> Google’s core DNA is search and engineering, though some would say engineering that is driven by the economics of search, which makes it hard for the company to see the world through any other lens.
I would nitpick slightly. Google core DNA is advertising. Search is a huge component to driving their advertising business, but let's not pretend that they are driven by anything other than ad revenue.
WPP Group is the biggest in the world. Does Google have the same DNA as WPP Group? Does that mean we can tell what Google will do by watching what WPP group does?
Google was an engineering and search company before they had any advertising whatsoever. There are just things about what Google did then, and do now, that pushed them into an advertising based revenue model.
Google's technology is based on gathering information about the structure of the web and user behaviour. That is their core competency, nobody does it better than them. They leverage that core competency, that killer unique advantage, to earn revenue through advertising. Is HBO's DNA advertising and subscriptions? Sounds like a magazine publisher to me, does HBO have the same DNA as Vogue Magazine or Time?
Yes understanding their revenue model can tell you useful things about the constraints on a company. It can tell you about the forces that act on them to direct their behaviour, but to say that it constitutes their DNA is to put the cart way out in front of the horse.
If Google finds a new revenue stream other than advertising, they will deploy their core competencies to exploit it, just as the carniverous ancestors of Panda Bears adapted to a herbivorous diet. Dont confuse ecological niche for innate nature.
I think you're confusing an ad agency with what I'll refer to as an ad service.
An ad agency works with companies to produce ads. It does the concepting and production of ads(etc.).
An 'ad service'(unsure of proper name) provides the medium of which to display the ads. These include tv stations, google, youtube(owned by google), facebook, amazon, all those annoying ones in free mobile games etc.
That said I agree that just because google provides a platform for ads doesn't mean it's "dna" is based in advertising. It's a core component of the company, though, and drives everything else the company does.
Google was incorporated in September 1998. They closed their A round in June 1999. AdWords launched in October of 2000, but they were selling ads through sales people for quite a while before that. Selling ads was always the plan from day 1.
Yes, as an academic research project. We can quibble over what it means to be "released", but the main point is that when it came time to try to monetize the technology, it was advertising from day 1. No other revenue-generation model was ever tried, or even seriously considered.
It was always in the long term plan though. Maybe not at the very beginning when Google ran their index out of a dorm room, but ads as monitization must have been the plan very early on, even if it took some time to work out the implementation.
> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users
> For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
> Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.
And most importantly
> But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
I think especially the last statement shows very well that they were ideologically opposed to advertisement-funded search engines.
In no way. The last statement very clearly is ambiguous, and does not preclude the creation of ad-driven revenue. They are in fact saying, "These are the problems with current ad-driven search services" and very heavily implying "we're going to do it differently."
> How was Google making a living before advertising?
It wasn't. Every search engine at the time had struggled to make money. It wasn't until Google "borrowed" pay-per-click auction bidding from Overture that advertising became their focus.
I suspect they'd planned to roll out enterprise products. (You know - "the box" - like they did in Silicon Valley). That business started later (circa 2002):
remember the banner ads in search engines before google came about? or how you usually had to go through ten pages of results in order to find what you wanted?
google was an intentional step away from the kind of “engagement” that so much of social media represents — and FB epitomizes. the problem with your argument is that it loses sight of what is really at stake here.
> remember the banner ads in search engines before google came about? or how you usually had to go through ten pages of results in order to find what you wanted?
Not my memory of Altavista. Also, when I google any book ever written, I don't hit any link not trying to sell it to me, just showing me wikipedia copy, and/or trying to trick me into something completely unrelated until around the tenth page.
I moved to Google from Altavista _specifically_ because of how shitty the experience had become.
It was good during the days of digital.altavista.com but they quickly started adding a lot of noise to the point where the actual power of a search was relegated to a small search field and a bunch of hard-to_parse results. Maybe they were not banners, but it was still a lot of crap.
I think Google quickly learned that lesson. I was expecting them to pivot to a website full of gunk but it didn't really happen. For better or worse, they found other ways to make money.
* reviews,
* analysis (historical context, more about author etc),
* other peoples thoughts about that book,
* free legal copy on Guttenberg,
* I am bored and dont care what comes out as long as it is interesting (which excludes selling places due to them not being interesting).
I just don't see the behavior the op is describing.
I tried searching for the last 5 or 6 books I've read, in every single case the results that came up were Amazon and Wikipedia, but also Goodreads, the authors website, at least one review or article about the book, and several had wikis.
In the main results I never saw more than two places to buy the book (unless the authors are selling it directly through their site, I didn't check). The bar on the right side of the page did include additional places to buy the ebooks, but it also includes places to borrow the ebooks, which is a cool feature I didn't even know existed until now.
