Gap Between Google and Competition Widening 188
eldavojohn writes "Business Week has up an article trying to explain why it is getting harder and harder to 'catch' Google in the search engine game. We've heard of many different kinds of search engines and many different companies entering the market but: '... Google keeps gaining share in the face of newly launched capabilities on other engines. In August, Google sites gained 6.8 percentage points of search share from a year earlier, according to researcher comScore Media Metrix. Meantime, Yahoo lost 1 percentage point, Microsoft's sites lost 3.3 percentage points, and Ask.com lost one-half of a percentage point.' All of this on the heels of recent news that A9 scaled back its features. Is it possible to think of a number better than a one with a hundred zeros behind it?"
Yep. (Score:5, Funny)
Even better! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Even better! (Score:5, Informative)
A googol [wikipedia.org] (correct spelling of the mathematical term) is a 1 with a hundred zeros, but a googol-plex [wikipedia.org] is a 1 with a googol of zeros behind it! (Read the Wikipedia article on it, lots of cool factoids
Re:Even better! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yep. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Yep. (Score:5, Funny)
Marty: I don't know.
Nigel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Marty: Put it up to google plus one.
Nigel: google puls one. Exactly. One louder.
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the infinity search engine (Score:5, Funny)
pssst... (Score:2)
Re:Yep. (Score:5, Funny)
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100 is Perfect (Score:2)
Monk would freak!
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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A link for Clarification (Score:2, Informative)
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Odd (Score:5, Insightful)
It's odd that people should say Google are widening the gap... Google's certainly the best, but lately I've been noticing a lot more search results that lead to pages that don't load, or result in 404s (in fact, a domain I used to run 3 years ago is still in Google's index).
Is google not removing ages from their index to try and seem impressive, or getting lax with recrawling sites? Or am I the only one noticing this?
Re:Odd (Score:4, Insightful)
Another truly annoying set of results are links to other SEARCH sites indexing some pages which may or not have anything to do with the search terms.
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Ganz Scheiß (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at the way great ideas have grown quickly: YouTube, digg, and so on.
And you can bet that if someone came up with a radically new search algorithm that provided noticeably better search results than Google (which is actually falling a bit behind, which is a dangerous mistake...) you can believe that most people would quickly migrate to their new engine of choice. (Of course, if it had little to no ads, speedy and reliable service, etc...)
Better search options (Score:5, Insightful)
The web now has become so large that a simple keyword search just doesn't cut it anymore. Try searching for information about a popular digital camera from someone who isn't trying to sell them. It is next to impossible. (Yes I know about http://www.givemebackmygoogle.com/ [givemebackmygoogle.com] - a good try, but not really addressing the fundamental problem.)
The best way that search could get better in my opinion is to introduce some kind of filtering on the type of organisation that produces the pages you are searching for. Google already does a bit of this with Google Scholar [google.com]. But we need something far more general, and more to the point, a facility for excluding results of particular types, e.g. blogs, sites trying to sell something,
I know that some people will complain that it may be a very subjective judgement whether site X is commercial or not. But search results are never going to be perfect anyway. Let's have the improvements where they are available, and worry about the corner cases later.
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They appear to be addressing this piecemeal (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Better search options (Score:4, Insightful)
The only way to get accurate, personalized results from a flexible search engine is to learn at least some basic query syntax. I don't want digitalcameras.google.com, laptops.google.com, anythingyoucanthinkof.google.com to walk me through making common searches, because it's more effective, flexible and easier to just add on a few extra clauses yourself.
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These sliders could control all kinds of variables: whether you're shopping or not, whether you want local results or not, are you looking for more academic sites or more personal sites, more historical data or more current data, etc. And they need to work seamlessly and on the fly.
Google used to have something like this in their Labs, but I don't think they do anymore.
In any case, the grandparent
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Two words: "-buy -blog"
Modify to suit your every exclusion need. Perhaps Google could just add an option to the prefe
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FUD
http://www.google.com/search?hs=PXD&hl=en&lr=&safe =off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aof ficial&q=powershot+s3&btnG=Search [google.com]
First link is to dpreview, which is not selling cameras
(they carry ads to camera stores, but that is not the same)
Re:Ganz (Score:2)
YouTube isn't a great idea. That's like saying that Empornium and Suprnova are/were great ideas. YouTube, just like Empornium and Supernova, is successful because there is a metric fuckton of copyrighted shit on there. No other reason.
