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Google Businesses The Internet

What's Next For Google? 213

Posted by CmdrTaco from the one-company-to-rule-them-all dept.
j_heisenberg writes "Technology Review has a nice story about the coming MS-Google showdown. I like especially the data comparison for different media on page 2 concerning data content."
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What's Next For Google? More

What's Next For Google?

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  • King (Score:1, Redundant)

    by someonewhois ( 808065 ) *
    We all know Google is king, don't we? Who's gonna beat them, MSN? When you think about it, anything Google does is going to be amazing, even if it's been done before.

    • Re:King (Score:2, Interesting)

      by RealityMogul ( 663835 )
      Yahoo is beating them right now in terms of appropriate search results, as well as faster crawling and indexing.

      • Re:King (Score:4, Interesting)

        by RealityMogul ( 663835 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @12:02PM (#11185342)
        Just to clarify, I run a high school alumni site for my old school. I'm not posting the name here cause the site is "bandwidth-challenged".

        The url is [smalltown]alumni.com, where [smalltown] is a unique name for a town. The title of the document is "[Small Town] Alumni", and the first H1 tag is "Welcome to the [Small Town] Alumni Website". Despite this, if you enter Small Town Alumni in Google (without quotes), my site comes up 7th. With quotes, my site is still 3rd. The one and only site that links to mine is listed first in the search results, and that site happens to be the school districts website. The other 5 that are before me are a link to reunion.com, a cache of the school districts websitesite, and a couple news sites related to schools.

        All of those sites only have the [Small Town] text in their site, with the exception of the school districts site, who's link text is "[Small Town] Alumni".

        For comparison, entering [Small Town] Alumni into Yahoo, with or without quotes, lists my site first.

        • Re:King (Score:3, Informative)

          by Handpaper ( 566373 )
          This is not surprising, and is caused by PageRank. Basically, the school district's website will be first because more sites/pages link to it than link to you.
          Try this Google search [google.co.uk] for my brother's band (see sig)
          It's taken quite some time and the placing of links on as many relevant sites as possible to achieve second ranking. The problem is that all the 'Independent Music' sites that mention Ahymsa have much more 'Google Juice' viz, they are linked to by many more other sites/pages than the Ahymsa [slashdot.org] site
          • Actually slashdot doesn't have as much google juice as you might think. Try installing the Firefox extention that displays the page rank of each page down in the corner of the browser. Most of slashdot pages are PR 2 or3, while others aren't even ranked (usually the more obscure sections, bsd.slashdot developers.slashdot etc.) The main page is only PR 5. In comparison a dinky little FAQ site I run is PR 8 just because various sites point to it. However I can damn well assure you that there are more inb
        • Like the post from Handpaper points out, this is the expected behaviour. And it's just that predictability that make google so good. A truly unique string of characters, in quotes, will return one page only.

  • What's next you ask? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 26, 2004 @11:01AM (#11185021)
    Global domination!!

    AHHH!!!!!

  • Logo/symbol search. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by irc.goatse.cx troll ( 593289 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @11:02AM (#11185028) Journal
    It would be nice to have a simple MS-Paint like interface to sketch a little symbol (like the contamination sign, or some more obscure wiccan symbol) and have google return both definitions, and better images.

  • Google is more than a search engine... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mOoZik ( 698544 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @11:05AM (#11185048) Homepage
    It's a way of life! But seriously, I don't think anyone - at least in the short term - can keep stride with Google. They are constantly upgrading their traditional services - search, Usenet archive, etc. - while at the same time implementing incredible additions, most of which can be found in beta. They're not following: they're leading. Unless they completely ignore any unforeseen future trend, I suspect they will be as dominant in the search market as Microsoft has been in the OS & applications market. And Google deserves it.

    • I'm going to disagree. I think Google's web search engine has degraded as time has moved on. It seems I'm having to adventure further into the pages of results to get what I really want.

