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Google Businesses The Internet

Google Still Ahead In Search Competition 266

Posted by michael from the second-place-is-first-loser dept.
ricst writes "Google is, as we all know, King of the Hill. But Yahoo, MSN and others have come a long ways towards catching up as this International Herald Tribune article describes. The gap between 'best' and 'next best' has narrowed substantially. The good thing is that we all benefit as these guys keep challenging each other."
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Google Still Ahead In Search Competition More

Google Still Ahead In Search Competition

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  • But... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by izakage ( 808061 ) <izakage@@@gmail...com> on Monday January 31, 2005 @02:04AM (#11526290) Homepage
    The important part, do they do no evil?

    • Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by danielrose ( 460523 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @02:08AM (#11526312) Homepage Journal
      They may do no evil, but for how long? Shareholders usually prefer profits over ethics.

      • Re:But... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by mboverload ( 657893 )
        Which is a shame. Money is blinding.

        I own stocks, lots of them, lots of money, but I feel GOOD about investing in Google. Ethics is something I take into account when I invest.

      • Re:But... (Score:2, Informative)

        by Damana Mathos ( 825898 )
        >Shareholders usually prefer profits over ethics. True, but that's probably why there's a dual class share structure where the founders effectively retain control, allowing them to ignore the desires of other shareholders if they so choose.
        • A company normally goes public because it needs the extra bit of investment, right? Do shares continue to affect how much money it has once it's gone public? Or is it a one-time deal unless they open up more shares? If they have to open up more shares, is Google likely to do so? If so, then they need their shares to be up and they need to be attractive to investors.

          If investors don't care about ethics and google ignores this, their stock will go down and they won't be an attractive investment.
          • >A company normally goes public because it needs
            >the extra bit of investment, right?

            Yes, but Google isn't an ordinary company. Google is highly cashflow positive and didn't need to raise capital. I think the main reason it went public was so that there was a market for existing shareholders (like employees with options) to sell shares, and because they reached a size where they needed to disclose a lot of information anyway.

            >Do shares continue to affect how much money it
            >has once it's gone public?

            Typically not -- unless they want to raise more money, or want to issue shares to take over another company.

            >If investors don't care about ethics and google
            >ignores this, their stock will go down and they
            >won't be an attractive investment.

            Yes, but since the Google founders have effective control, they might not care. :)
            • Google is highly cashflow positive [...]

              GOOG does have positive cashflow (~$238m last quarter), but that pales to, say, Microsoft ($4b). Buying Google's cashflow (in the form of stock) is highly expensive -- P/E of 234 (!!!), and Price/Sales of almost 20. Those ratios are typically assoicated with minor dieties (or .coms before the bubble burst), and not mere mortals.

              I'm not saying that Google isn't worth the current price, but they have absolutely no room to screw up.

      • Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)

        by sparkydevil ( 261897 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @04:16AM (#11526724)
        Coprorations do not exist to do evil or good. They exist to make money for their shareholders.
        • Coprorations do not exist to do evil or good. They exist to make money for their shareholders.

          And people wonder why some slashdotters hate capitalism. It isn't because socialism is great, it's because this extreme capitalism is (in my opinion) unacceptable. I'm just glad we have some laws that prohibit companies from acting too bad. Unfortunately laws are being created to allow them to act worse, not better. All in the name of Capitalism.

          It almost sounds like a religion.

        • Re:But... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by robertjw ( 728654 )
          Corporations primary purpose is to make money. That does not mean that they cannot be good or evil. Companys are controlled by boards and managers. Some managers are ruthless and will cross any moral boundary to achieve their goal of making money for their shareholders. Others are more benevolent, paying fair wages, giving back to the community, sponsoring scholarships, conducting fair and legal business practices.

          Of course these degrees of good and evil are variable, just like they are in people. F

        • Re:But... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by duggy_92127 ( 165859 )

          Coprorations do not exist to do evil or good. They exist to make money for their shareholders.

          Not untrue, but I hate this gross oversimplification. Both the corporation and the body of shareholders are people, and as such they may very well decide that they're not going to do any evil. In fact, they may all decide that they're going to make all that money by not being evil.

