Google's Impact on the Internet 351
Kierkegaard writes "The Globe & Mail and Fortune Magazine both wrote a piece on Google, arguably one of the most important companies in the world, and its influence and impact on the Internet. In particular, they mention the effects of Google's recent new services, like Blogger and Maps, as well as their take on how Google threatens the Microsoft Corporation. "If Sergey and Larry stick to their corporate mantra -- Don't be evil -- and are able to stem degeneration into the typically corrupt corporate ethos, who knows, they may just succeed in assuming the fair and honourable dominion over the world's information they so naively set out to achieve eight years ago in their garage.""
Google important? (Score:5, Insightful)
Internet barons... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yahoo's always behind safe money (see the Y! News vs G News)
And Microsoft is behind all evil,
Netscape survived as Firefox and
Macromedia just went to Adobe
That's a brief history of the web since Y2K
Google = "The Internet" (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps... (Score:5, Insightful)
Threatening M$ ??? How? (Score:1, Insightful)
This is like this "iPod killer" fixation: why does everything have to be viewed as a threat to M$? Is billg's incapacity to accept to have to compete (fairly) and resulting intolerance of potential competitors rubbing off everyone else?
Google a threat? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless Google pulls a rabbit out of a hat (like a new operating system), I cant see this changing any time soon.
They haven't been too evil (Score:3, Insightful)
Stay good, Google! Stay good! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google = "The Internet" (Score:4, Insightful)
They All Become Evil, Eventually... (Score:4, Insightful)
The same thing will likely happen to Google, though the term 'evil' may a bit overused. Google is a public company now, and like all public companies, they have a responsibility to maximize shareholder value. If the directors of the company will not do this, the board has a responsibility to put in place people who will.
That said, Google will become more like Microsoft and more like Adobe over time. They will try to protect their market share, they will try to prevent the entry of others into their market space that they perceive as a threat. And, given the world's propensity to pull for the "little guy" Google will in turn be perceived (rightly or wrongly) as a bully, a bad guy and therefore -- evil.
This is a natural progression for successful startups. Microsoft did not begin as a huge monolith, it was a small company that one could send an e-mail to the founders and usually get a reply. It was also a decent company from a service standpoint. They grew, their market grew and the service got a lot less personal and the stakes got a whole lot bigger. Thirty years later, they are thought of as a James Bond villain.
If Sergey and Larry stick (?!?!) (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Isn't is kinda scary? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Perhaps... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd not call that `changing the face of the search industry`. But I wasn't denying they've affected how some other companies, simply that it's not one of the most important companies in the world, which was the original, laughable claim to which I was responding.
Re:Google is way overestimated. (Score:3, Insightful)
I too used to go on USENET quite a bit to find out interesting tech information, but I stopped in the late ninties once surfing the web made getting that information a whole lot easier (and cleaner for tha tmatter). It's not a good thing when you can load up just about any unmoderated group and the first 500 threads are adverts for horse porn.
Usenet didn't keep with the times, therefore USENET is marginalized. Then again, you can still find great tech information (Novell is a great example here) on the moderated forums.
One of the most important!?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Huh??? What about, oh, I don't know... oil companies, food companies, telecom companies, drug and health industries, transportation.... I could go on, perhaps just consider companies that have been around for, oh, longer than 10 years or so for some companies that are vastly more "important" than some search engine.
The internet is not the entire world, people, much as we sometimes wish it were. If it magically went away today, the vast majority of the earth's population probably wouldn't even notice....
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Isn't is kinda scary? (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.a9.com
http://www.alltheweb.com/
http://www.yahoo.com
http://search.msn.com
http://www.lycos.com/
http://www.altavista.com/
http://www.dogpile.com/
http://search.excite.com/
http://search.looksmart.com/
http://www.ask.com/
Where are you getting this "one company" stuff? Same goes for email, just because Google knows how to design a good interface does mean they are the only option.
Re:Google important? (Score:5, Insightful)
Without Google I'd have lost hours searching through wads of irrelevant and/or paid listings in yahoo or MSN.
Without Google I'd have been lost when trying to convert teaspoons to tablespoons or quarts to liters.
Without Google, we'd be lost in a sea of paid advertisements lurking as 'relevant articles'.
Only recently have I found it more difficult to pull good results from google, but even so, their usefulness is unparalleled. Google maps is easily the best web-based mapping application. Gmail leaves other mail providers in the dust (and gives free POP access, which is rare) Google local is incredibly useful for finding nearby shops and restaurants.
I can no longer imagine a world without Google, and can only laugh at your attempt to downplay their importance in todays society.
Re:What about the not-so-good things? (Score:5, Insightful)
Which one is more evil? Refusing to provide your service to a population that could otherwise benefit from it, even in its reduced capacity, or making it available, even if you might not be happy with the terms you're required to comply with?