      There hasn't been any innovation at Google in a long time.
      • the web grows larger and larger
        so it is just natural that you have more results
        but there is no search engine not affected by this
        what i really would like is faster updating of the results
        • what i really would like is faster updating of the results Hear hear. The results of most sites on google are cached and indexed from up to a month ago, as I think google update only once a month. Lets not go to the extravagant refreshing of pages as MSN does (my tiny personal site gets 100s of 'msnbot' clicks a day), but once a day would be nice, if possible.

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • There hasn't been any innovation at Google in a long time.

        I have to strongly disagree.
        Have you tried www.froogle.com ?
        How about the google image search?
        They've always got something big going on at google!
        I can't wait to see their next new big thing.
      • Google should add two simple options (check-boxes) to its search. "Omit blogs" and "Omit commerce sites". Those two options, if they could be cleanly implemented, would improve the search results enormously. And they wouldn't even have to be perfect, it would be fine if a blog-filtered search still had some blog results, or a commerce-filtered search still had some commerce related sites in it. Heck, just reduce them by a third or half and it would still help a lot.
    • Just like in software applications, a monopoly is no good. People nowadays rely highly on search results by google, and if google can't find it, it doesn't exists. Sounds pretty dangerous to me. There have already been precedents of censoring data by google. Competition is good, also in the market of search engines. And I wouldn't forget MS, they also have the money and the knowledge to make an even more powerful search engine. And if they integrate it closely in Windows, its popularity will surely increase
    • As far as their Usenet Beta, there are a lot of people disgusted with how Google changed the look. I think it compels people without a news reader to sign up for one, instead of going through Google Groups.
    • I like Google too but come on, they are rolling out services other sites have had for years.
    • <i>They are constantly upgrading their traditional services - search, Usenet archive, etc.</i>

      Yeah, that new Google Groups is a real great improvement.

      Google's best years from a technical & public service point of view are well behind them. Now its time for them to squeeze as much cash as possible.

  • MSN can try, but MSN will fail... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by agraupe ( 769778 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @11:06AM (#11185049) Journal
    The only people who don't use google are those who haven't seen its full power. Take, for example, my father. He used any search engine, but usually MSN. Then one day he came to me, saying "What is this song called?" referring to a song he knew a few words to. I said calmly, "Go to google, and type the lyrics in quotation marks, and you will find the answer." It worked exactly the way I had said, and now he only uses google. And looks down at MSN.

  • I prediect ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheLoneCabbage ( 323135 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @11:10AM (#11185070) Homepage
    I predict a resounding win for Google!

    Of course I also predicted that DOS would beet windows.... I meen realy, who would want to waste 90% of their machine to just make things look pretty?

  • Instant Messaging (Score:5, Interesting)

    by onyxruby ( 118189 ) <onyxruby@ c o m c a s t . net> on Sunday December 26, 2004 @11:12AM (#11185081)
    I'm still waiting for the Google instant messaging client that will link right Gmail. It strikes me as the one truely obvious thing that Google hasn't done yet.

    • Re:Instant Messaging (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Funny, it strikes me as something they shouldn't do. It has nothing to do with searching, for one. It'll be hard to add ads to instant messaging when so many other services don't. And so on.

      Seems like a very bad move for Google.
      • Good points, thought about them and had a couple of thoughts.

        Their desktop tool records all kinds of past information, their email is intended to be kept for a significant amount of time. It only seems natural to have an im client that could record your conversations and be accessible through gmail. Use gmail to handle the contacts and to search past conversations.

        Many people already record their im sessions anyways. When you consider the growth of instant message against email, esp in countries like So

    • Re:Instant Messaging (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sporty ( 27564 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @11:25AM (#11185163) Homepage
      Google is in the buisness of managing information. Email is a good problem for google, as finding old email, organization and spam filtering is all about information handling. IMs, not so much. I don't think it's the next logical step.

      • Re:Instant Messaging (Score:4, Interesting)

        by emarkp ( 67813 ) <slashdot@ro[ ].com ['adq' in gap]> on Sunday December 26, 2004 @11:40AM (#11185224) Journal
        What and IM isn't information? Corporate IM is just like short memos and phone messages. I think even the non-business type would like the ability to archive and search IM conversations.