          The fact that you want to make a buck or two doesn't automatically mean that you'll eat babies to do it. The people at Google may

      • Re:But... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Mazem ( 789015 )
        The motto "Do no evil" is not just a slogan - it is an important and well known part of the Google brand. Were Google to start "doing evil", the loss of their good reputation and trustworthy image would hurt profits.
        • The movie "The Corporation" [thecorporation.tv] shows that corporations can be clinically defined as psychopaths. Basically it implies that any given corporation will always do what is best for profits now, with no empathy, remorse or regret. It's my thought that there will come a time when Google will shoot itself in the foot, much like most companies will do/have done.

    • Re:But... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by NETHED ( 258016 )
      Hmmmm.... I'm going to be modded down as flamebait or a troll, but heres my opinion anyway.

      Google is beginning to remind me of Anakin Skywalker [starwars.com], the cute and powerful little tyke whom everyone loves, and everyone thinks is great. But slowly, Anakin becomes a power hungry murdering black mass. For a while now, I've been hearing the Imperial March when I think of Google.

      Anyway, my 0.02

  • How? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    How is this gap measured? It's all a matter of opinion. All search engines can give you at least somewhat relevent results.

    • Re:How? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by peluchejs ( 761163 )
      According to the article, the gap was measured by usage of each search engine.

      • Re:How? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by RatRagout ( 756522 )
        Ah...nothing beats the old objective "usage" method. A thorough and scientificly acclaimed way of evaluation.
      • The article is actually complete rubbish because of this. Sure it might be an interesting read, but I wouldn't put much stock into it. People use different search engines for various reasons, it's reliability in offering good results to queries is only one factor.

  • Don't forget (Score:2, Insightful)

    by kaedemichi255 ( 834073 )
    Don't forget A9, which recently added some virtual locality [cnn.com] features. I think the fact that it's a subsidiary of another internet behemoth (Amazon.com) gives it some edge as well.

  • MSN? What!?! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by aldridge ( 740912 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @02:10AM (#11526324)
    MSN and Yahoo still have a long way to go. I like Google for its simplistic site design and its lack of obtrusive banner advertisements shoved in your face. I use the word simplistic cautiously because as we all know Google is very powerful and keeps getting better every day. Who seriously wants to support Microsoft anyways?

    • Re:MSN? What!?! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by forand ( 530402 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @02:17AM (#11526350) Homepage
      Unfortunatly the same people who click on banner ads. I would agree that I don't know anyone who would use MSN by choice but how many people just use the page that comes up after someone installed the OS or upgrade for them? Those are the same people who are much more likily to click on ads.
      • how many people just use the page that comes up after someone installed the OS or upgrade for them?
        Solution: Install Firefox on every computer you see.
        • And piss off all your friends and family members for doing it without asking them. Or are you going to claim you meant with permission? With so many zealots saying "permission? Just do it anyway" on slashdot I find that claim unlikely.

      • Re:MSN? What!?! (Score:3, Interesting)

        by gl4ss ( 559668 )
        yep.. nowadays you look for a review for a product and 50% of the sites are just fake-review sites.. fake as in they don't have the reviews themselfs, but rather link to other sites that link to other sites that link to.. maybe a real review in the end.

        fucking linkfarms. wouldn't take _that_ much of browsing around to ban them even. google needs a big blacklisting option... "never show this site to me again" or whatever.

    • Re:MSN? What!?! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bstadil ( 7110 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @02:26AM (#11526399) Homepage
      Google is very powerful and keeps getting better every day

      I like Google but the statement is not correct in all domains. Technical searches is getting very hard, as the "sales" sites are crowding out the support pages.

      Take a technical part of some kind (graphincs card, disk drive etc.) if you want to get a more detailed description or a technical discussion of a certain problem it is very hard to get to this.

      You normally get zillions of sites selling this part first and even "reviews" tend to be blurbs left by a few buyers on the site nothing of real interest.