I would venture to say that the ads are tied directly into their core DNA of search. The ads are tied to keywords and demographics (which is basically an ad searching for the correct person to be shown to).
Google is monetizing on the huge effort and improvements of their search machines. Gmail, Google docs, are just more paths to learn information about their users (investment)
The money comes in from promising to the real customers that they will deliver the right ad to the right eyes.
>would nitpick slightly. Google core DNA is advertising. Search is a huge component to driving their advertising business, but let's not pretend that they are driven by anything other than ad revenue.
How quick people are to forget the 20 page research paper by Larry Wall and Sergey Brin that started all this: "anatomy of an ad engine", I think it was called.[1]
Google could exist even if it was just an empty page with banner ads, as long as it could get people to visit it, for example if it paid Firefox to set it as the default startup ad page. It doesn't really need to offer any services and has never been about that.
I'm very surprised to see this downvoted to -4. So, the actual history is that they came up with the technology first, and when they needed to monetize, they were against the invasive banner ads at the time, introducing text ads instead. Google has been about technological innovation (for example, the introduction of maps was a technological innovation and then required massive acquisition of map sources) and they have done huge amounts of technical work. They've scanned millions of books, turning one page after another.
The idea that Google's core DNA is advertising is simply laughable on its face.
Looks like a duck, acts like a duck. Google lives and dies by their advertising revenue, they made have decided that engineering is a core component that creates all that advertising revenue but it's still just a means to and end
I don't think this fits the analogy. The DNA was/is search tech long before ads came around.
It's like saying Lebron James' DNA is basketball because that's how he makes all his money. In reality, his DNA is his natural athletic abilities. Basketball is something he does well because of it.
At any large company like Google (where I worked for 4 years), if you find a way to leverage a vast existing business (i.e. ads) in what you are offering, then that's naturally an advantage for you. Doing so isn't required to survive as a project within Google and many projects don't fit that mold.
Thought experiment: A Google team develops a search algorithm improvement that increases the quality of results by an order of magnitude, but reduces Adwords revenue by 50%. Would management allow that improvement to be deployed to production?
Wherever you make your money, that's your business. Google's customers are advertisers rather than users, a fact that becomes readily apparent if you ever need customer support. The PR department can spin it however they like, but the accounts department see the truth in red and black.
You are not gonna like this, but Google as any other healthy company would ship the improvement and take the short term revenue hit...they do so all the time!
The incentives are well aligned here because it’s proven that if you improve the product people will use it more in the long term!
Facebook just announced such thing a couple days ago...they are taking a huge hit in time spend (and therefore ad revenue) to increase meaningful interactions between friends and family’s.
What you are suggesting is against so much of the current american business culture that I am going to have to request some evidence here. A consistent complaint about any publicly traded company is that they are incredibly short sighted and focused on quarterly results as that is all shareholders care about.
What you have stated is that none of that is true and that everyone else is incorrect about corporate culture
I personally think there is a huge difference between the old economy and how the new players play the game...it’s really what gives the later a competitive edge in the first place, being more people focused instead of money. It just happens to be that when you do that as an outcome you end up building the most valuable companies in the world!
Facebook is just reacting to reports about fake news and Russian trolls. They don't want their users to be turned off of Facebook, so they're trying to mitigate that threat.
> You are not gonna like this, but Google as any other healthy company would ship the improvement and take the short term revenue hit...they do so all the time!
Only because they are sitting on a mountain of cash. Let’s see if a downturn has them losing a ton of money. The safe bet is on them doing what almost big company does: fight for their core market and avoid risks.
Thought experiment flawed assumptions. Can't reduce Adwords revenue by 50% overnight (unless by a bug). Think advertisers set budgets, they just get spent on different searches.
What could be reduced is the quality, and that could lead to gradually losing of revenue over time. So you have a trade-off between increase of quality here and decrease of quality there. So it really boils down to the ratio of these two quality changes.
The existence of technically focused projects within google doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of their efforts are made with advertising revenue as the overriding concern.
I mean fuck, the projects you're describing used to just be called R&D at companies. Xerox invented the PC, the mouse, the GUI and others in their R&D but that didn't change them into a computer company, they were still focused on printers
The ad business funds the majority of what they do, but that doesn't mean everything or even most of what Googlers are doing day to day is tied to ads in some meaningful additional way or that every product can be viewed through that lens.
The projects I'm describing aren't all R&D. For example the GCP products aren't dependent upon or strongly connected the their ads businesses.