        I know I would. Not being tied down to an OS or hardware architecture would be a bonus as well.

        • Doesn't google desktop already do this?
        • I think integration with Gmail contacts and integration with Desktop Search for IM logs would be very useful, personally.

          Plus. In the same way iChat is an official AIM-compatible client, Gtalk(or whatever) would be as well. Along with Jabber support. It would also be able to do a corporate intranet-only chat... And somehow integrate with Google's corporate appliance search server.
      • I think it is the next logical step. I use Google's Desktop Search exclusively to index my conversations so I can search through them.

        If I could store my conversations on Google's servers then I'd be sorted (excuse the pun ;-)) - no chance of losing my conversations to hardware failiures or other such disasters that I may somehow encounter.
      • I don't agree. Haven't you ever wanted to look back through your logs of old IM conversations for an exchange you had with someone, or an idea you were talking about once? I make it a point to always turn on logging in Gaim or Adium or whatever client I'm using, but when you change machines or operating systems, your data doesn't follow you. It's another thing you have to back up, and it's really easy to forget to bring that data with you. I can't tell you how much data I've lost just because of that. If Go

  • Google and Yahoo duopoly (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Prince Vegeta SSJ4 ( 718736 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @11:15AM (#11185100)
    This competition has resulted in a Google and Yahoo duopoly.

    I used to experiment with different search engines back in the day, From Infoseek, Excite, Yahoo, Webcrawler, HotBot (does this one really count?), etc.

    After I stumbled on to Google via some friends at Georgia Tech, never looked back. I try one or two now, on occasion, but can they really say duopoly? Yahoo may have members et al, but for searching, nothing I've tried comes close to Google yet.

  • Google will get reactive at some point (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ars-Fartsica ( 166957 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @11:17AM (#11185116)
    The ad market for adsesne will eventually dry up, either through click fraud or through a recession that kills ad spending. As Yahoo figured out in 2000, ad spending is the first thing to go when times get tight...which invariably leads to calls for revenue diversification. Google will end up going the Yahoo route of charging fees for some services once they hit this patch. When you have to report revenue every quarter, telling investors to hold on until ad spending comes back just doesn't cut it.
    • TV adds and payola go on through a recession.
      All that 'Google' has to go is attract people to the Internet and away from the TV and radio and attract some of that grass roots advertising revenue.

    • Re:Google will get reactive at some point (Score:4, Insightful)

      by gregwbrooks ( 512319 ) * <gregb.west-third@net> on Sunday December 26, 2004 @07:44PM (#11187916)
      I agree with your premise that the business cycle and the realities of public ownership will mean some sort of reactivity at Google. However, I think your analysis of their ad revenue's vulnerability is incorrect.

      Google's whole ad model is built around a simple, devastatingly effective concept: Advertisers only pay if there's a clickthrough. In a recession, when people are buying less overall, the clickthrough rates are likely going to go down.

      But -- and this is the big deal -- that will automatically reduce ad expenditures and it will do so in a fairly graceful way. This is a big, big contrast to the agency-driven, big-dollar buys a major advertiser would commit to on a network like Yahoo. Those purchases are much more likely to feel the effects of fast, pannicky spending reductions because the risk they represent is higher in terms of both dollars and questionable rate of return.

      Does Google get hurt in a recession? Yes. But I'd argue that they get hurt a lot less -- and with more of a predictable, linear response -- than Yahoo or other competitors.

  • One potential problem point I see in most of the responses of "crowd" is:

    "$1 is big and monopolizes. They don't do free software. I hate them."
    "$2 is building applications to compete with $1. I support $2. I will think about $2's free software later."
    .
    .
    (couple of years later)
    "$2 has grown bigger and sell/distribute applications. They don't do free software. I get a strange feeling out of it."
    .
    .
    (some more time)
    "$2 is big and monopolizes. They don't do free software. I hate them."