      • Funny, I seem to have the exact opposite problem. I remembered seeing a review for this dual opteron shuttle pc type thing a while back, the iwill zmaxdp I think it was, and wanted to see what it's going for and maybe get one, but I couldn't find anyone selling it anywhere. The iwill corporate site lists it as a current product, but all I could find were detailed product reviews and photo blogs of its innards. None offered for sale.

      • Re:MSN? What!?! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Mant ( 578427 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @05:25AM (#11526912) Homepage

        It would be nice if all the selling stuff could be moved to Froogle, although I'm not sure how technically possible that would be.

        It would also be nice if they could get rid of the other 'search' sites that often get the top spots. You click on a link, and just end up on some crummy search site with no actual info.

    • Re:MSN? What!?! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by benjamindees ( 441808 )
      I like Google for its simplistic site design and its lack of obtrusive banner advertisements shoved in your face.

      So do I, but I'm wondering, now that these other search engines have dropped Google's services, can Google resist the urge to add these annoying "features" while still turning a profit?

      • Google's business model is not based around the traditional 468x60 banner ad. I don't think that they see them as something to aspire to. As a lot of companies are now seeing, the traditional approach to online ad sales is dying.

    • Re:MSN? What!?! (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      yahoo has a little known barebones search page too, at http://search.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com]

      the article is correct too, for the past 2 or 3 months ive been using yahoo as my primary search engine to see if i could still tell a difference between google, yahoo still found everything about the same as google. i use http://local.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com] pretty frequently now too, if they added store hours for every business it would be even better.

    • Re:MSN? What!?! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by joeykiller ( 119489 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @02:55AM (#11526487) Journal
      Who seriously wants to support Microsoft anyways?
      These kinds of statements always angers me: I can't see why I shouldn't support Microsoft, if their technology happens to be better suited to my needs than the competitions?

      I guess you worry about Microsofts monopolistic practises. Guess what: In a couple of years, if things don't change, you'll worry about Google as well.

      - Even if Google's not responsible for killing usenet, it sure helped speed up the process.

      - Take a look at the cached content feature of Google: In every other context this feature would have been called breach of copyright.

      - Take a look at the image search: This too is breach of copyright.

      - Look at how people are designing web pages today: The old ideas of crumb trails (navigation paths on top of pages) are coming back, not because users need them but because Google needs them to crawl your site well.

      The thing is that the web is adapting to Google now, not the other way round. If you're paranoid you should worry more about Google than about Microsoft because what Google does actually matters.

      • Re:MSN? What!?! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Caching is *not* a breach of copyright. See "fair use." You can tell Google not to cache the page (via meta tags) if you want.

        As for "crumb trails", if a user can follow a link to your site, then Google can too. Google doesn't depend on anything else. You don't have a clue what you're talking about.
        • If Google's presentation of cached pages is fair use, it would mean that I could rip out entire articles from the New York Times and post them on my web site, call it "quoting" and get away with it.

          Would that be fair use? I'm certain New York Times wouldn't say so. But because Google is so dominant, I guess most people won't say anything. Don't mess with Goliath, unless you're David.

          As for stopping caching: I know that I can stop Google from caching via Meta tags, and that I can stop Google from indexi

      • Re:MSN? What!?! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by the pickle ( 261584 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @03:21AM (#11526569) Homepage
        Take a look at the image search: This too is breach of copyright.

        No, it's not. Google doesn't show (or store) the full-res images; they "quote" the images (an image thumbnail is a reasonable analogy to a quote of text), which is an established "fair use," and they use this quote to provide a link to the original source, just as with their text searches.

        p

        • quoting images?? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by pbhj ( 607776 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @08:51AM (#11527521) Homepage Journal
          There is no such thing as "fair use" in the UK (and Europe AFAIK).

          I doubt that this would really fall under fair use in US as, from what I've read, that applies to re-use of copyrighted works when you have some rights to them already (quoting books, re-formatting musical works, etc.).

          This is an adaptation of an original work. It shows the initial artistic work in low quality and therefore infringes not only on the commercial rights of the "artist" but also on their moral rights!

          Consider how to prevent people buying a poster and then distributing their own postcards of that poster in competition with the original artist. Sounds like google is doing the digital equivalent.

