Who Isn't Afraid of Google?

An anonymous reader writes "Google, despite 'doing no evil', has managed to make itself a number of enemies recently. That's the subject of an article from the San Francisco Chronicle, which looks into the Davids looking to slay Goliath. In this strange, strange tale the Davids are the size of companies like Microsoft and Yahoo, rumoured to be discussing an alliance to take on the search leader. The list of detractors is longer than other search providers, though; privacy experts, advertisers, startups, and Hollywood executives are all frustrated with the company for one reason or another. 'Despite Google's power, few say the company strikes as much fear in them as Microsoft did during the 1990s, when its near-monopoly on computer operating systems earned it the nickname "evil empire." Google's spotty track record with new products -- few outside of search have much of a following -- and intense competition with other Internet companies keeps it a step below. "With Google, there is still choice," said Chris Le Tocq, an analyst for Guernsey Research, "so I'm not sure if the 'evil empire' epithet can be equally applied." But he cautioned that the warning sign will come when Google becomes so dominant that customers cannot do without it. How well will Google deal with its customers' problems then?'"

Hm, I've got a pretty good idea...

[Mikachu]

How about... anybody who isn't a company/corporation?

Re:

[lordmetroid]

No worry about the the company or the seeming monopoly. It is not a monopoly and as soon as as any market leader reduces customer happiness competition grows. Monopoly can only be achieved through the means of the forcefull regulations and banning of competition by the state createing a monopoly. Google is no monopoly and I could at any time without fear of jail or death create my own search engine and compete or just use it for myself.

Re:

[aussie_a]

Monopoly can only be achieved through the means of the forcefull regulations and banning of competition by the state createing a monopoly.

And yet Microsoft was and is a monopoly without that happening. Perhaps you might want to rethink that definition or use another word, because when communicating with other people its always best to use words with agreed upon meanings. While that definition of monopoly might be agreed upon in some circles, it isn't here at slashdot.

Re:

[packeteer]

If you are a company out do win at any cost what is the best strategy? The best plan is to tell everyone you will "do no evil" and then do it anyway. If your going to do evil you might as well lie about it. Maybe Google is going to do no evil but consider this; any company out do do evil will say they wont do evil, any company out to do good will say they wont do evil. Basically I am saying that Google's mission statement counts for nothing and we need to consider their actual actions. Judge for yourse

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Monopoly can only be achieved through the means of the forcefull regulations and banning of competition by the state createing a monopoly.

And yet Microsoft was and is a monopoly without that happening.

It didn't actually. Like most people (I suspect) I think that copyright serves a very useful goal, but it is defintiely forceful regulation and banning of competition by the state. The whole point of it is to restrict supply so as to give the creator the financial benefits that come from a monopoly in their

Re:

[aussie_a]

But the state didn't give it a monopoly on operating systems. It gave it a monopoly on the Windows code. By your logic Linux and Apple would have had monopolies on operating systems all at the same time (and no I'm not talking about an oligopoly, I'm pointing out the logical flaw in the AC's claim). It was a nice try though ;)

A nicer try

[Mateo_LeFou]

The point is that the distinctively Microsoft practice of leveraging their control of the Windows code to crush competition in new markets (Cf. browser wars) depends on the government-granted monopoly called copyright.

Likewise their attempts to nip Samba in the bud, and constant efforts to keep Samba falling behind through fire and motion.

Re:

[Elektroschock]

Or that governments let make it happen. Its nothing to invest 1 billion in an alternative operating plattform.

governments can do. I means imagine we got 50 developers who work on getting Windows application run with Wine. governments can be it, its peanuts.

but they prefer to pay license fees and enslave us all.

Re:

[morgan_greywolf]

Actually, you don't need government rules, all you need is corporate fiat. Windows and Office became the defacto systems because corporate IT departments decided they wanted to settle on something that was to be a corporate standard. Before Windows became a monopoly OS in the desktop arena, corporates had a huge diversity in systems and solutions.

Several companies I'd worked for had IBM equipment (mainframes and mid-ranges like the AS/400) for accounting, Windows and DOS for many office workers, Macs in th

Re:

[Eustace Tilley]

But the state didn't give it a monopoly on operating systems. It gave it a monopoly on the Windows code

The state gave a monopoly on Windows-compatible implementations by using force to

• prevent reverse-engineering
• prevent anyone with an application from bundling the binaries required by that application
• prevent anyone from setting up an alternative distribution
• etc.

monopolies and the state

[falconwolf]

Monopoly is NOT given by the state. Monopoly is a degenerated case that can happen in a very unbalanced market, but happens due to the natural evolution of said market rather then from a state decision.