If the site was only starting out and didn't have that stuff no one would have started to use it. Now that they are huge and people know of them because of allowing copyright infrigement, they are goi
The bar has gotten a LOT higher since 1996 (Score:2)
Today the big guys have 500,000 servers. Even if you are somehow an order of magnitude more efficient, and another order of magnitude smaller while you're starting out, that's still 5k servers -- $5M at least, plus an ops team to run them.
Good luck.
--
Carnage Blender [carnageblender.com]: Meet interesting people.
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Article Summary (Score:3, Informative)
New Formulas - Ask.com hopes their new smarter algorithm will win over searchers.
Topic Communities - Clusty.com has a new feature that retreives related topics to your query instead of related links.
Social Search - Yahoo! has been working hard at
An Issue of Trust - Ask.com and Snap.com work on a more visual interface compared to googles plain ordinary links returned.
Google Still Gaining - Google can easily acquire or replicate any new search method that makes signficant headway.
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I just tried the clusty cloud technology. Way cool: http://cloud.clusty.com/ [clusty.com]
You can even have the results generated in the 'Slashdot Green' color.
Inertia (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless someone comes up with a revolutionary feature for search engines, Google won't be losing terrain any time soon.
Is it possible to think of a number better ... (Score:3, Funny)
Yep...... 1
Although it is the loneliest number..
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A9 (Score:2)
The thing is, I don't go to IMdB and Amazon to do generic websearches, so it's kind of a waste. I have no idea what "value add" they're trying to bring to the table.
Plus, their name kind of sucks.
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Actually, the suck-iest (is that a word?) search engine name is Clusty [clusty.com]. Oddly enough, the name of Clusty's parent company, Vivisimo [vivisimo.com], is probably also ahead of A9 on the "suck meter".
The weird thing about it is that I believe Clusty's seach engine is much better than Google. Go ahead and try it, check out how it clusters the results.
Being a HUGE Fan of Google... (Score:3, Insightful)
They won't stay in front for long (Score:2)
Nobody will be able to beat me, nobody!!!!!!
(Evil laugh)
Opposite of my experience (Score:5, Informative)
To me, more and more Google is a tiresome chore -- you have to make stuff work with it, but searches are hugely hampered by blogs, aggregators, search engine traps, link farms and so on to the point where:
If I want to find out about some general topic, I use wikipedia.
If I want to find out about a specific thing, I use a site such as riskglossary or MSDN.
If I want detailed facts, I use a bookshop, still as true today as it was before teh n3t started.
If I'm looking for a line from a half-remembered song, I use google.
In other words, google is strong when you want 'something that contains text X' but not strong for 'a page that describes 'X''. And Google's attempts to preserve quality can actually become a nightmare -- that's how Search Engine Optimization got to be a big business.
I like google and I use google, but to me, the days when it was my one-stop shop for absolutely every visit to the web are long gone.
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I started using MSN Search about ten months ago. For the non-DB-specific searches that I do, I haven't missed Google at all (used it maybe once a month).
Search engines are a commodity. Anyone who thinks they can keep an empire going on search is dreaming.
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Of course you can't use Google for that. Content on Wikipedia changes often enough that Google couldn't possibly index it! And, you can't change Google search results (easily).
But searching google gets a plethora of sites, and not just what's currently popular.
If I want to find out about a specific thing, I use a site such as riskglossary or MSDN.
I also go to MSDN. But i search it through Google. MS's search is the absolute worst searching i ha
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'mazda wiki'
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What else could I possible want? (Score:5, Interesting)
However, its not sewn up. What I really want is a search engine that actually understands what I'm asking for. Rather than a library index, what I want is a librarian. The company that get that right will be the overal winners... but thats decades away - and I imagine it will come from left field, just like Google did.
I see no significant difference between Google (Score:3, Insightful)
Google Vs MSFT monopolies? (Score:5, Interesting)
I dont think so. Google operates in a field where the switching cost to the user is zero. If GOOG does not deliver, it is extremely easy for the user to switch to a competing search engine. So I dont feel threatened by GOOG. But MSFT monopoly was created by increasing the switching cost to the user. It realized long before its customers, the key to revenue is lock them in. MSFT effectively confused interoperability with IBM-PC compatibility and later Windows compatibility and got bulk of the users locked in. As long as it prices its products, mainly MS Office a tad less than what it would cost the corporations to switch t a competing product they will keep raking money in. And they use the money to make sure that the playing field does not get leveled ever again.