          If copyright laws were strictly followed life would far less of a rich tapestry.

          PS: I don't see anything wrong with what google do per se, just pointing out that it seems incompatible with the law.

      • Re:MSN? What!?! (Score:3, Interesting)

        by dustmite ( 667870 )

        If you're paranoid you should worry more about Google than about Microsoft because what Google does actually matters

        Good grief, are you stupid, trolling, or shilling? Microsoft has a proven track-record of frequent, regular and ongoing unethical behaviour that stretches back some two decades or so, and they've shown no signs of changing. Google have so far not shown any signs of unethical behaviour at all. Where the hell do you get the idea that this has anything to do with "paranoia", it's just bloody co

        • Your copyright arguments are so ridiculous

          Would you mind saying why though? The image-search is fair-use, but no-one has yet to refute his cache comment.

      • Re:MSN? What!?! (Score:5, Informative)

        by timealterer ( 772638 ) <slashdot@nOSPAm.alteringtime.com> on Monday January 31, 2005 @03:53AM (#11526657) Homepage

        The old ideas of crumb trails (navigation paths on top of pages) are coming back, not because users need them but because Google needs them to crawl your site well.

        No actually. Breadcrumb navigation is good for usability. Read about them from Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru himself, here [useit.com] and here [useit.com]. Breadcrumb navigation helps users get a mental picture of a website and where they are within it. It is particularly useful to users who come to a deep page from a search engine (be it MSN or Google) and need to orient themselves.

      • Being a monopoly isn't necessarily bad, abusing that status is. So far, MS is a monopoly and has abused it. Google isn't, nor is it on track to be. If anything the competition in the search area is increasing. If MS ties search into Window I'll be more worried than anything Google seems to be doing.

        How did Google speed up the death of Usenet? I'm not conivnced Usenet is dying, but Google Groups (even the new one they are messing around with) makes Usenet far, far more useful with the archive, and more acc

        • Being a monopoly isn't necessarily bad

          No, but I'd rather support an environment that allows competition because competition increases the chance of innovation. Google could improve if it was a monopoly, but I doubt it would improve at it's current rate. Does this mean using inferior products? How can I support an environment that has competition? By not using the one product blindly. Which many people do.
  • But yahoo & MSN both have the same feel of google... espescially since they copied the cached page idea.

    just for giggles, i tried searching MSN for friend chicken [msn.com] and search result number nine was University of North Texas Dining Services' Menu. Not sure how relevant that is, or maybe its relevant to our discussion.... because it is not.

  • The key difference (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Monday January 31, 2005 @02:12AM (#11526329) Journal
    The main thing I think that keeps Google ahead of everyone else is that they seem to be some nice folks.

    They've never gone and done anything nefarious (Micro$haft), and they've never had to switch search engines every other month (Yahoo!). They've just put out a quality product and improved on it continuously.

    They've got good tools that are both powerful and unobtrusive. They have very good search results. And they offer free services that make using their software a real pleasure.

    Yahoo and Microsoft can try to do what they like, but they just aren't as cool as Google. I seem to recall a previous article on Slashdot that stated that most searches conducted at Micro$haft are done on Google, even over M$N search.
    • They've never gone and done anything nefarious (Micro$haft)

      Disregarding your weird insult toward Microsoft ("Micro$haft"?! What does that even mean?), I have to take issue with your claim that Google's never done anything nefarious. They've removed search results due to legal threats or ideological differences, refused paying people for Google ads (search Slackersguild [slackersguild.com] for "Google" and read first-hand accounts), replaced Google Groups with a horrible barely-readable format, and aside from all that have

      • Re:The key difference (Score:4, Interesting)

        by gad_zuki! ( 70830 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @03:12AM (#11526543)
        >They do this because Google places higher value on pages with search terms directly in the URL.

        I just hate this, because its been abused for so long and google has done nothing to stop it. I believe some blog software uses this form now either by default or as a setting. So someone blogging about "minnesota fishing sucks" with the filename minnsota_fishing_sucks.php gets a higher priority than, say, a guide to minnesota fishing with just a plain old index.html in there. The URLs are just crazy long nowadays as people try to game the system. And it works great too. That page will just fly up the rankings.