Oh but states, government, does give or create monopolies. Take the cases of electrical transmission, cable tv/net access, and landline phone service. In each of these cases the local government granted the companies an exclusive right to use the right of way [wikipedia.org] to lay their cables or fiber. No place I've

Re:

[Eustace Tilley]

And yet Microsoft was and is a monopoly without that happening.

Microsoft's monopoly rests on the state's enforcement of its copyrights. State power gives Microsoft sole-legitimate-supplier status in the developed world.

Re:

[twistedsymphony]

I agree that there are benefits of a standard OS... but this can be achieved without a Monopoly. For instance if Linux was the standard OS users would have the choice of any number of distributions. Would it be so bad if Windows became Open source and allowed anyone to tweak it and provide their own distributions and flavors? Obviously that wont ever happen "naturally" but I think that is one way we could have mass market OS standardization without a monopoly.

As for the case of Google... their monopoly i

Re:

[DeadChobi]

Actually, Google doesn't have a monopoly in the search engine market, as there are a fuckton of other engines available. A monopoly is defined as something like 80-90% market share. Thus, your argument that Google is abusing a monopoly position doesn't hold water.

Re:

[k1e0x]

Yeah, I agree with you. I'm not sure how it applies to Microsoft as I don't know the back story very well but even a corporation itself could not exist without governments. I would say the laws protected Microsofts monopoly, just as they do with any other monopoly.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly - Google is anti-corporation, pro "the ordinary people" and generally Anti-American [shelleytherepublican.com]. Only Microsoft can save us from their communist ways now.

Re:

[ThePromenader]

Um... quite often in that story, the David-s are not even in the same business as the Goliath in question. Whenever does an urge by one to take someone else's job - without being able to do it - end in anything we can call progress, let alone something positive?

Re:

[Mikachu]

Haha, the sad part is that few of the members are really fans of Dream Theater anymore.

Re:

[UncleTogie]

After all, it's done no evil to any non-corp person so far, except in China. And even there it claims to be balancing the greater good against the censorship which it is fully acknowledging that it is doing, so whether it's "evil on balance" or not in China is at least debateable.

I'd have to say that trading someone's rights for corporate profit is bad on any level, but many would disagree.

they won't have to

[froggero1]

when the general opinion of people turns to "google is too powerful and potentially evil" because there is choice, people will just stop using it. There's no lock ins (besides email, but even then, there's redirection, or just telling people that your email has changed).

Microsoft however, way back in the day, when you bought a "Windows PC", you had a couple thousand dollar investment in the company, making it a sudo lock in. The comparison doesn't really apply here imho.

Re:

[26199]

Huh? No offense, but... that's crazy talk.

1) Most people will never realise or care. 2) Of those who do realise and care, most won't switch until there's a competitor that's at least as good. I've yet to see another search engine as good as google, and their other offerings tend to be top of the pile, too.

Even with no lockin at all, it's very hard to take on google. The word "google" has become a verb! How's that for free advertising?

Re:

[froggero1]

Huh? No offense, but... that's crazy talk.

none taken

1) Most people will never realise or care.

Never say never, when mainstream media has a constant flow of articles about how all your email is being read, google is profiling you... they're making deals with your employer to inform them of when you apply for a different job (that sort of stuff, you know, actually being evil), people will notice, and they will care, a lot.

2) Of those who do realise and care, most won't switch until there's a competitor that's at least as good. I've yet to see another search engine as good as google, and their other offerings tend to be top of the pile, too.

I suspect that the next "good" search engine will come from the open source community. When enough people with knowledge and capability group up against google,

Re:

[spottedkangaroo]

...next "good" search engine will come from the open source community.

Oh sure. I like to write open source stuff and release it in the wild and all, but it's never occurred to me to set up a million dollar server farm and stick it on the net for people to use as a search engine or whatever. And venture capitalists tend not to bother with companies that don't have a clear way of making money some day.

So, where does that leave us?

Re:

[aussie_a]

So, where does that leave us?

With a problem that requires an innovative solution. Good luck :)

Re:

[Architect_sasyr]

Well without thinking it out too much, all I'm thinking right now is a SETI @ ~/ style of search engine. Or maybe something like bittorrent. The whole problem I see with the internet is that, despite all our funky routing tricks, I still have to get from Australia to America to reach Microsoft.com. Bring on the distributed internets!

Disclaimer: Whilst I am a fairly decent programmer, I am nowhere near to the task of this. Do not message me with suggestions or sample code, I won't be able to help.