So GOOG can keep its only if it constantly innovates and provides a better service than its competitor. As long as there is competitive pressure on a company, I dont begrudge any billions they rake in. But I strongly resent even pennies made by unfair companies that do not have the burden of competition. Cable monopolies, electicity utilities, MSFT, teacher unions, anyone who found a way to dodge the pressure of competition irks me. Because I am under so much pressure to constantly learn and fight off competitors 20 years younger than me who are gunning for my job.
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so sad 'cause it so easy (Score:2)
this is just like firefox: ALL you have to do is find the one or two really simple things people actually need and want
This would have the added benefit of reducing google revenue; the financial markets are fickle sharks, and one quarter unexpected bad new
Google hardly useful overseas. (Score:5, Interesting)
But frankly, Google and Pagerank suck when it comes to searching in languages like Japanese. I can search for a Japanese company or item and get two pages of completely irrelevant links first. Not spam links, but junk like blog posts. Normalization sucks; Japanese uses a mixed script (phonetic kana plus Chinese characters), and Google does no conversion or normalization when searching. It would be a cinch for anyone to top Google in the huge Japanese market, and I think they're already getting pummelled by Chinese search engine.
Is it a case of "tall poppy syndrome"? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the shots at Google are a little bit of 'tall poppy syndrome' [wikipedia.org] kicking in. The only thing keeping Google from being resented is their 'humility' - that they aren't flaunting their position and their committed to 'not be evil' - like not handing the info to the NSA without a warrant like the 'others' did.
Firefox (Score:3, Insightful)
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Google is the default also in Safari, the Mac OS X default browser. I guess we could generalize that "I bet there is a correlation between the switcing rate from IE to *[xX]" :-)
And Opera (Score:2)
I remember Opera Google version in which as soon as you typed something, it populated the combo box with the results of the search.
Somehow the feature was removed, a very sad thing.
They missed the boat. (Score:4, Insightful)
Their front pages are still a big abortion of pictures and junk. Google is simple "box + logo".
Their results are trying to coppy google but the no.1 thing the google results page sells is TRUST. Most people trust google that all adds are going to be labeled clearly and they will not be inserted into the results!
MSN/Yahoo/etc already missed the boat on this issue. If anyone is going to compete with Google it's going to have to be someone new at this point probably. Unless of course someone thinks up a new must have feature.
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Have you seen the default site [live.com] for IE7 in Vista? I just loaded up Vista RC1 in a dual boot to see what it was like, I noticed the first time I loaded up IE to go download Firefox, that's the site it goes to.
Who wants to bet that millions of people will start using live.com as their search engi
Google (Score:2)
Surprising Google hasn't spawned a new rennaisance (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead, we still see a whole lot of "heads in the sand" and people wondering why their previously successful business models are failing. But then again I can see where people are trying to demonstrate that they learned something from the dot-com failures too... but perhaps they didn't learn what they should have since a great deal of the mentality from the dot-com boom is present in Google's "just try it" ideology.
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As far as I can tell, Google's innovation is subsidized by revenue made through a fairly old and well-understood business model. Whenever I ask where Google gets their money, I hear about ad revenue through the search engine that everyone uses, and sometimes references to "licensing their technology."
I guess I can see the relationship between innovation and the business: by making things that people want to use (particularly the search engine) they get eyeballs and then those people click on ads -- and in
Google found a good way to make money. (Score:3)
If you want to understand why Google is winning... (Score:3, Insightful)
AltaVista got the message, but they're still playing catch-up.
Google is about to get taught the lesson! (Score:2)
to use their platform dominance to crush google from the face of the earth. Now of course MS is
probably going to get sued again for doing so but, so what the gains are much bigger than the penalties. MS is going to just keep them wrapped up in the courts for years until they are nothing more than a smoldering wasteland.
Google had a chance to avoid the defeat they are about to get dealt, but they are not thinking enoug
It's not "googol," it's "google..." as in Barney. (Score:2)
"Google" has no particular referent other than Barney Google, possibly the longest-running comic in history, about a "cigar-smoking, sports-loving, poker-playing, girl-chasing ne'er-do-well" and his hapless horse Spark Plug.