        On top what you've listed its important to include:

        The google toolbar is spyware. The one without pagerank isnt. On top if it, very few (if any) spyware scanners will let you know.

        They do not reveal who, in fact they refuse, they are selling all their datamining stuff to. They put a non-expiring tracking cookie on everyone who uses their service to track them, preferably for life or at least the life of that computer. I wrote a little piece (with screenshots!) on how you can thwart this with firefox by removing it for good, or letting firefox only allow the cookie per session here. [everythingisnt.com]

        That is the price to use google. Its free, like spyware funded apps are free. Its just not a biggie to many people or they accept tracking and spyware as the price of entry. That is of course your perogative.

        They certainly arent as bad as MS, MarketScore, etc but they really get a pass on a lot of things they do. What helps is the perception that they are a great, awesome company which loves you. Regardless if that belief has much to do with reality.

        Also, I dont think the new groups interface is that bad, its just extremely dumbed down, thus the whole "google is geeks and geek friendly" might have been true at one point, but now all their work must attract the lowest common denominator as much as they can as they are now a public company and with all this competition they have to shoot for the LCD as much as possible to get more eyes on their pages than on a9 or overture. Competition is certainly good, but usually its good only for the LCD.
    • Yeah, sure. Is this why a majority of Google users use a Microsoft OS and a Microsoft browser to do their searches?

      Since when is being a 'nice guy' a reason to be ahead in business? Do you think your grandmother uses Google because they're such nice chaps and she wishes she could invite them for a cup of tea?

    • True (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Pan T. Hose ( 707794 )

      The main thing I think that keeps Google ahead of everyone else is that they seem to be some nice folks.

      Very true. Infortunately, people doesn't seem to be nice to Google. As an example let's take this "Google file system" from some time ago. As much as I am usually against frivolous lawsuits, in this case I really hoped Google had sued its authors and won. Why? Because this so called "file system" is a classical example of parasite which can only hurt Google. And for what? So its "developers" could

  • Googling. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ATAMAH ( 578546 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @02:13AM (#11526335)
    Because of the quality of it's search engine Google has, over time, became a part of speach. How many times have i heard people say "i just googled for it" or "i found this and that after some googling". Internet search is now associated with google, its the mindset of the vast majority and that is going to be very hard to compete with.

    • Re:Googling. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by maelstrom ( 638 )
      How many people call any tissue Kleenex? How many people call any copy machine Xerox? How many people refer to any soda as Coke?

      Try again.

      • Re:Googling. (Score:2, Insightful)

        by DavidD_CA ( 750156 )
        Exactly. And its those very reasons why Google will likely stay ahead of the game.

        Kleenex, Xerox, and Coke are all on top of the game when it comes to tissue, copiers, and soda. Granted, there are competitors, but they are at least in the 1st or 2nd of their markets.

        "Owning a word" as it's often called is a very powerful thing in marketing.
        • Owning a word is indeed important. From these examples, yes, the Google name will probably remain dominant.

          But let's look at the also-rans. Pepsi has the same ingredients as Coke, it was created to compete with Coke, its logo was ripped off of Coke, and since Coke decided not to buy Pepsi in the early part of the century, now Pepsi's mindshare and marketshare are about the same. They cost the same, they are packaged and distributed the same, they even almost taste the same.

          So do they really compete wi
      • When I go to the store I can pick up any box of "Kleenex" - even by a different brand name - without noticing.

        But how can you go to "google" something, then type in "www.yahoo.com" (or other search engine). With search engines, far more than with any physical product, the name ties much more directly into use of the product and therefore is far stronger.

        Microsoft is trying to head off this tide by making it so easy to search that you no longer need to type in "google" to a browser. But even there Google

      • Re:Googling. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by the pickle ( 261584 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @02:52AM (#11526482) Homepage
        1) A *lot*.
        2) A *lot*.
        3) Almost everyone in the Southeastern U.S.