  • Zoogle (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 26, 2004 @11:18AM (#11185121)
    Seach for animals and related information. Thx.

  • a9 (Score:2)

    by Fuzzle ( 590327 )
    I think that Amazon a8 search [a9.com] is quite cool, and it comes with a link to it's crossplatform Firefox toolbar [a9.com] on the front page. It's cached searches and resizable image columns are quite cool. I don't use it more than google, but it could be a contender.
    • Ummm, A9 uses [haydur.com] Google?

      Technically, not a contender currently, but could be if they start developing some algos out there.

      • That raises the question of whether or not the next "winner" will be because of the search tech, or the interface/options given. It's possible that some users will want the sleek, yet "feature rich" interface of a9. I'm not a regular user of it yet, but I'm willing to give it a chance.
    • What A9 does is offer an interesting way of presenting search results. In that way, A9 is almost more of a portal than a search engine in and of itself.

      Most of us /.ers won't see A9 as a contender to Google because its not truly a search engine. However, Joe User wants something that looks nice, and he might like A9 more than Google because of the way it lets him play around.

  • Marketing... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by squisher ( 212661 )
    what we all here at /. always forget is that the success of anything is not largely determined by the technical superiority. Who cares if google is better than anything else when noone knows? I personally think google is the best, that's why I never use any other engines but soooo many people don't know that, or don't know how to use google correctly.

    So, all MSN has to do is get enough people to use it, it does not matter how good it is and Microsoft is very good at that. Then they will get more ad-revenue

  • GoogleGroups Debacle, A Sign Google Ain't The Same (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The recent destruction of GoogleGroups and the excellent interface to usenet that it used to offer are a pretty clear indicator of where Google is heading. Just like Microsoft, they will continue to dominate some areas by virtue of mind share and momentum, but the glory days are over. I didn't know any geek that didnt admire google up till a couple of weeks ago; to a person, they are shifting persectives, and think google has lost it. Some day there will be books written about the changes now taking place a

  • Investigative services (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ph33r th3 g(O)at ( 592622 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @11:25AM (#11185169)
    Google is in a unique position to sell information to:
    • copyright holders--can give up the hosts and posters about infringing software and cracks
    • government agencies and security-sensitive companies--queries by IP address correlated with ISP databases can provide a "database of intentions" helpful in vetting candidates for security clearances or ferreting out those potentially plotting crimes against the state
    • corporations--Google's massive index can help dig up parody sites, sucks sites, and other places where ordinary people "defame" corporations or brands by daring to tell the truth online.

    Summary--Google's best moneymaking potential is in the black helicopter arena, where their assets will blow away startups like BayTSP, Cyveillance, and Genuone despite the startups having had the first mover advantage.

    Yes, this doesn't square with "Don't be evil." Neither does helping the PRC subjagate its people by assisting with censorship. And a publically traded company, as any Cryptonomicon MBA here can tell you, cannot have the luxury of a conscience.

    • Cyveillance got themselves permanently blocked from any Web site I ever touch, for not obeying /robots.txt [robotstxt.org], making their requests way too fast, and pretending to be MSIE when it's obvious it's a robot.

      Google wouldn't dare explicitly move into this area, as it would kill whatever good karma they still have after going public. If they started selling data on who was searching for what, people would stop searching with them and start blocking their robots. It just wouldn't work.

  • MS vs. Google (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tji ( 74570 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @11:27AM (#11185172)
    Let me use my amazing visibility into the future to predict what will happen...

    Google will continue to innovate, developing new features, integrating new capabilities into the developing 'user portal' centered around GMail. They will continue to develope advanced ways to organize, search, and use huge amounts of data.

    Microsoft will wait to see what the users gravitate to the most, and will create a nearly identical version of the feature. They will extend it in a few minor ways to integrate more tightly with their operating systems. Since it will be in the OS by default, they will quickly gain a large market share.

