

What Keeps Google Up At Night - prakash
http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/23/google-marissa-meyer-intelligent-technology-search_print.html

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gruseom
_Larry and Sergey, from the very beginning, were convinced that advertising
was something very complementary to search and the right way to monetize it._

This surprises me. I had the impression that it took them quite a while to
come to this conclusion.

~~~
nostrademons
Yeah, surprised me too. The conventional story about Google's founding was
that they were going to sell search appliances or license their tech and only
got into advertising when nobody would buy. Though I guess I shouldn't be
_too_ surprised, since Ron Garrett's blog describes working on AdWords when he
joined in early 2000.

Also...w00t, demo days is public now. I participated in that, worked with
lacker (also a HackerNews reader). Was a lot of fun.

~~~
vlad
I don't see how that is contradictory or surprising; the fact that they had an
engineer for advertising doesn't mean much, since all the other search engines
had advertising.

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Tichy
"Google has been disruptive to industry as a whole"

Come to think of it, has it been? Surely without Google, some other search
engine would have filled the gap?

I see some smaller sub-disruptiveness, such as popularizing AJAX with Google
Maps, but overall, that statement seems exaggerated?

~~~
alanthonyc
There's a reason "to google" has become a verb.

~~~
Tichy
I don't deny that they have the majority of the market share, but somehow
"disruptive" means something else to me. I haven't looked up the proper
definition, though.

~~~
Retric
I think the disruption is mostly about the quality of competition. Nobody else
really focused on the quality of the search results. Heck, Bing is not that
bad, but they are still more focused on the GUI vs. higher quality search.

~~~
diego
This could not be more false. I worked at Inktomi for four years. Inktomi
provided search results to a number of customers (MSN, AOL, Hotbot, Yahoo)
through an api but did not control the UI. When Google came into the picture
it had a superior UI compared to the horrible clutter on our clients' portal
pages.

Our management believed that people used Google because it had better results,
but our internal blind tests showed that it wasn't the case. We built internal
metrics frameworks and improved our result sets until they were at least as
good as google by objective and subjective measurements. We stayed focused on
the quality of search results for a long time and disregarded the UI effect as
we didn't control it. As a result we lost and ended up being acquired by Yahoo
for a tiny fraction of what the company had been worth at its peak.

~~~
gruseom
A fascinating comment. I never found Google's results to be noticeably better.
What got me to switch were their simple UI and, most of all, how fast they
were. These two things were of course related, since that lightweight goofy UI
was so much faster to load. Indeed, performance _is_ UI if you think about it.

I've read that studies show that if you put the Google brand on search
results, people automatically rate them as having higher quality. So a lot of
this is perception. (Quality is related to performance too. Once people notice
that a piece of software is faster, they're primed to believe that it's better
in every respect.)

Your comment confirms that the reason most people cite for Google's success is
quite different from what actually gave them an edge. Of course, once they got
it they capitalized on it bigtime.

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caustic
They didn't mention Facebook. Should they?

~~~
jacquesm
No, why ? Facebook and google operate in completely different spheres.

Twitter should be worried about facebook, after all twitter is a minor feature
that can be grafted onto a whole bunch of other sites.

Facebook and twitter fans see facebook and twitter as the be-all-end-all, they
don't realize that even though they're big they are not nearly as universal as
google.

Search + ads = product, facebook / twitter / myspace / flavour of the day =
fads / fashion.

~~~
halo
Google wants to organise the world's information.

Hard to do that when a rival website has a large proportion of that
information inside their closed garden.

~~~
litewulf
I guess though similar arguments could be made for many academic journals,
pay-walled sites and things like the deep web.

I don't think facebook is really something that is to be worried about except
as an example of a broader problem.

~~~
marcusbooster
From what I've read, Facebook has a completely different vision of search than
Google - and possible competitor in a number of areas. They want you to be
able to query your contacts as you would in "real life". A more humanistic
search versus Google's algorithmic one.

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, but that is just within their own little garden. Google has declared the
internet their garden, that's a completely different story. It turns them into
a major player instead of into a large niche.

If facebook were to die tomorrow I doubt there would be any big disturbances
in the force (and twitter wouldn't even be noticed, except for some deflation
of some egos). If google would die tomorrow morning the internet as we know it
would grind to a halt. Search now drives the majority of traffic, plenty of
people don't even know how to properly use the url bar any longer and it won't
be long before it becomes optional and the search box is your main avenue to
the web.

~~~
alanthonyc
You make a great point about how to intuitively calculate the value of a
website.

(Although I should say that I believe the sudden disappearance of facebook
__would __be a pretty big deal, just not along the same lines as the
disappearance of google would be.)