There are many "technically focused projects" that have users but don't relate to ads, as a byproduct of their bottom-up culture (a very real thing there which is sometimes great and other times a massive PITA, especially when trying to accomplish anything cross-PA), or as a response to innovation at other companies. In my experience Google is, for better and worse, not the manifestation of the vision of one or a small number of people, so when I hear intentions ascribed to Google writ large (such as OP's "let's not pretend that they are driven by..."), I laugh.
Does that make sense? I don't think we completely disagree.
Google might do all those things but ads still win. Another poster put up a thought experiment about whether google would take a 50% hit to advertising revenue for an improvement in search results. The answer to that would show what Google actually is, and I believe that Google would not take the hit
Additionally google is not flat management. As much as it might feel at the moment that it's driven from the ground up, if someone higher up the chain can put the kibosh on something below them on the chain, then it is manager driven
edit: In the contrived scenario you referenced, I agree that the internal analysis wouldn't begin and end at simply "put the users first!" :P But since the vast majority of activity at Google isn't in that critical path, I'm not sure how useful the thought experiment is.
>> if someone higher up the chain can ... then it is manager driven
Again, it's not this simple. Things have gradations in the real world.
I've seen the "business case" be ignored because a VP doesn't think they could get their engineering team excited about it because (a) it's uninteresting or uncomplicated to implement and their perf-focused workers will transfer to other, shinier teams or (b) it's counter to the project's culture or philosophy and they will similarly lose people. Google is "management driven" in some scenarios and "engineering driven" in others. It's part of the gallows humor in Google that some mucky muck or PM is unable get their team to do something we think makes business sense.
edit #2: This is what is really meant by "bottom-up" in the case of Google. The specific incentives from their performance review system, the size of and breadth of projects at the company, and the degree of mobility of its engineers combine to give engineers concrete leverage over their management. I've worked at 4 very large companies and Google is an outlier in this regard. A number of success stories at Google can be traced to that structure, and at other times it's criticized as leading to inefficiency or redundancy, lack of focus or long term commitment, etc.
I'm not even sure what we're arguing about. Of course ads dominate the company, it's what drives the most revenue. If you're trying to have an informed view of the place that would allow you to predict or interpret some specific thing they do with some level of certainty, you can't just look at the mean statistic.
>...Xerox invented the PC, the mouse, the GUI and others
While Xerox invented the GUI and other technologies, Douglass Englebart at SRI invented the mouse and Henry Edward Roberts designed the first PC, the Altair 8800
Pretty sure Larry and Sergei don't give a rat's ass about advertisement, they just want to do cool tech (cf investment in AI and self driving cars, among many many other things).
Advertisement revenue is a mean to do all this stuff.
That opinion is typical of the overoptimistic tech guy that drinks the Silicon Valley Koolaid.
The ONLY incentive for Google is amount of revenue, and that means ads.
They are very good to market themselves as a friendly company that cares about engineering more than advertising, but that's Branding and Marketing! And you fell for it.
The comment you're responding to is referring to Larry and Sergey's motivations, while you're referring to Google (as a company)'s motivations.
You both could very well be right. It's (almost always) in a company's best interest to focus on profit. That profit, however, is very often used as a means for the people in charge of that company to march towards their personal motivations, which may not always align 100% with the company (but often overlap enough for a mutual benefit).
You must be kidding. Maybe this could be true for the founders, maybe they would still be nowadays developing cool technology even if it didn't make any money. This is NOT TRUE for Google. This is a company that exists solely to extract money in form of online advertisement. The moment search stops being the best vehicle for this purpose, they will boot out search to continue on their ways.
If that were true then they wouldn't have made decisions that benefited advertising over tech or the product. Do you think they didn't give a rats ass about advertisement when they disabled the "+" operator on search for anything other than google+?
Yeah coal and cigarette industries said the same thing, with blinders on, when all claims of health related problems were poopoo'd. They said no one could have known or imagined or predicted, even though they were and they did but it was dismissed by the gatekeepers.
I see pretty much total shit knowledge of history, ethics, and philosophy in the tech industry. It intentionally has blinders on, zero imagination for anything other than the good intentions rails it's wants to believe it's on. Oh no one could have known, no one could have predicted, you had no evidence that these bad outcomes were possible. It'll be the same excuses we've seen before, because no one wanted to confront the possibility and how to mitigate complex interactions, they just want the ends because that alone justifies everything.
That of course will be convenient when claiming a lack of responsibility for the outcome, shifting the blame, because only good was intended. Now trust us.
And the reason why I increasingly don't trust tech, is because the language the industry uses is consistently dismissive of basic concepts in ethics, merely accepting assertions of "good intentions" as sufficient evidence of ethical behavior.
I would nitpick slightly. Google core DNA is advertising. Search is a huge component to driving their advertising business, but let's not pretend that they are driven by anything other than ad revenue.