Google will Eat itself - Excellent article I must say!!

I don't know if everyone has read the following article but it really is great. Please concentrate on the last three lines. I have highlighted them for you.

Trust me. Its very true if you understand those lines.

Hack the Google self.referentialism - Google Will Eat Itself


Bari/Vienna, 18 December 2005

How can a dictator be funny for the people ? One chance is to know how to entertain the people, while continuing to influence every decision they make, so invisibly maintaining the totalitarian power untouched.

Google’s management knows very well how to entertain surfers. They are not a (totalitarian) government, but they are the first, and almost only reference for most of the internet users. Moreover they periodically announce and release new, effective (and entertaining) services. People like these services. People want them and want even more of them.

It’s not a Microsoft-like type of monopoly at all. On the Google planet everything works and is easy and funny. Everything is light (as the interface) and tasty (as the images search), resource-rich (as Gmail) or fast and updated (as Google News). So the "cream" of fun and the "strawberries" of interesting results are flavouring the Google dictatorship. In fact we’re talking of a monopoly, or so, in a certain number of strategical net economy sectors.

The Google database is an incredibly valuable bunch of data. It’s constituted by the most visited pages of the net. But they are selected through the Google’s page rank algorithm. It’s the paradigm of their self-referential game : the moment they had enough credibility they established the web filter criteria, and then, being the first source, they decided what the content of this source would be.

On the other hand the database of searches and the requests of other services (news, images, cheap prices, personal mail) is even much more relevant. In fact, it can be localized and statistically analyzed, and crossing locative, general and product searches, constitutes the secret dream of every Internet marketing executive. It deals to a frightening perspective of ’profiling’ the Google’s users.

The common perception is that Google offers chances of augmenting the personal information power in exchange of small and digestible amount of advertisement.

But all the recorded data (the queries and their respective users) are simply ignored by the users, which are hypnotized by an almost perfect virtual machine.

This funny empire has another crucial element : the advertisement. Goggle is the biggest player in the net advertisement business (actually adv is its core business). Being the most visited search engine, it attracts billions of users. Their billions of eyeballs are seeing Google’s pages with the above mentioned textual advertisments, that everybody can fairly buy (AdWords).

On the other end, tons of people have become "publishers" through the giant blog phenomenon. So they are entitled to share the bits of profits through the Adsense program. They accept to display this tiny text advertisment in exchange of a small amount of money for every click on them. This process is protected and monitored for preventing abuse.

The final (actual) scenario is Google as the giant middleman. It sucks money from the advertisers offering a targeted portion of the global webspace. And it gives spare changes to the publishers for their collaboration. It sucks infos from the websites (and news, images, prices) and it releases it to the user’s queries. Being in the middle it is more and more the unavoidable balancing center of the system. But we’re not talking about a natural systems. We’re talking about business and predominance.

Google’s position is predominant in the same moment it enteres a new business field with a new service. It’s the Google effect : creating consensus on a new business, even if it instantly gets the predominant position.

The greatest enemy of such a giant is not another giant : it’s the parasite. If enough parasitites suck small amounts of money in this self-referentialism embodiment, they will empty this artificial mountain of data and its inner risk of digital totalitarianism.


Source : http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Hack-the-Google-self.html

 

Not a bad article, but I don't forsee Google going away anytime soon.

 

But if lots of small companies emerge, they will definitely eat into the market and that will certainly hamper business for google. Think about it.

 

Hmmmm. The general thrust of the article I find interesting, and a good warning though I'm not sure how google collects data on me, and my searches, so I'm not sure how to combat this. However I find the logic of the end summation to be somewhat questionable. Also, the article reffernces Gwei.org, which explains it a bit more clearly. Interesting that their model estimates it will take over 200 years for gwei.org to own google at the current rate.

 

Nope, they estimate much more then 200 years. They estimate more then 200 million years:

 

well said i do agree with you...even if they eat small % they still eat!

 

or do the opposite , make it that much stronger.

 

Its operating on the law of averages. For example, I start running a small advertising service like Google Adsense and say 100 people use my service on their websites. So, Basically, I have stopped those 100 people from going to google.

So, if 100 such advertising services start, google loses 100 x 100 = 10000 such people's business which is a considerable loss. And this is a very small scale thing that I am talking about.

This is happening every day. New contextual ad services are coming up.

 

And it turns out that you can't make a living off those 100 people and you die and go to heaven or you don't have enough of a consumer reach for those 100 people and then you die and also go to heaven.

technologist its not as easy as you think !

 

I agree with what you say too. I didn't write the article and I am not trying to justify anything here. I am just impressed by the article and wanted to share with you all because we never think like that, you know.

 

I agree..that's the problem with the small companies they have small arms and small reach....

for an advertiser google has worldwide reach...and as a publisher they have a lot of ad inventory..

Google will be around for a while

 

My apologies. I'm used to seeing the symbol "." used for the decimal point and the symbol "," used for commas for easy separation, not the other way around... however anything that is more than 200 million years is also more than 200 years, so my statement is still valid.

 

Small concurence will make google stronger a bigher concurence maybe make them litlle hard to florish but at this moment it's quite unposible maybe in few years

 

You ever hear of the Borg? You will be assimilated.

Just my take on this subject.

 

All of us adsense publishers are already assimilated.

The web works on a few factors: a lot of small sites on all kinds of subjects and a few big sites to help navigate the chaos. Digg, Stumbleupon and google are examples of big sites like that (though perhaps Stumbleupon isn't quite there yet - still it helps navigate the chaos). The point is: no chance in hell that the small fish eat up the big fish. How many mice have you seen crush elephants? (even though elephants are reportedly scared of mice).

Doesn't mean google is going to rule for ever. Everything that we know in this world has the potential to die. And if things get too big, they get unwieldy. For every successful google product - we forget about 3 that didn't go anywhere.

The web is so young: what are the chances that the biggest player we know online is the biggest thing we are going to know for the next 50 years? No idea.