        I would be mildly surprised if Kleenex and Xerox are not the dominant brands in their markets. I know Coke is. Grandparent has a pretty good point.

        p

      • Re:Googling. (Score:2, Insightful)

        by davisk ( 664811 )
        Nobody outside America.

      • Uh, what do you mean "Try again"? I didn't notice you 'rebut' anything in the GP post, which was just your point exactly (making yours 'redundant') that trademarks may enter the language and become associated with the generic form of the product they originally referred to. Or were you just trying to show us how clever you are by saying "I know this isn't the first time this happened to a product". But the GP poster never said it was the first time.

      • Re:Googling. (Score:4, Funny)

        by __aailob1448 ( 541069 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @03:47AM (#11526641) Journal
        13%, 8.6% and 0.04% respectively. Why?
    • I just heard the word in Catwoman (you know, that flick that sucked really bad)...

      I remember back in school, when Google wasn't well known like it is today, our teachers warned us not to use them to search because they thought they had unreliable results (I mean, it's too simplistic! It couldn't possibly have reliable information). Today, however, professors prefer you use Google.

      Bye-bye, AskJeeves... It was not knowing you, especially when even you started to become a part of people's speech...
      • Natural Language usage of "Ask Jeeves"
        As for me, encouraged by "ask a question in natural language", I asked "where to find info about (X)" and was presented with thousands of results "where to find info about (everything but X)".

        My reaction was:

        "Ack! Jeezzz! This search engine is DUMB!"

  • Article also available from NY Times (Score:5, Informative)

    by phidipides ( 59938 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @02:15AM (#11526343) Homepage
    In case of slashdotting, the article is also available from the NY Times [nytimes.com].

    It wasn't a very informative read -- quick summary is that Yahoo and MSN are catching up to Google (they don't give many specifics as to what "catching up" means) and each of these companies is making more money from searches than they have in the past. They allude briefly to Yahoo improving their search technology and Google losing focus somewhat due to management being preoccupied by their IPO.
    • Obviously, Slashdot posted this rather meatless story just to reaffirm Slashdotter hopes with a blaring headline that Google was "still ahead." :)

  • Speaking of which.. (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Webmasters, go check your logs. It looks like MSN is heading for a very frequently updated search engine.

    I host 13 websites on my servers, and on some of them, msnbots causes most of the traffic. It's about a crawl a day.

  • Google is part of our culture now (Score:3, Informative)

    by Nik13 ( 837926 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @02:19AM (#11526360) Homepage
    "To google for something" has became part of common language. People have associated the word with the web search concept, plus it does a great job and is quite innovative.

    Every once in a while, I'll use yahoo (as I have an old email there mostly) or when google won't find something (almost never).

    But don't count on me to use MSN. I think I've already paid far too much microsoft tax (starting to become more and more fed up about these guys), and they really don't need advertizing revenue from me. And the only way they seem to be able to get half decent results - is by using some bots to harvest google results (not completely ethical imho). Plus, I've always seen "MSN" as crap - especially after having seen the IM. Plus their webpage is quite "graphically overloaded" (yahoo is a bit like that too, flash ads are particularly annoying). When I want to do a quick search, I like google simple logo (which changes with holidays) and a simple seach box.

    Google works. The results are great, the (text) ads are unobtrusive, they're innovative, and they've earned everyone's trust. Competition is good sometimes, but I'm not about to switch to another search engine.

  • But Google's Behind In Search Patent Competition (Score:5, Interesting)

    by theodp ( 442580 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @02:20AM (#11526365)
    Google may best a9.com in the search department, but not when it comes to the patent department. Helped out by parent Amazon, a9.com boasts twenty four patent assignments [uspto.gov] (17 issued, 7 pending), while Google falls short with twenty one [uspto.gov] (8 issued, 13 pending).
  • But had flaws. I knew it would take some time but eventually the COMMERCIAL SPAMMERS got their way with it.

    I have tried certain searches in the business fields and have had no luck.

    I tried doing a search on science of skin but all i get are skin care companies.

    Google is a DUMB technology. Lets look for links instead of trying to understand the request like real human interactions.

    I may start my own search engine company. Any programmers out there work for food. I make excellent handmade pizza.