Barney Google was the subject of a hit song of the 1920s:
Baaaaaaarney Google! With his goog-goog-googley eyes!
Baaaaaaarney Google! Had a wife three times his size!
She sued Barney for divorce--
Now he's living with his horse!
Barney Google! With his
Whoops, somehow omitted the URL (Score:2)
Re:It's not "googol," it's "google..." as in Barne (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, it's one.
Google: You keep using that word. (Score:3, Informative)
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. I think you are thinking of Googol [wikipedia.org]...
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One hundred zeros... (Score:3, Funny)
Does anyone know how to get google to do (Score:2)
Just yeaserday I was looking for Parklane park.
I got 10 pages hit for Park Lane -note the space.
Park lane inn
Park lane apartmaent, etc.
I don't want something 'close' I want exact. Putting it in quaotes does not help.
So, what obvious thing did I miss?
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[exact term]
I think this is an exact phrase search.
how much they've won (Score:5, Insightful)
In the past six months, I've noticed two computer newb friends of mine doing the same exact thing-- When provided a URL for a website, they don't know they can type it into the browser's URL field. Instead, they use their bookmark for google (it's also set as their home page) and then type the URL into the google search field. In most instances, Google returns a link to the URL they have just typed.
In the most recent instance, it didn't because it was a website I had just created for my friend. He told me on the phone that he couldn't find the website I had sent him the URL for. I knew the domain was propagated in DNS, so this sounded odd to me. Then when I visited him at his house, I saw him typing it into google instead of the browser's URL field and I had to explain that google didn't yet know about the website and that he needed to request it directly.
The other guy opens his browser, which has google set as his home page, then he types "www.hotmail.com" into the search field so he can check his email.
So, yeah, Google has established itself as a fundamental component of the internet for many, many people.
Seth
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Goog FTW! (Score:2)
Good News (Score:2)
- p
length? (Score:2, Funny)
Does anyone remember id? (Score:2)
Money quote:
It's my impression that other comp
Search engine capabilities I'd like to see... (Score:2)
1) You upload an image to the engine.
2) It searches for exact matches of the image, and shows you the URLs where they're hosted as well as any pages href'ing them, what the image has been renamed to, etc.
It can do some sort of advanced pattern recognition, allowing it to compare your uploaded query pic against images which look similar to it in the search engine's index. Upload a smiley face, for example, and it'll find you other smiley faces, or perhaps frowny-faces, etc.
If someo
Percentage Point? (Score:2)
There's one way how it could go wrong for Google (Score:2)
research progress, core vs niche (Score:3, Interesting)
Like all large organizations, they have limited ability to focus on niche areas, and some of the really important niche areas they are completely ignoring. It really does always come back to limited resources.
Why have they been unable to complete with YouTube, and instead they are in talks for buying them for 1.X Billion?
Why do they have a litany of research projects that have limited to minimal adoption?
Why are they still focused on the big-numbers word game when it's clear that even with 100 Trillion+ word corpuses, they still only achieve 70-90% accuracy for various language tasks?
The answer to all of these questions is that they have a (massive) core business, and the focus of the company if to maintain and grow that core business. To really address the above issues and several other, critical ones toward their ultimate goal, they need to be "more different" than how normal, big companies operate. They need to separate out the core and build an internal financial ecology to mirror the outside world. They currently have an internal idea and development ecology - but that is not enough to incent the niche development internally.
Best technology. (Score:4, Interesting)
It may actually be that anyone has yet to best any technology offerings Google has, hence nobody is able to challenge their dominance. Apart from that, Google is hardly a monopoly. You have a wide selection of search engines and nobody is forcing you to use any of them over the other.
it's the number of sites. (Score:2, Insightful)
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Thank you for providing an example of abuse, as per the GP post.
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Agreed,
Those who thinks that Google is defacto "good" are naive. Google is a company, and they do have to increase their market share and profits. Just take a look at recent decision in China. Shareholders have firmly remind them that China is a market they cannot loose.
There is strictly nothing wrong with that. They are a company..."but" it is just a private company, nothing more.
If they can profit from a monopoly (and currently they don't have any monopoly, competitions are one click away), they will sure
It depends (Score:2)
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Re:Time for some anti-trust! (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep in mind that Business week is a major share (Score:2, Interesting)