In Google We Trust

firstadopter.com writes "The New York Times (registration needed) writes about how far Google has penetrated our culture (soul sucking "Free" registration required) in the last six years with the pros and cons of its success. It's amazing to think 200 million searches are done on the search engine each day on an index of 6 billion pages."

Only appropriate...

[interiot]

It's a NYT story about google, but without the google no-reg link [nytimes.com], heh.

Google link

[Anonymous Coward]

No-reg link [nytimes.com] (free of karma whoring)

Mike Myers commentary on Goldmember

[intertwingled]

Yep, while listening to Michael Myers commentary track of the Goldmember DVD, I heard him call Michael Caine a "veritable Google of the entertainment business." Thus, we are stuck with the word google as synonymous with search or knowledge base, whether Google likes it or not.

Article Text

[Anonymous Coward]

In Searching We Trust
By DAVID HOCHMAN

Published: March 14, 2004

BEN SILVERMAN is what you might call a Google obsessive. A producer and a former talent agent best known for bringing "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" to American television, Mr. Silverman Googles people he is lunching with. He Googles for breaking news, restaurant reviews and obscure song lyrics. He Googles prospective reality-show contestants to make sure they don't have naked pictures floating around the Web. And, like every self-respecting Hollywood player, he Googles himself. Competitively.

"Guys all over town are on the phone saying, `I bet I can get more Google hits than you.' " he said recently. "It's become this ridiculous new power game."

It's more like the new kabbalah. With an estimated 200 million searches logged daily, Google, the most popular Internet search engine, "has a near-religious quality in the minds of many users," said Joseph Janes, an associate professor at the University of Washington in Seattle who taught a graduate seminar on Google this semester. "A few years ago, you would have talked to a trusted friend about arthritis or where to send your kids to college or where to go on vacation. Now we turn to Google."

The Web site that has become a verb is many things to many people, and to some, perhaps too much: a dictionary, a detective service, a matchmaker, a recipe generator, an ego massager, a spiffy new add-on for the brain. Behind the rainbow logo, Google is changing culture and consciousness. Or maybe not ? maybe it's the world's biggest time-waster, a vacuous rabbit hole where, in January, 60 million Americans, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings, foraged for long-lost prom dates and the theme from "Doogie Howser, M.D."

"In one sense, with Google, everything is knowable now," said Esther Dyson, who publishes Release 1.0, a technology-industry newsletter. "We were much more passive about information in the past. We would go to the library or the phone book, and if it wasn't there, we didn't worry about it. Now, people can't as easily drift from your life. We can't pretend to be ignorant." But the flood of unedited information, she said, demands that users sharpen critical thinking skills, to filter the results. "Google," she said, "forces us to ask, `What do we really want to know?' "

Google delivers information that can radically alter one's self-perception. About a quarter of "vanity" searchers ? those who search for their own names ? say they are surprised by how much information they find about themselves, according to a survey by the Pew Internet Project.

Sometimes, they're really surprised. When Orey Steinmann, 17, of Los Angeles, entered his unusual name on Google's query line, he discovered that he was listed on a Canadian Web site for missing children and told a teacher. After an investigation, county officials took him into protective custody last month and federal marshals arrested his mother, Gisele Marie Goudreault. She has been charged in Canada with parental abduction, said Barbara Masterson, an assistant United States attorney in Los Angeles. Canadian authorities are seeking Ms. Goudreault's extradition, and Orey is deciding whether to contact the father he never knew.

Then there are the Google miracle stories. The morning after five left-handed electric guitars owned by Robert McLaughlin were stolen from a storage room at his San Diego apartment complex last year, he searched Google's image library for guitar photos to use on a reward poster. Instead, he found the stolen goods. "The thief was selling them in a live auction," he said. "In the past, my report would have gotten lost in a mountain of paperwork. Because of Google, the cops recovered four of the five guitars that week."

While some compare Google's reservoir of six billion documents to the ancient library at Alexandria, it often feels like the shallowest ocean on earth. "Google can be useful as a starting point to research or for superficial inquests," said James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress. "But far too often, it is a gateway to illiterate chatter, propaganda and blasts of unintelligible material."