    • When you have a computer that can understand real human interactions let the world know, becuase it will be a major breakthrough.

      Google could certainly improve thier search result, but knocking them for not creating AI seem a bit much.

  • Google is very flawed (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Who cares about Google. They are not God or even close. In fact it's not so much Google is so great but all the others are so BAD.

    Google has become incredibly flakey lately turning up worse and worse results, I'm not sure this is all to do with spammers either. Sometimes I have to add about 10 different -this -that to a search to get relevant results. It's very much gone down hill and some of it's page ranking is a nonsense.

    The original posting says Yahoo and friends are catching up. Well good. Google des

  • Hmmmm... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Alias777 ( 841435 )
    It seems that when Google does something innovative, EVERYONE follows suit. For instance, Google video, Google desktop search, Google translator, etc, etc. Some of those were actually there fist in obscure places and google found them and adapted them. Also, the issue with the algorithm in which Google ranks its pages in regular search is still under review, a la Google bomb. Try typing "Miserable Failure" in google and hitting I'm Feeling Lucky. Now, it's not that I dont agree with that statement, its th
  • While the author of the article see that Google is increasing its lead, he think it will narrow in the future due to new exciting features e.g. Yahoo has to offer?

    He fail to mention anything about MSN Search and A9 closing any gaps. And in November, Google increased the searches on sites owned by them with 5.3 percentage units and Yahoo with 1.1. He then goes ahead and speaks of gain in USA, but again fails to mention what they would be.

    If he's saying that as long as these companies keep pushing new produ
  • MS will win this in the medium term, they have the most $$ to throw at it, and they can skew the field by making MSN the mandatory default.
    Searchengine technology will then suck for a while.
    Eventually, a community-based project will come along and challenge MS (maybe a firefox plugin to feed a distributed page ranking system using bittorrent to sync the databases)
    Been there, done that (web-browsers, mail client, OS, word-processor etc)

  • APIs - where's the competition? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by manmanic ( 662850 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @03:20AM (#11526568)
    Google is also the only search engine with an API [google.com], giving 3rd party developers the chance to add value to their service without violating any terms. I think they deserve serious Kudos for that and it's also a smart move - they get to pick up some great ideas fro third parties like Google Alert [googlealert.com] for tracking the web, CapeMail [capeclear.com] to get results by email, GARBO [staggernation.com] for browsing related pages and Copyscape [copyscape.com] for finding plagiarism.

    Until the other search engines release competing APIs (hopefully with a higher than 1000 query limit), Google will remain top dog from the POV of /. types.

  • Among other things (Score:2, Interesting)

    by al912912 ( 835343 )
    Neither Yahoo nor MSN provide a View as HTML option for PDFs, it's really useful when you are not so sure if that's what you want and you dan't want to wait a hell of a time for Acrobat Reader to load. Or even worse, to download it and then open it with xpdf for every file that might have some spec about some transistor.

  • WWW Centralization (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lux55 ( 532736 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @03:39AM (#11526619) Homepage Journal
    It's funny how everything in this (pseudo-)decentralized environment keeps naturally migrating towards a single central point that everything else revolves around. Not that I think this is a good or bad thing, it seems that its just a natural part of everything human to form itself into some structure resembling the state (city=net,government=google,citizens=sites), which may be also true of much of the natural world as well (galaxies, for example, are drawn together around a common object, which is similar, although the cause of it is different).

    It's almost as if, given the chance at a total level of equality, we unconsciously back away from it. Maybe equality isn't what we need or want (subconsciously speaking, of course ;)), or maybe it's too difficult (maybe it's impossible)...

    Perhaps P2P is the answer to this little late-night rant -- the example of a lasting and true decentralized system -- but seeing as how the only real mainstream applications of it have so far been illegal activities, I don't see it replacing the WWW any time soon (ie. freenet).