The correct answer -- neither. Neither one is inherently evil. The first one is petty and immature, and the second one can be construed as greedy without knowing all of the details.
Re:Google is way overestimated. (Score:3, Insightful)
google groups has done usenet harm in a way: they've now got "google groups" and most younger people don't know their NNTP from their elbow. you can now not only post to usenet via google groups, but *start up new google groups* which obviously don't propogate out to usenet - hence a google groups user's unlikely to go and start using usenet.
usenet's signal to noise ratio is somewhat higher than the web though, possibly for exactly this reason...
Re:Isn't is kinda scary? (Score:3, Insightful)
The outcry would be immediate. The Slashdot story would get 5,000 comments. There would be people who said that this proved that Google was evil, after all. And there would be people who would defend them, in the context that pop-up ads are effective, and therefore what people really want.
In the end, Google would lose a tremendous amount of credibility. People would start laughing at them. And AltaVista and A9 and MSN would work ever harder, knowing they could knock Google straight off the perch. A lot of people would stop using Google and would never come back. And the Googleplex would no longer attract the very best people, as it does today.
This is the beauty of that ever-adjusting system we call the free market. People who don't like Google will go to other search engines if they see it as truly "bad". And enough is now understood about search that it wouldn't be that difficult to create a new search engine with similar quality results.
This is our protection against Google turning "bad". They know that if they do, they lose credibility and customers. The people who run Google are smart and know where the money is: In being the biggest and most respected search company on the planet.
They're not going to give that up for a bunch of pop-up ads. But if they do, we'll desert them in droves, and they'll get exactly what they deserve.
Hope that helped.
D
Re:What about the not-so-good things? (Score:2, Insightful)
Is it better not to have slavery? Or to have slavery and abide by the law, and treat your slaves as nice as you can? I'd vote that the first one is the more socially responsible one.
Yeah, this is a bit of a stretch comparison, but the point I'm trying to make is that Google could have made a stand to say, "what you, China, is doing is wrong, and we will "do no evil." Instead, they accept the check and say, "we'll do what we can."
Can you shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding?
Re:Stay good, Google! Stay good! (Score:3, Insightful)
When the majority of firms are part of the 'dark side' then it makes more sense to go counter what they do and just let the integrity and quality of your work speak for you. Eventually, the people get fed up with the dark side shitting on them and then they turn to you as a shining example of how to do it right..without anyone getting hurt in the process.
Or so it should work in a perfect world. Either way, with the general distrust and malaise people have towards corporate America, any firm that plays a good game is alright with me.
Re:Isn't is kinda scary? (Score:1, Insightful)
You've got your web history mixed up there, nephew. Before Google, there was AltaVista, THE search engine. Yahoo! was THE web directory..the distinction being that a directory has its web pages organized in a categorical hierarchy, and back then, Yahoo! hired web surfers to do nothing BUT categorize the entire web. Yahoo!'s directory is still there, but it has really, really suffered since searching overtook directory seeking, and in general could not keep up with the exponential growth of the web.
But I miss it. It's a completely different approach to finding what you need on the web. Instead of doing a dumb search where some fancy shmancy algorithm (PageRank in Google's case) figures out with keywords and inbound links and other magic whether the page it has indexed is relevant, you actually just POINT at the topic you want and find a list of the most relevant sites or subtopics, which then lead to more specific relevant sites. If you wanted information on a topic, rather than some particular detail or fact, it was very handy.
Which makes me wonder. Part of the downfall of creating the kind of semantic tree that is a web directory is the sheer labor intensity of it. It's very hard to write good AI to do semantic categorization, so a manual approach is still the way to go. But what about the wiki approach? How about a collectively maintained web directory? Or is this what those "folksonomies" already are?
Re:Google is way overestimated. (Score:1, Insightful)
The Google groups thing was just an example of Google not being the Holy grail of the internet and the fact that openign technology to people is not alwasy a good thing.
When somethign good gets dilluted by the ignorant masses, it usually starts to suck.
Are you serious? (Score:3, Insightful)
That part is true. However, like another poster said (the first post actually) if they didn't come around we'd all just be using Yahoo, or Lycos, or one of the other companies that would probably be bigger if not for Google.
"Sergey and Brin take their job very serious."
How do you know? You know them personally? Or is this just what you read on a news clipping?
"Organizing and delivering a whole world's information/thoughts/opinions is a HUGE responsibility"
It's a search engine. It indexes web sites and delivers responses based on some criteria. It's cool stuff, for sure. But it's not like the world is in the balance and if Google gave the wrong responses world war would break out.
"they've carried it and with dignity. I see little if any abuses of the power they hold."
You stick with what works. Did you know that these guys are worth BILLIONS of dollars? And they're young?
