I remember reading an article in WIRED that stated that MSN has an insanely high R&D budget but it consitantly falls behind Google. What's the deal? I never understood what makes google so effective.... I also heard the Microsoft is planning to incorporate web-search technology into offline components, such as documents on a personal computer. Would this be enough to overthrow google?
I think Google's biggest asset is just the general way the run the company and solve problems. So far no one can compete with them there. You can't be bought (well, not like other search engines at least). You can't buy your way into natural rankings. As long as natural rankings can be bought, the search engine cannot be relevant. So from that regard they are going to be more relevant. They solve problems programatically, so they scale better (Yahoo for example has a staff of people that manually look at and filter sites from the index. Not practical if you ask me.) Google instead tries to actually understand the page algorithmically for spam filtering. Of course neither method is 100%, but Google's method scales better because computers are cheaper than staff. Google innovates, while other companies try to mimic what Google does. PageRank was revolutionary when it came out, Google answers, the Google API, Google News, Google Catalogs, Google Local, Orkut, etc. The things Google doesn't invent, they do better... Froogle, Google groups, Image search, Gmail, translation, etc. Things they acquire, seem to be the best of breed.. Blogger, Picasa, etc. Google as a company encourages free thinking and innovation from their employees (all employees spend 1 full day per week working on whatever personal project they feel like). I don't particularly *love* Google, but they are doing many things right in my opinion.
"You can't buy your way into natural rankings. " I noticed the "sponsored links" section of yahoo. And they aren't always helpful. I often find somethign similar or cheaper for free. "Google as a company encourages free thinking and innovation from their employees (all employees spend 1 full day per week working on whatever personal project they feel like)." But if microsoft can have full-time employees dedicated to innovation...I hear the budget for R&D had LOTS of zeroes. Of course passion is important, and so is a love for your company, but money speaks louder than that for many people. And I'm sure the best in the business want to be payed top-dollar for their work.
It sounds good on paper, but in all the years Microsoft has been around, they have failed on the innovation front IMO. Throwing money at developers to mimic something that's already been done works well, but innovation is different. Given an infinite amount of money for salaries, how many "normal guys" would you think it would have taken to equal the innovations of Einstein?
I think shawn is right on innovation. MS isn't innovative, they just copy and compete and destroy the small guy who was the innovator.
"they just copy and compete and destroy the small guy who was the innovator." I remember more than a few people cheering when a cartoon charactacture of Bill Gates was shot in the Southpark Movie. :lol: Microsoft itself started in this manner. I remeber Bill Gates buying the source code he would originally make tons of money from for a small one-time price. (I don't know if it's true - but it was in the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley <b.o.a.t.s>)
Things don't have to be this way - maybe one day some upstart will sling a sledgehammer in the pallid face of the current computer tyrant.
I don't how long Google's reign will last, but it may not be there forever. Anyone remembers the good old days when everyone kept saying that altavista was the best SE in the world, and was sold for hundreds of millions of dollars? I'm not saying M$ or Yahoo will best Google, but who knew what google was 5 years ago? Who knows how many will still be using it in 5 years time? The only major SE/directory who's still around from the "good old days" is Yahoo because they diversified their offering and didn't stick only to the SE/directory market. Google is diversifying, but who knows what kind of stupid business decision they can come up with in the future? As for the next big SE, I read in businessweek a few month ago that we should keep an eye on clustering engines, such as Vivisimo. It's interesting, but give it a few more years and many (L)users who haven't figured out yet that searching for more than 1 word is better or that the advanced search option exist will be using those clustering engines because it sorts out their results in categories for them. Some kind of mid-way point between a pure SE and a directory. In the meantime, I SEO for Google, next year we'll see. Dji-man
I reckon Google will last for a while only until someone comes up with a desktop SE that works well ..... In any case, as far as Google's search results are concerned, I think they have lost their 'relevance' especially since Google starting working on trying to make them more relevant. BIG sites are favoured in the top 10 results so much that if a travel site publishes a page on health issues, it can make it to the top 10 and beat the 'real' sites related to that topic. Also, the top 10 results seem to display a lot of directories and indexes, instead of displaying the actual sites. I reckon Yahoo is much more 'relevant' just working on more traditional methods ....... Of course, having said that I do spend a lot of time optimising my sites for Google and trying to make it to the top spots. And will continue to do so, till people keep using it.
I think the industry is maturing and consolidating. The top 3 are well-branded and aren't afraid to buy answers to holes they can plug in their own proprietary systems. Unless someone can come up with something as revolutionary as a search engine that can tap directly into the users brain telekinetically to serve up answers to what they were thinking about, get used to Google, Yahoo, and MSN serving up about the same thing and using search to generate new customers for their other business divisions.
Agree. It's definitively not the same to work and receive a salary to innovate and be creative than to perform your regular job (whatever it is) and as a bonus, receive from your employer the freedom of forgetting about your regular tasks during part of your working time, and do whatever you feel like. It just works better. Most people do creative things better if they feel that they are doing them for themselves, than if they feel that they are doing them for their bosses. I think that if GG maintains this policy, we'll be talking about it for many years. Problems might come if now that they've became "public", some "corporate minded" moron gets some control over company policies and outlaws "free thinking".
This is kind of like Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing. They also encourage their people to be creative. That's where post-it notes came from and one reason 3M is so successful.
Well, the way Google setup their stock, it should not happen. They are essentially non-voting shares. So if you buy Google stock, you really are just "along for the ride", rather than actually being able to change the direction of the company.
I am not fan of Bill Gates or whatever but i think buying a piece of code and turning it into software empire cannot only be called as innovator but may I say a "Genius". Hey he is one of the richest man in the world (if not the richest) And google had almost the same story. They also turn a piece of code into search engine empire! ... the difference is they build their own code.
yeah. I think it's called preffered stock. But does this mean that google will still be headed by what? 3 guys? It's nice to cut down on the beaurcracy....but i guess such a radical idea is part of what made google so successful.
Yeah Scroeboard I agree. I don't mean literally telepathy. But some new innovation that tries to capture "intelligence." That's what pagerank was back in the day. Backlinks are basically a moderation tool; pagerank is an attempt to algorithmically "clone" human intelligence. And it worked great, until we seos reverse engineered it. I spend some time thinking, how could we get that effect back, using some other thing? Google has this "vote" option on the googlebar that seems like it might be something in the right direction. I don't think anybody actually uses this vote feature, but what if they did, and what if they could do it better? Well, seos would probably build bots on a distributed ip proxy network that "vote" for their sites so that wouldn't work either. But yeah, we need to get back to telepathy, somehow. Does anybody have any brainstorms in this direction? thomas.
The don't need telepathy. Quoted from GG Privacy Policy: http://www.google.com/privacy.html "...Google collects limited non-personally identifying information your browser makes available whenever you visit a website. This log information includes your Internet Protocol address, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your query and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser. We use this information to operate, develop and improve our services." Meaning: They might (some believe they already do) deliver custom information and search results based on user profile.