Re:Alternative search engines

[pphrdza]

Try Teoma [teoma.com], AlltheWeb [alltheweb.com], Wisenut [wisenut.com], Profusion [profusion.com] and Vivisimo [vivisimo.com] (both metasearch clustering engines)

Fun new one to try: Mooter [mooter.com]

Re:Google-centric web design

[LostCluster]

The downside is that some people still don't understand what it takes to rise in the rankings: quality content and getting linked to. The more shady web designers set up link farms and share links like a heroin addict shares needles.

Link farms, and other cheating schemes, are what result when people want to buy themselves a higher PageRank. They don't have quality content or want to wait for links to form.

Google web services (SOAP) API is very cool

[MarkWatson]

For developers, the Google SOAP API is great. I used it a year and a half ago for a demo system that answered "who" and "where" questions posed in natural language. You need to ask for a license key that allows 1000 SOAP based calls a day. In addition to searching, you can also use the Google spelling corrector with this API.

Amazon also provides a SOAP (and REST) API.

-Mark

Re:Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

You can shorten the keyword to a simple g. Just open the Google Search bookmark's properties.

Re:Google-centric web design

[TrentL]

I don't think [b] has anything to do with the page-rank score, I was just using it as an example.

"Symantically correct" html means the tags have meaning. [b] (bold) doesn't *mean* anything. Neither does [i] (italic) or [font]. The preferred tags to use are [strong], [em] (emphasis), and [h1-6]. This idea is that HTML should describe content, and stylesheets should determine how the content looks.

If you surround something with [b] tags, you're coupling the content and the presentation. It's better practice to surround content with [strong] tags and then define how [strong] looks via a stylesheet.

Re:Only appropriate...

[evilviper]

Isn't it funny that the NY times weren't doing any positive stories about google (that I know of) until Google news partnered with NYTimes, and suddenly there's one every 2 weeks.

Hmm... Not tin-foil hat time, but suspicious.

If you're too lazy to reg...

[LordK3nn3th]

...If you're lazy and afraid of possible spamming (probably not from NYT, but you never know), then try the slashdot account!

Username: slashdot2003
password: slashdot2003

Links without registration

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's one way it is done... [tech-recipes.com]

Re:6 Billion Pages?

[LostCluster]

I thought it was 4,285,199,774 pages

Google recently put out a bragging release claiming they now search 6 billion items, but in order to reach that number you have to use web search, image search, and a newsgroup search and add the numbers up.

registration needed? No!

[Marco Krohn]

Registration is not needed! Thanks to google :-)

Just google for the following URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/14/fashion/14 GOOG.h tml

(without the space in "h tml")

Google will tell you that it found no results, but that you can visit the link by clicking onto it. Do that and that's all.

Re:The multi million dollar question...

[BoldAC]

Just remember NOT to purchase google when it goes IPO.

Yahoo spiked big right after the IPO, and then it took years to return to that value.

Even Money last month noted that people should not buy stock in a new IPO as most of them rise rapidly, fall rapidly, and then level out after a few years.

I love Google and will love to own a piece of the company... I am just going to wait for the honeymoon period to be over first. :)

AC

This article has too much fluff

[Everyman]

I was disappointed in the piece. Because I'm the founder of Google Watch [google-watch.org], the reporter on the piece, David Hochman, called me twice in the last three weeks to talk about Google, for a total of about an hour. I have a feeling that the reason the piece came out the way it did is because he was constrained by his editors. The NYT has a custom-filtered AdWords feed from Google, and it's one of the reasons why the Digital NYT is in the black. Their record of publishing trenchant pieces about Google has been rather lame now for several years. Money talks, both at the NYT and at Google.

Re:Alternative search engines

[rixstep]

Visisimo is worth checking out. CMU people. Interesting concept, a lot unlike Google, and fairly debugged too.

Re:The multi million dollar question...

[Liselle]

Makes you wonder why such a profitable company wants to expose itself to the vultures at wall street?

You know, I was wondering the same thing, but it seems they might have cause. They are getting big enough that they'll have to disclose their financials. If they have to put up with the grief, they might as well get the gravy of some new investment money, no? There's an article [zdnet.co.uk] in ZDNet UK I found that goes into more detail. Explains quite a bit.

Google averages 2415 searches / second

[freelunch]

200 million searches a day, eh? Being a performance geek, I am driven to estimate the implications of that load.. Please feel free to augment and correct..