    On a lesser note, other 'competitors' like Yahoo, will continue to innovate in areas of banner advertising, and flash advertisement integration. They will add new features only after Google releases products that make theirs look primitive by comparison.

    The only question my visions have not answered is: How large will Google have to become before slowing their innovation and playing it safe.
    • The only question my visions have not answered is: How large will Google have to become before slowing their innovation and playing it safe.
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    • Google's GMail took a lot of features from good and innovative e-mail clients like Opera's M2. Yes, doing it in JavaScript was cool, but I don't think Google strives for "Master of Cool JavaScript Hacks" position. :)
  • Getting rid of google-bombing search engine results within your search results! I don't even know what it's really called, but I think you'll know what I'm talking about. If MSN manages to do this, then I may just have to do the unthinkable.
  • Do 90% of users really need more information ? Most of my googlems (google problems) occur because I can't formulate the question properly - E.g., the other day I wanted to know what all the numbers on a plain old fashioned check are for; it took me 30 minutes, and I still never got an explanation of how the transit number ( the 3 part number upper right with a bar, not the aba number) works.
    So, rather then more info, we need the ever elusive electronic expert (or perhaps, starting in middle school, a class
    • Of course, Google already has such a service at Google Answers [google.com] and I think the service and the business model is actually quite innovative. Too bad Google barely even markets it and the average person isn't really aware of what the service really is or what it does.
    • The task is called Question Answering. Google does a lot of Information Extraction and retrieves results very well. But other parts of QA include analyzing the question as well as extracting the answer. So, assuming you get many results from your database of relevant documents, you analyze the documents and look for answers within them and then present that to the user.

      What some people like to do is Information Browsing and sometimes don't have clear intent or have multiple interests. And sometimes, an

  • Next step for google (Score:5, Interesting)

    by defrabelizer ( 842549 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @11:46AM (#11185259)
    For those who are interested, there is a flash animation of the possible evolution of google. Its quite possible, also makes you think. http://oak.psych.gatech.edu/~epic/ [gatech.edu]
  • This article is a collage of beaten subjects : possibilities of search, advertisement means money, and how Microsoft's Bill Gates will do anything to win this new war. It is SOOOO cliche it almost feels like someone paid for it.

    - Technology means money, cites Microsoft, Cisco, Intel and IBM. (We didn't know that.)

    - Those who prevail will have more chance to set the standard for the industry to follow. (This is news to me.)

    - Says search will go through email, PDF, and even phone conversations(whatever th

  • Searching beyond the PC and providing search APIs (Score:4, Interesting)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @12:05PM (#11185356) Homepage Journal
    The author mentioned a few times that it would be important for search engine companies to think beyond the PC in their search infrastructure and that providing some form of APIs to the search engine would setup standards.

    I am not sure about the former but I do agree with the later. Thinking beyond the PC is too difficult, I think. If a tool can be connected to a computer and data can flow between the tool and the computer, then this tool becomes part of the computer. Mapping MP3 player just turns this player into another harddrive, so I am not sure what the author really meant, besides, we do not have our MP3 players on the web, so it would be a desktop search engine that would have to crawl the devices (like Google's desktop searching tool - bar.) So for now atleast, whatever the author meant by this is covered already.

    The search engine APIs is a more interesting subject. I suppose Google's desktop bar could be used by desktop applications for running searches from within, that's first.
    Developers already can tap into Google's search API (I tried it myself,) but as the author mentioned, these are limited to a thousand searches a day and to a very small set of utilities.

    I wonder if it would be possible for a search engine to provide a set of APIs with much more functionality than a simple search API. Incremental searching, time period based searching, topical searching, who knows what else.

    Any ideas what functions could be useful in such an API?

  • A different story. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by MikeyVB ( 787338 )

    A web development company has a different view of the future showdown between Microsoft and Google. They "predict" it moving beyond the realm of search engines and into the realm of a total mainstream media takeover.

    They call it Epic [halorising.com] Granted, it is a bit over dramatic, but it does make you think. Make sure you give yourself five minutes to view the whole thing.