    Does any of this make sense, or am I just really tired? ;)

  • Google wants their own browser (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mtanne ( 805334 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @04:29AM (#11526758)
    Google relies on the browser, and although, as noted, Firefox is already very Google friendly, Google is determined not to let MSFT define the battlefield. Google is big enough to take the battle to Redmond, by taking it to the desktop, starting with GMail and Google Desktop http://desktop.google.com/ [google.com], then GBrowser (see whois below), then a suite of apps - Photos (Picasa), music (GTunes?), movies (GVideo?), etc. - designed to incease their desktop presence and mindshare. Then who knows, a desktop OS? (GLinux - their own version of Linux)
    It's the rational thing to do as the new 900 pound gorrilla. Hence they will hire the best they can find in each area, while still trying to maintain the support of the open source community. How users react will depend on the amount of control Google tries to exert, and how arrogant they are perceived to be.
    Whois: Domain Name: gbrowser.com Registrant:Google Inc. (DOM-1278108) 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043 Technical Contact, Zone Contact: DNS Admin (NIC-1467103) Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043 dns-admin@google.com +1.6503300100 Fax- +1.6506188571 Created on: 2004-Apr-26. Expires on: 2006-Apr-26.
    • I look forward to saying, in 10 years:

      "Gee, remember when Google wasn't a monopolistic empire of Evil controlling everything on our desktop? Remember when we were rooting for them?"

      Should make for fine flamewars on Slashdot. :)

  • Coming close isn't good enough (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 26199 ( 577806 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @04:48AM (#11526806) Homepage

    People don't try a selection of search engines every day then use whichever's best. They find a search engine they like and stick with it.

    The competitors are going to have to be considerably better than Google before people will switch in significant numbers. Or they're going to have to cheat... bundling, anyone?

    Look at IE versus other browsers: IE has been behind on features for years, but does it make people switch? No, they use what they're used to.

  • www.jux2.com [jux2.com] compares the result sets from google, yahoo, and ask jeeves and you can immediately see what's missing from each
  • Personally, when I first started surfing the web (c. 1997) I used Altavista [altavista.com]. I don't remember when I first discovered Google. It was a fast change, so much so I just subconciously accepted it's superiority.

    Strange though, at some point in the last few months I've created a Search Engine folder my bookmarks and managed to fill it up... now how did that happen?

  • Altavista (Score:2, Informative)

    by rbarreira ( 836272 )
    I still remember the time when Altavista and Yahoo were the kings. Then google came and dominated in a few years. I don't think it would be impossible for the same to happen again, but as long as google remains focused on improving their engine I think it's very difficult for this to happen.

  • The Tide May be Turning for Yahoo. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CristalShandaLear ( 762536 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @09:29AM (#11527802) Homepage Journal
    I work for a long distance company and I spend a lot of time confirming numbers people dispute on their bill (i.e. I DEEN'T CALL THES NUMBER AN IF YOU CAYANT PROVE I DE-ID, I'M GONE SEEWWW YEW SUMBEACHES).

    If we can't find a number using AnyWho, we always use Google next and I'd say 99.9% of the time this resolves the issue without having to verify the call with the term party (i.e. If that lady's daughter wasn't sleeping with my husband, my number wouldn't be on her bill).

    When Yahoo first said they weren't going to use Google anymore for their search results, I really didn't believe them. I mean it took them forever to admit what we already knew so the trust factor was a little broken.

    It took a while, but gradually the returns from searches did seem to be different or different enough. I'm like well, ok, they're on their own now, but Google still gives more or better results.

    Until recently. Lately, searching Yahoo has been like back in the 90's when I first discovered HotBot(R.I.P.) then Google. In the past month or so, I actually have found what I wanted easier and faster using Yahoo. By faster I don't really mean return speed, I'm actually referring more to the relevance of the first items returned.

    It's not every single time, but often enough and different enough where now, I don't just use Google by default anymore. I actually make a point to check both and lately Yahoo is gaining on them in turns of generating the results I need and on returning a search that's different enough from Google that's it's worth the extra time to see what Yahoo turns up as well.

    Now my searches are for very simple and every day thing. However it seems to me, it's always those small things that cause the tide to turn in the larger pool of profitability in the long run.

    I also like the new video search. To be honest, it's cut down my pr0n search time a lot. Uh, at home of course, not at work.

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