200M searches/day = 8.33M/hour = 138888/min =

*** Google averages 2415 searches / second ***

Average page size = 5,563 bytes (a search for "apple", hey I RTFA)
Assume outbound bandwidth requirement of 6000 bytes/search with some overhead.
2415/sec * 6000 bytes/search =

*** 13.88 MB/sec avg or 1200 GB/day bandwidth requirement (OUTBOUND ONLY) ***

CPU.. 2415 searches/second.. Determine required aggregate CPU capacity using various assumed values for 'CPU per search':

0.25 CPU sec/search = 603 CPU seconds required for each wall second
0.5 CPU sec/search = 1207
1.0 CPU sec/search = 2415
2.0 CPU sec/search = 4830
4.0 CPU sec/search = 9660
8.0 CPU sec/search = 19320

Assume they only run the search boxes at 50-80% util and tweak estimates accordingly. Also, the burstiness inherent in the internet will greatly impact these requirements (assume at least +30% for the second to second variations as well as the hourly variations).

Re:Core weakness of PageRank

[Anonymous Coward]

Clustering search engine [vivisimo.com]

Re:Article Text

[Anonymous Coward]

The images weren't necessarily hosted on a dynamic site. If directory browsing is enabled on the hosting web server, google could crawl it, linked images or not.

Re:My chief google frustration is...

[Amit J. Patel]

I wish google would stop passing the search words along with the URL when I click on a link. That's a privacy invasion.

It's your web browser doing that. In Firefox, go to about:config and change the network.http.sendRefererHeader value to 0. Or run a proxy like Junkbuster or WebWasher.

Re:Firefox

[pharkas]

Firefox also has the mycroft [mozdev.org] plugin built-in, so you can actually use any search engine you want. Just press ctrl-K and type the search term. Many popular pages (like dictionaries, shops) can be searched quickly this way. I use the IMDB search all the time...

Total BS

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep getting e-mails with subject lines identical to my searches. So either A. they're selling my information to the highest bidder or B. many people are taking advantage of the referring link to try and invade my mailbox.

Or C, neither. So you go to Google and search for "Foo Bar," now you get spam with "Foo Bar" as the subject line? Where did Google get your email address to share with the spammer? Thinking that website operators somehow magically have your email address just because you clicked-through to them from Google is even more of a stretch.

It sounds more to me like you've got some sort of adware or other undesirable program running.

Re:The multi million dollar question...

[HD Webdev]

though I don't know of anyone that uses Yahoo (I hear different ones are popular in different regions of the world).

It's very often a question of bandwidth available that effects the choice.

I've noticed that in 'bandwidth challenged' areas, yahoo.com is much more used for email accounts rather than msn.com or netscape.com.

Yahoo pages usually load a lot faster than msn.com or netscape.com ones, so there's a good reason to use it. Users then often end up switching (or adding) yahoo instant messenger because they use the yahoo email accounts.

Re:This article has too much fluff

[khallow]

On the other hand, Google Watch appears to be the site that routinely cries "wolf". I think there's a straight-forward reason to ignore Google Watch. You aren't providing real information [lindqvist.com], but rather vapid propaganda. For example, we're supposed to get worked up over the fact that a single Google employee worked for a year at the NSA [nsa.gov]? Is this something like the "one drop" rule? If you ever hire someone who worked for any period of time at the NSA, then you become a tool of the NSA? My point is that, if Google does something particularly heinous, then Google Watch will be well positioned to discredit or hijack any public reaction to this information. Just the kind of operation the CIA would do... hmmm...

Re:The multi million dollar question...

[jayminer]

SCO used to be a recognized brand when it was "Santa Cruz Operation". Just browse through computer magazines of late 80s and early 90s.

It's a joke

[mdfst13]

/. has included articles from the NY Times for quite a while. There have been a number of complaints that it requires registration to read. The recommended solution has been to not include NY Times articles as /. links (i.e. to refuse to post a link to NY Times the same way /. would not link to an article that required monetary payment).

The "soul sucking 'Free' registration required)" is a compromise that seems to be working (I don't see the complaints that registration is required anymore). Except when people miss the joke and complain about that.

Obviously the poster read the article. T.f. it can reasonably be assumed that the poster disagrees that registration required links should be barred from /. (as paid links presumably are -- at least I've never seen one). The extraneous comment wards off those who would be offended, while at the same time implying that they are being overly sensitive. Laugh. It's /. humor.