
Facts about Google and Competition - johnpark
http://www.google.com/competition/howgooglesearchworks.html
======
azifali
It'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
_" 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
If 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.

------
confluence
Maybe 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.

------
drakaal
I 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.

~~~
fogleman
I just tested Samuru vs. Google with the query:

speed of the iss

I think Google clearly won in this case.

~~~
rschmitty
> I just tested Samuru vs. Google with the query:

why is grass green?

Samuru clearly won in this case

~~~
skj
They both appear to have relevant results.

------
applecore
It's funny how a monopoly will pretend they’re not a monopoly while the non-
monopolies try to pretend they are.

~~~
albertyw
Sun Tzu - Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak

------
nextstep
Completely 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
Usually these issues are due more to browser settings...

~~~
tedunangst
Safari on iOS doesn't have many settings... The page is just broken.

~~~
Mikeb85
I 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...

------
danso
I 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
One 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.

------
hrasyid
this may be a stupid question, but what does the link have to do with "Google
and Competition"?

~~~
jfoster
This 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....](http://web.archive.org/web/20110826063413/http://www.google.com/competition/howgooglesearchworks.html)

------
dzhiurgis
Google 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
Interesting, 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
Just 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?

------
breck
A few years ago it was reported at being 20-25%.
[http://searchengineland.com/google-25-of-queries-are-new-
add...](http://searchengineland.com/google-25-of-queries-are-new-adding-
question-engine-11535)

------
jgalt212
How would they know this for sure if they are only supposed to be storing
searches for 18 months?

~~~
carbocation
A Bloom filter, for example, would permit them to know this without retaining
any searches.

~~~
3pt14159
Or even statistical sampling.

------
mfarid
I 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 !!!

~~~
BitMastro
Think out of the box: you most certainly WANT personalised result. What you
don't want is biased news

~~~
mfarid
imagine 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
Yes, 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
I'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
You might like
[https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html](https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html)

------
lubujackson
"we can create computing programs, called “algorithms”"

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

~~~
jimktrains2
Yeah, it's not very clear or clean, but also take into account the audience
this site is aimed at.

------
gibwell
The 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.

~~~
martin-adams
While I wont speak for gibwell, I'm interpreting what is saying that Google do
set the criteria of what metrics deem a higher or lower ranking page.

For example:

\- More time users spend on a page indicates it's more relevant

\- More high quality inbound links indicates higher quality content

\- Content seen as spammy are considered can lower page rank

The fact is that Google don't discriminate based on the rules they set out
within their algorithm. When Google say their algorithm does the choosing, it
does, but it's the same algorithm used across the whole internet, giving a
fair competitive landscape. That's the theory at least.

~~~
devx
What worries me more is that Google is increasingly choosing to put _brands_
at the top of the search results.

Don't get me wrong, if I'm looking for the Apple website, I should absolutely
get Apple.com first in Google, and not a medium-sized blog talking about
Apple. So relevancy should matter most.

However, I fear that they are ranking bigger sites and bigger brands above
more _relevant_ posts from medium-sized, sites, too. And that I don't like.
Give the little guy a chance, especially if his post is of higher quality.

And no I don't think that if the big site's post gets retweeted 100 times and
the medium-sized' post gets retweeted 10 times, it should matter much, because
resharing is just a side-effect of being big and having a big audience, and I
think it's less about the "quality" of the post.

Google ends up promoting bigger and bigger sites at the top, while downranking
the smaller ones, who are impacted negatively by a lot of factors (smaller
age, fewer backlinks, fewer reshares, etc).

So I guess my point is, on-page "performance" (for lack of a better word)
should always count more than off-page performance.

~~~
vdaniuk
This is just a power law applied to the distribution of inbound links. As time
progresses, the gap widens.

Moreover, very frequently a little guy has content on bigger sites and enjoys
traffic from being integrated into the bigger site ecosystem. Reasoning about
search engine result pages is hard because it is a _very_ complex system with
multiple various parameters that are factored in.