Back on t

Re:they won't have to

[Arimus]

I suspect that the next "good" search engine will come from the open source community. When enough people with knowledge and capability group up against google, I'm sure they could come up with just as good or better of an alternative. Again though, they'd have to be motivated to do that to google, which will probably only happen if/when the majority of people shift from believing do no evil to don't get caught doing evil, but do it as much as possible.

While I agree the OSS community could produce a search engine as good or better than google in terms of code etc - the biggest killer for any alternative not from a big company is going to be the server resources, bandwidth and all the other infrastructure type elements that require serious bucks to buy and maintain... The best we can hope for would be the OSS community to produce the software and firm like IBM to provide the infrastructure elements... And typing this another issue just occured to me: Google's index has been built up over many years, for any alternative to get to the same level of indexing as google will take a long time to be complete. (Yes, I know the web changes but a certain percentage is going to be static content.)

Re:

[beyondkaoru]

i've always been curious as to how these search algorithms work; i've been thinking that it might be possible for a globally distributed search network running in the background on people's computers to replace google. then again, i don't really know anything about searching other than the google dance pagerank thing (which seems quite parallelizable).

this would be open source / free software and we could, you know, make sure it stays in the background and doesn't use too much space or bandwidth or processo

Re:

[Arimus]

In theory that sounds good - however speed of response would be an issue, how to distribute the index amongst the nodes would be a stumbling block... how many nodes should have the same parts of the index to avoid dead spots when people shut their PC's down...

Things like SETI can be distributed as the data set can be broken down into discrete portions and each client is reporting back to a central point...

Re:

[beyondkaoru]

i'm kind of curious how much data would need to be stored; we can organize it such that we use distributed hash tables and have the daemons store data depending on how close some data's key is to the node's id. if the data to be stored is less than, say, ten times the amount of space the participants are willing to cache we'd be fine. it could be a somewhat probabilistic thing; each node should try to figure out what sorts of other nodes have similar id's and if someone logs off then others will have to try

Re:

[VENONA]

Google started with a few PCs under a desk, and PageRank. It took them a few years to come out of the blue and become a verb. I was using Google from the early days, just as I was using Inktomi before it was widely known, way back when.

What might supplant Google is probably going to equally as surprising to most people. Perhaps something from researchers at a university connected to Internet 2, enjoying huge bandwidth. Surely that's something that should make Internet search engine research easier?

The need

Re:

[FrostedChaos]

The need is there. I have a *huge* bookmark collection. So large that it's often faster to search rather than drill through the collection--though the bookmarks are still valuable in terms of providing direct links to fundamentals. I do a lot of research, but also some education. So it's worthwhile for me to direct links to fundmental references to, say, the Law of Large Numbers. We're talking non-Wikipedia here, as Wikipedia references can change overnight, due to internal wars. References to fundamental p

Re:

[VENONA]

"Nobody who matters is interested in maintaining privacy, at least in the 20th century sense of the word. Corporations realize the money to be made on profiling customers. Governments want to send spooks after terrorists. The general public doesn't understand or care about the issue because they don't understand data mining. The advocate of 20th-century-style privacy is in the same position as a well-meaning pacifist in the 19th century saying "don't use these new artillery pieces to redraw the political ma

Re:

[FrostedChaos]

I suspect that these things may run in cycles. Of course, that could just be wishful thinking. I'd agree that the general public, except for older people such as myself, don't currently care about privacy the way people, say 20-30 years ago did.

People 20-30 years ago were just as willing to fill out income tax forms with tons of personal information, have their phone numbers and addresses printed in telephone directories, and support governments which conducted extensive surveillance operations. The only th

Re:

[VENONA]

"People 20-30 years ago were just as willing to fill out income tax forms with tons of personal information, have their phone numbers and addresses printed in telephone directories, and support governments which conducted extensive surveillance operations. The only thing that's changed is that information technology got better."

I don't regard filling out income tax returns as much of a personal decision--unless you're into some sort of tax protest thing. Phone directory listings are a case where for most pe

Re:

[aussie_a]

Well if people care more about good search results then not "being afraid" then I'd suggest they go see a psychiatrist. If however they're not afraid of google, why would anyone switch?

I've yet to see another search engine as good as

[falconwolf]

google

It really depends on what you're searching for. Most of the tyme I start a search with Google myself however sometimes I find Alta Vista is better. I've done searchs with Google that didn't return any results but I would get some at Teoma, before Ask.com bought it out, or Mooter [mooter.com]. And for a couple of areas of searchs I start right away with About.com. Actually it was Google that led me to using About.com. Googling for archeology/anthopology led me to About's section [about.com] on it. A later Google led m

Re:

[suv4x4]

when the general opinion of people turns to "google is too powerful and potentially evil" because there is choice, people will just stop using it. There's no lock ins (besides email, but even then, there's redirection, or just telling people that your email has changed).