Give Google some time. They're publically traded now. The two guys that created it will have less and less say about how things run. I mean, do you think every descision Microsoft makes rests solely on Gates?
"How many other companies could do what google does and resist the temptation to abuse their audience or subject them to slanted views/opinions or worse."
Google isn't the only game in town. If they started doing stuff like that, it's easy to just use something else. No software changes needed. No lock-in to Google. (yet.)
"Google's only agenda is to get you where you want to be."
No, wrong. SO wrong. Google's agenda is to MAKE MONEY.
Re:Perhaps... (Score:3, Insightful)
If thiis doesn't make it one of the worlds most important companies, what does?
Re:Google important? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, just like if Firefox weren't around you'd just use IE, and if computers weren't around you'd just use a pen and paper, right?
Re:Google important? (Score:3, Insightful)
Google does not organize. They simply provide a good search engine.
From an information architecture point of view, the Internet is a disaster - nothing is structured, everything is equal weight, nothing is verified, etc. It's like the deconstructionists won the war.
Google has not solved the problem of information organization, or even attempted to. Google is not the Star Trek library computer. The day has not yet come where I can "look up" what I want on the Web instead of trying to "search" or "find" it.
I'm not criticizing the Internet or Google here. I'm just pointing out that fanboys like thirteenVA are way off the mark...Google did not "figure out" how to "oraganize and access the far reaches of the Web". They just built a search engine. That's it.
ABSOLUTELY they are important (Score:5, Insightful)
If Google wasn't around, I would be using
Yahoo or whatever for my search engine.
I'd probably still be using Mapquest for maps (and cursing it).
I don't know if I'd be able to search newsgroups the way I do. Would DejaNews still be around?
I guess I'd have to use local.yahoo.com instead of local.google.com to find things in my area.
Image searching - well, I'd be out of luck.
I'd just have to figure out how to do some conversions (like celcius to fahrenheit)
And I don't even use all of Google's features. They are important, because they changed the game. They innovated, in a very simple way (to the end user). Google maps is awesome, but up until Google did it, Mapquest was "good enough". That is why they are important, because they seem to do the things they do VERY well. It would be scary to companies if Google decided to enter their area of expertise.
Re:What about the not-so-good things? (Score:3, Insightful)
Your counter example is poorly chosen. It should be more along the lines of:
"Is it better to deal with slave owners to afford their slaves with some limited freedoms, or to refuse to deal with them entirely unless they free their slaves?"
China doesn't give a rat's ass what Google thinks of its censorship policy, so taking the moral high ground is essentially unproductive posturing. The real question is is it better to make a purely symbolic all-or-nothing stand on principle, or to do as much good as you can with the limited options available?
That's it... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Remember before Google? (Score:3, Insightful)
I love the Forbes article (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, what did MS do first? The association 'MS = cool new technology' makes not sense to me. They almost missed the Internet by their own admission. I think BillG isn't pissed that didn't come up with a cool search engine but because he can't kill Google like he did with numerous others.
Re:Perhaps... (Score:3, Insightful)
5 years ago, I spent time 'surfing the web' by using things like 'Yahoo Cool Sites' and their 'Surfers Picks.' I'd get to an interesting site and pretty much read the entire thing. Sites like 'Mississippi Mobile Homes' (pre-commercialization) and 'Avocado Memories' still stick in my head many years after I first saw them.
Now, I don't look at entire sites, I only look at individual pages. I do a search on a subject and find what I am looking for. The snippet on Google ensures that I don't just randomly click on sites until I find the right one- I usually find it right away.
This is good, this is efficient, this is great. But it is a lot less fun.
I run a site (see my sig) which has about 55 different pages on it. As I look at my site statistics, I see that most of my visitors only view one page. Of course this could mean that they don't like it, so they leave. That's okay. But, my number one referrer is actually Google IMAGES. So I guess that a lot of people are coming just to steal a picture, then they leave.
So the Internet experience has changed. People no longer surf the web, they use it. But if I compare it to a magazine, I think it has lost a lot of it's charm. For instance, if I am reading Newsweek, I enjoy all of the OTHER stuff, like the comics page, the side-bars, the one page stories, the sub-stories from the main article, etc. etc. But if I was doing research on the web, I would miss all of that and go straight to yet another boring story about Iraq.
I use the web all day long, and Google is indespensible. But sometimes it would be nice just to stop and smell the roses, wander around and see what's out there. But it's hard to do when what I want is available right from the Google toolbar.
Enough Corporate Fawning (Score:1, Insightful)
It's not like the technology they have is rocket science. All they have is a software patent on fairly obvious technology.
What is really needed is a distributed search architecture they uses a similar rating system but circumvents the Google patent. Then make it a distributed crawler system and open source. We need search on the Internet as much as we need DNS. Everyone should be able to implement.
For the most part people would implement search indexing on their own sites.
It just has to get started.