The fat is that Google can affect their competitors and website owners in many ways.
- lubujackson 13y ago"we can create computing programs, called “algorithms”" I don't think that word means what you think it means.
- jimktrains2 13y agoYeah, it's not very clear or clean, but also take into account the audience this site is aimed at.
- applecore 13y agoIt's funny how a monopoly will pretend they’re not a monopoly while the non-monopolies try to pretend they are.
- albertyw 13y agoSun Tzu - Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak
- gibwell 13y agoThe whole 'algorithms do the ranking' thing is a misdirection. Algorithms do of course rank pages, but they do so according to criteria chosen by humans employed by Google. Google absolutely chooses which pages rank highly and which do not according to their own subjective human judgement, applied by machine. It is disingenuous of them to pretend otherwise.
- daliusd 13y agoIt feels like something is wrong with your comment. I'm pretty sure that Google does something what looks more like A/B testing than law making process. That basically means that you should have some magic power to guess how adjusting one parameter (I don't even speak about multiple) will affect final result. Could you guess how mathematical attractors will behave by changing some parameters? Are you sure Google hires super geniuses that can guess weather? If they do why Google has not released they weather prognosis service yet that would wipe-out all competition from the scene?
- gibwell 13y agoThey don't need magic powers. They employ hundreds of human raters to judge the quality of search results according to Google's criteria and biases.
- pedalpete 13y agoCan you give a concrete example of this? What 'criteria' is chosen by humans? Do you mean stuff like are the key terms in the h1 tags? I would still consider that an algorithm doing the ranking, and PageRank also is the major factor in deciding what gets returned, and though a human wrote the mathematics, they aren't scoring each page individually to quantify the value of each link.
- drakaal 13y agoGreatest Living American. Google it. Read how I was the greatest living american, Colbert was, and then an seo firm was. All in the matter of a few weeks, because google changed scores to "hand job" the results.
- azifali 13y agoIt's funny that Google is publishing this. I work in the ad tech industry and Google did this to us 3 months ago, in order to connect to ad exchange Signed contracts of about 200 pages long, including really long NDAs Took $35k deposit Put us through Dev / Testing Cycle including a few hundred million hits each day for about a month. After spending 3 months on it, they said that we were profiling user data (which we were not - it was an ignorant mistake on our part in checking an item YES in the contract rather than NO). We pleaded, begged and argued with no merit. Google blocked us from accessing their ad exchange .. In the meanwhile...Google does user profiling openly, mining search queries, Google+, Google Maps and everything else available at their disposal, including the kind of apps that you open on your phones (non android included, thanks to Admob). It seems to me that they are deliberately blocking any fair competition in the marketplace. If this is not a monopoly, then what is this supposed to be?
- ronilan 13y ago"For every search query performed on Google, whether it’s [hotels in Tulsa] or [New York Yankees scores], there are thousands, if not millions of web pages with helpful information." True. But there is exactly one Trade Winds Central Inn in Tulsa. If I look for [hotels in Tulsa] right now, the name of that inn is prominently displayed in the "Hotels in Tulsa on Google" box. Clicking the name will lead not to a page about the inn but to a page of search results where that specific inn is again prominently displayed at the top. Clicking that link will bring a booking page where Expedia, Priceline and multiple others bid on providing booking service for that specific inn. And if I scroll all the way to the bottom of that page I find a little link: http://www.tradewindstulsa.com/ http://www.tradewindstulsa.com/ That's the the one vital link for that one little inn in central Tulsa, Arizona. The "algorithm" placed the name of the inn on the top of the front page. Then it placed the actual link two clicks deep and at the bottom. The "algorithm" is not stupid...
- skj 13y agoIf you're looking for "hotels in Tulsa", you almost certainly want to book a hotel. Hotel booking sites seems like good search results. If you're looking for "Trade Winds Central Inn in Tulsa", the first result, after one ad, is www.tradewindstulsa.com/. Yes, Google displays a lot of ads sometimes. But those sometimes are almost always when you are looking to purchase something, and Google works hard to make sure those ads are things you're interested in purchasing.
- dzhiurgis 13y agoGoogle Search is broken. Even Verbatim search starts to look fishy. Search for 'engine oil' and you will find 'health benefits from using fish oil'. I'm tired.
- bluecalm 13y agoInteresting, I searched for "engine oil" and I don't get anything about fish oil in 5 first pages of results. First two hits are the most relevant as well - wikipedia entries.
- dzhiurgis 13y agoJust a poor hyperbole, yet I don't believe you haven't seen these issues before. Just looking now to fix a Wordpress site that a cheap developer left us without any documentation. Search for "wordpress schema explorer", results: Outlook Web Access 2003 doesn't work with Internet Explorer 10 Some SOQL and Salesforce results (can you even turn off personalisation?) Crystal Reports 2008 Database Explorer Doesn't Show All Schemas Verbatim results: visual studio 2008 - How do you open XML Schema Explorer - Stack ... There is a single mention of Wordpress in that page: at the page footer. Also, how about inability to filter by date AND verbatim results?
- vdaniuk 13y agoAnecdotal example of broken queries != broken search.
- confluence 13y agoMaybe I'm just a cynical, skeptical bastard, but if you have to actively state that you have serious competition, then I can quite reasonably assume that you are, in fact, a total monopoly. Welcome to the Ministry of Truth, my friends. Let the doublethink engulf your senses, and may the newspeak slip off your tongue, for it is clear that Big Brother is watching, and it appears that he is deathly afraid of the EU. May the DOJ have mercy on his soul.
- mfarid 13y agoI feel Google will get replaced soon. The fact that search is getting more personalised is hurting me more than anything else. We dont get unbiased results. The User experience will definitely die down with this !!!
- gabriel34 13y agosee duckduckgo and bubble
- BitMastro 13y agoThink out of the box: you most certainly WANT personalised result. What you don't want is biased news
- mfarid 13y agoimagine a republican seeing more republican friendly results and a democrat seeing democratic results. Now, this would make Google really look unreliable at some point of time !
- BitMastro 13y agoYes, I've seen (as many others did) the filter bubble video, but I'll propose a counter argument: imagine looking for "python" and having results referring both to wildlife and programming languages. The questions that I asked myself after watching the video are: What is the expected result? Are there any logical fallacies that I need to consider? What are the flaws associated to a point of view? What are the flaws associated to the other point of view? Why are they flaws? What can be done to fix them? If some things cannot be done, is there any workaround?
- CodeGlitch 13y agoI've been trying to ween myself off search engines, and rather search directly from within specific websites: Wikipedia - general information StackOverflow - programming IMDB - actors/movies etc... Obviously finding those websites in the 1st place requires a search engine or index of some kind, but I'm getting faster results going directly to the source :)
- eru 13y agoYou might like https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html