Microsoft however, way back in the day, when you bought a "Windows PC", you had a couple thousand dollar investment in the company, making it a sudo lock in. The comparison doesn't really apply here imho.

So your point is Google is building a

Re:they won't have to

[Bert64]

On the contrary, i have often found myself forced to use microsoft products against my will.
How many times have you been send a file in a proprietary format, or gone to a non standards compliant website that forced you to use a microsoft browser.
This is why people hate them. Google on the other hand, don't force anything.

Re:

[suv4x4]

How many times have you been send a file in a proprietary format, or gone to a non standards compliant website that forced you to use a microsoft browser. This is why people hate them.

So, people hate them since a 3rd party uses their products or doesn't support other browsers.

How on Earth can this be a reason to hate the tool provider. If you're so pissed off, call the guy who gave you the format or whose site you saw, and give him a piece of your mind.

He'll have to give you the said files in SOME kind of f

Re:

[jZnat]

If Microsoft followed open standards in the first place, it wouldn't have been a problem to receive documents in "Microsoft Office format" (it could have been ODF, or Microsoft could have made it an open standard in the first place), or view IE-only webpages (which can only happen because Microsoft extended or created their own IE-only "standards" and then marketed the hell out of it; if they used open standards such as those created by W3C, which Microsoft is part of mind you, it wouldn't have been a probl

Re:

[chris_eineke]

If Microsoft followed open standards

HAHAHA, oh wow! You had me up until that part.

Re:

[Bert64]

Microsoft intentionally created proprietary formats to make it harder to clone their products, and to force others to buy their products when they receive such files.

Those third parties usually have no idea anything other than microsoft exists, and i still usually give them a piece of my mind.

In cases where standard files are already prevelent, i have absoloutely no problem accepting files from people using microsoft products, or any other vendor's products. However, microsoft usually have much smaller mark

Re:

[Breakfast Pants]

Someone sent me a link with directions to their house, and it was a google maps link!@!!! I was locked-in because I couldn't extract the street address from the URL. Google is EVIL! The URL didn't comply with any standards.

Re:

[PoliTech]

I think that there have been rumblings about Google being "Not-so-great" amongst the web developer community for a few years (due to questionable pageranking, the clickfraud problem and whatnot), but the combination of the "Don't be evil" mantra and the China censorship deal triggered lots of people to take a closer look at Google and Google's business practices. People who otherwise never before cared about Google.

Now Google faces a similar problem to that of the main stream media news outlets. They are

Re:

[JKConsult]

Now Google faces a similar problem to that of the main stream media news outlets. They are too left-wing for the right-wingers. They are too right-wing for the left-wingers (at least as far as business practices),

And yet, for moderates (or even for those of us who can separate our leanings when we need/want to) they're neither. Hence their popularity amongst the mainstream. Unlike in politics, where a vocal minority can get past the apathy of the masses, Google's business doesn't require you to approv

Re:

[Breakfast Pants]

Just to a add a bit on email--if you use gmail for your domain there is absolutely no lock-in at all. You just point the DNS mail records over to whichever other provider you want, or to your own machine.

**AA hates Google, that makes me love them ;-)

[anandsr]

The article gives 4 groups that are afraid of Google.
1) MS, Yahoo - MS I hate. Yahoo I don't care. In all it is positive.
2) Raised salaries - I am a programmer, I love them.
3) MPAA and RIAA are afraid - This makes me love Google more than anything else.
4) Privacy Advocates - I think this is a bit of a problem, but going forward,
I believe that privacy will only be a figment of our imagination.
I would just hope that all people have equal venues to violate privacy of others,
rather than having one group more eq

So... It's simple.

[Colin Smith]

Build me a better search engine...

 

Re:

[Timesprout]

Whats not so simple is how you fund this endeavour. Google have been successful with targeted ads because they keep and analazye lots of data which is what's raising concerns now. What I find surprising is that many in the tech community are only becoming concerned about this now. While my geek griends were happy to get them, several of my non tech friends immediately turned down invites to GMail years ago as soon as they read the T&C. The T&C with the failed Google web accelerator were even worse.

Re:

[Vexorian]

The word you tried to spell was "paranoid" not concerned. Seriously people get serious.

Re:So... It's simple.

[owlnation]

Of course, that isn't simple.

I love Google, but in truth we do very much need someone to do that.