  • Google v. Microsoft Article (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dingbat-from-hell ( 843623 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @12:30PM (#11185458)

    Very interesting article, with many implications.

    From a business standpoint, Google will need a lot more resources to compete with MS. Swallowing Yahoo might not be enough. A consortium between Amazon, Google and Yahoo and a number of universities might still not be enough.

    Microsoft; "I spit on your meagre $2-12 billion."

    Since the point is winning an architecture standards 'war', the context for these standards needs to be defined first -or last as the case may be. Will these standards ultimately be commercial, governmental (international or national), military or none of the above? Microsoft with greater resources has the advantage of being able to hedge more alternatives.

    Microsoft's Windows vulnerabilities grafted onto entry into everyday technologies make the 'Y2K' scenarios a year by year (day by day) nightmare. I don't like the idea of a hacker using either Google or MSsearch to gain access to my thermostats or my refrigerator. Or my Slashdot password, either.

    If search is to be a $20-30 billion a year business, what will the computer/cellphone/intranet/PDA/various electronic device security business be worth?

    To paraphrase Eistein, 'I don't know how this architecture war will be fought, but the next one will be fought with pencil and paper.'

  • It's interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Saint Aardvark ( 159009 ) * on Sunday December 26, 2004 @01:20PM (#11185661) Homepage Journal
    In this article some of the heroic myths we geeks tell each other (see The Cathedral and The Bazaar) are turned on their heads: the companies that did the good things that give us what we have lost, and they lost precisely because they were not aggressively proprietary like Microsoft. For example:

    I argued that if it was to survive, Netscape needed to imitate Microsoft's strategy: the creation and control of proprietary industry standards. Serenely, Barksdale explained that Netscape actually invited Microsoft to imitate its products, because they would never catch up. The Internet, he said, rewarded openness and nonproprietary standards.

    I suspect the characterization of Netscape is a little starry-eyed, but I can't be the only one who thought, "No, that Netscape executive was right!" His point (someone else can argue about how accurate it is), though, is that rewards for "openness and nonproprietary standards" did not go to Netscape: MS trashed them, and in the business world Netscape lost horribly. We (as in the users of the Internet) may have won, but we won at Netscape's expense.

    And then:

    In contrast, the losers in these contests have usually made one or more common mistakes. They fail to deliver architectures that cover the entire market, to provide products that work on multiple platforms from multiple companies, to release well-engineered products, or to create barriers against cloning. For example, IBM failed to retain proprietary control over its PC architecture and then, in belatedly attempting to recover it, fatally broke with established industry standards. Apple and Sun restricted their operating systems to their own hardware, alienating other hardware vendors. Netscape declined to create proprietary APIs because it thought Microsoft would never catch up.

    IBM's opening of the PC architecture is thought of by geeks as A Good Thing: by letting go, they created the market we have today, even though they didn't benefit from it. TFA says IBM lost market dominance as a result. It's interesting that he doesn't address the question of whether the PC architecture would have taken such hold of the market if it had not been opened up to competitors in the first place...but again, what we see as a win for PC users, he presents as a loss for the people who came up with the PC.

    It's also interesting that he doesn't explain the contradiction between failing to "create barriers against cloning", and Apple and Sun's "alienating other vendors" by making their OS only work on their own hardware. He needs to pick a side on this one...

    Anyhow, no grand point -- just some things that stuck out for me in TFA.

    • >by letting go, they created the market we have today, even though they didn't benefit from it. TFA says IBM lost market dominance as a result.

      No, it says that "in belatedly attempting to recover it, fatally broke with established industry standards", meaning PS/2 and MCA. IBM thought it could close the market again but obviously was wrong about that.

      Who knows where IBM would be today if they had just stuck with the standard PC business instead of trying to trap the market with the PS/2?

      And, of IBM an

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday December 26, 2004 @01:59PM (#11185843)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Since the html-ized article is spread across 9 whole page ad-filled pages, maybe you should read the printer friendly [technologyreview.com] page instead.

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