

Google was worth 1,838,389 workers in 1998, maybe - herdrick
http://herdrick.tumblr.com/post/45297680351/1998-google-was-worth-1-838-389-workers-maybe

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twelvechairs
There are many ways to define the 'value' of something for different purposes
- however a value derived from comparison against a task which nobody would
ever want to perform (employ millions of 'librarians' with grep) is not likely
to be useful anything.

To give some examples of different kinds of value you could assess for a
company like Google - Its value for its users (for early Google this would be
basically how much value is gained by using Google as opposed to an alternate
search engine) is for instance very different from Google's 'use-value' (how
much money Google make from it), its market value (driven by a lot of
speculation as to what Google's future might be, as well as its 'use value')
and its 'liquidation value' (of assets - assumedly very low when Google
began).

The link comes closest to looking at the value for users, however this would
be better ascertained from a closer understanding of what Google was
supplanting at the time (other search engines such as Altavista who had
results which were poorer, but not hugely so) and then trying to derive some
basis for how this might affect the 'user', rather than what the cost for
Google might be to implement their search mechanism in a technology-backward
way.

[edit] To clarify that I'm talking about valuing Google in its infancy (as per
the OP) rather than Google at present (which is obviously more than just
search) - thanks to martinced's comment below.

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martinced
_"Its value for its users (basically how much value is gained by using Google
as opposed to an alternate search engine)..."_

and:

 _"(other search engines such as Altavista who had results which were poorer,
but not hugely so)"_

I upvoted you but for _many_ Google is, and since quite a long time, just so
much more than just the search engine.

Actually I don't even search that often anymore. My girlfriend hardly ever
searches for stuff on the Internet: online life for her is GMail, YouTube (I
take it you could hard there's search inside YouTube), eBay, Amazon, FB and a
few other sites but that's basically it. What Google offers goes way beyond
search: to me the biggest benefits are, by far, a spamless webmail, online
backups and online editable/shareable Google Docs. Search is a very very very
distant fourth or fifth service compared to the rest that Google is offering.

~~~
twelvechairs
Thanks. I was really trying to discuss Google in its infancy (basically,
search) as that was what the OP was talking about. I've edited the above post
to reflect this.

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w3pm
Sorry but I don't think this analogy works. How many people would it take to
lift a plane 38,000 feet into the air at 600 mph? You can't measure the
usefulness of jet travel by such labor utility metrics, it's nonsense.

Perhaps you can quantify how much gasoline and time jets save as compared to
other methods of travel, such as by train or boat. But going on some
hypothetical equivalent of Google search with hundreds of thousands of
librarians made me stop reading midway through.

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kevinpet
No, taking your reasoning as correct, Google would have had a _cost_ of 1.8M
workers in 1998 without technology. The fact that this service didn't take off
before the technology could support it suggests that it is actually worth less
than that.

Just because I paid $4000 for a hand carved peruvian hardwood iphone case does
not mean that its actually worth that.

~~~
lurker14
Incorrect example. Your $4000 hand-carved peruvian phone was worth that, since
you bought it.

~~~
_delirium
Only if you take an extremely tautalogical definition of "worth" of limited
usefulness. If you strengthen it even a _little_ bit further, towards a
definition that takes into account a degree of repeatability, then a single
transaction is not sufficient to establish worth.

That also accords better with general English usage, where what something is
_worth_ and what a particular person _paid_ are not considered generally
equivalent. There exist phenomena such as "overpaying" and "getting a great
deal", where payment in a particular instance diverges (in either direction)
from this more robust notion of "worth". Indeed, if that were not the case,
arbitrage would be impossible.

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herdrick
Author here. Would love to get some feedback about how to make this scale of
innovation work better.

~~~
whatshisface
Measuring labor-saving devices by how much labor they save is a great idea.
But, how would you apply this to things that don't augment or replace human
abilities? (Eg, spacesuits.)

Edit: It just hit me, a spacesuit sitting on a shelf has absolutely no value.
Only when used for something does it have worth. So, since the biggest
practical purpose of spacesuits is keeping people safe while they fix things
in space, the labor worth of a spacesuit is the cost of building a robot to
replace it and the human inside it, minus the cost of the human.

If the spacesuit is being used to so something a robot could do better, (like,
say, hold a camera steady in orbit) then the labor value of the spacesuit is
negative.

~~~
nostrademons
"Measuring labor-saving devices by how much labor they save is a great idea."

This is called the "labor theory of value" [1], and dates back to Aristotle.
It was useful for agrarian economies but misses some crucial points, and so
modern economists generally don't consider it all that useful. Adam Smith's
work (which later became classical economics) was largely in reaction to
shortcomings in the labor theory of value.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value>

~~~
SilasX
The LToV is a failure as a _normative_ claim about how much things "should"
cost (edit: or, indeed, a as a descriptive claim about what we can expect
things to cost).

It's an eminently fair metric in the context the GP was trying to use it for,
which was to estimate the relative benefit to consumers (something like the
"consumer surplus") compared to other innovations in other times and places in
order to gauge relative progress esp. in saving labor.

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brent_noorda
Really interesting way to calculate this number. Coming from a completely
different angle (the job-killing calculator that says
JobsDisplaced=Profit/YearlyProfit-$60,000) I calculate that Google is
displacing only 200,000 jobs, which is only about 1/10 of your number.

But, if you figure that google's profit could instantly be about 10 times
higher than it is now by firing the 9 of 10 employees that are not in the
profit-making search group (I admit to gross simplifications) the
JobsDisplaced=Profit/YearlyProfit-$60,000 value would come close to your
~2million number.

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jonnyscholes
Surely this should be applied to 'web search engine' as an invention? Not just
to one of the products built in the image of that invention. Google made a
better search engine but its MO was still the same as Go.com or Altavista -
search web -> return (useful) results.

This would mean a much less microscopic view of its place in history but
without at least basic knowledge of /how/ Google's implementation was better
how could you know any of your calculations are accurate?

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dankingbooks
If you google "that sherlock holmes story with the dog", The Hound Of The
Baskervilles" doesn't even show up on the first page.