1. Search, regardless of Google, or politics, or anything else, does NOT meet most peoples' needs. There's far too much gaming, far too much blackhattery, and image search is a complete lottery (although Ask seems to do a much better job of this than the others).

2. It's been around ten years since there was any significant breakthrough in search technology. While it IS hard, that's still kind of lame. I suspect part of the reason for lack of development is that search, you know, kinda mostly works, and Google, kinda mostly, does an ok job. If it totally sucked, I bet we'd have new tech by now.

3. Evil or no, competition is healthy. Google needs serious challengers to evolve. It's good for them, good for us all.

4. Few people know how to legitimately promote a website on Google. If you are de-ranked, most people don't know why, or how to solve that problem. Your site is vulnerable to your competitors deliberately Blackhat SEO-ing your site to de-rank it. There's nothing you can do about it. Your business can be destroyed. No-one to appeal to, and no way of finding why, or what happened. That's too much power.

I'm inclined at this point to say that the situation was healthier, if more time consuming, in the days before Google. I always searched in Yahoo, Infoseek, Altavista and MSN. Between these four I would find what I was looking for by page 3 or 4 of the results, and sometimes curiously serendipitous results would take me off somewhere more interesting.

I find that most searches I perform in Google these days have to be qualified with -ebay, -amazon, -wikipedia, -about, etc. to find relevant results. I'm still faced with about five SEO link farm sites per page for most searches.

For example, try searching for a celebrity's name. You'll get an (usually very useful) Imdb entry, a wikipedia entry (that's usually copied and pasted from Imdb), and then dozens and dozens of SEO link farms or celebrities picture page scams (there's so many of these that they are hard to filter). If you are very lucky you might find the celebrity's own website by page 4 or 5. You might also begin to see interesting fan pages by that time too. You'll be 10 or 20 pages in before you start seeing things like legitimate newspaper or TV reports about that person.

No folks, if you are are currently working on new search tech, please I beg you, work faster!

Well, no. Of course it isn't that simple

[Colin Smith]

Otherwise it'd have been done by now.

What I want though is a personal search engine. Where I can perform an initial search, have some likely candidates returned to me and then I can say yea like this, or nay not like that and the search engine will go off and find me more candidates which were like the ones I do want and less like the ones I don't want. Then I want it to keep my searches recorded and update them every so often as it indexes more sites.

 

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[Kijori]

I have a slightly different theory. If you look at what's changed in the past few years, you'll see that this engine-spamming has increased massively. People now devote their days to trying to fool Google into listing them higher than they deserve. Taken in this context, the quality of result moving up slowly sounds pretty good - if the results are improving, despite the efforts of thousands of people and companies to reduce their quality, the technology behind the search must be moving forwards fairly quic

Re:So... It's simple.

[garcia]

1. Search, regardless of Google, or politics, or anything else, does NOT meet most peoples' needs. There's far too much gaming, far too much blackhattery, and image search is a complete lottery (although Ask seems to do a much better job of this than the others).

It doesn't meet people's needs that haven't a clue what the fuck they're doing. Generally if you are searching for something simple (which is what MOST people do) Google will return it in the top 10 results and more than likely the top 3. For the rest of us, Google offers some really fucking cool searching (like inurl) that lets you do some deep digging for XLS/CSV dumps of databases that makes my job easier.

The basis of your argument is correct -- we always need better searching abilities (and they probably will come) but to say that it's not good enough for most people is just nuts.

2. It's been around ten years since there was any significant breakthrough in search technology. While it IS hard, that's still kind of lame. I suspect part of the reason for lack of development is that search, you know, kinda mostly works, and Google, kinda mostly, does an ok job. If it totally sucked, I bet we'd have new tech by now.

Instead of sitting here bitching, why aren't you developing new search algorithms that work better?

3. Evil or no, competition is healthy. Google needs serious challengers to evolve. It's good for them, good for us all.

Definitely and while they're snapping up all the good engineers, I think that someone will either leave Google and start their own shit or they'll just decide that they can do better themselves from the get-go.

4. Few people know how to legitimately promote a website on Google. If you are de-ranked, most people don't know why, or how to solve that problem. Your site is vulnerable to your competitors deliberately Blackhat SEO-ing your site to de-rank it. There's nothing you can do about it. Your business can be destroyed. No-one to appeal to, and no way of finding why, or what happened. That's too much power.

Then beat them out at their own game and either learn or hire someone else to do it. Just like your competitors beating you out with conventional advertising because your marketing department sucks, you have to hire a team that will handle that stuff for you.

I find that most searches I perform in Google these days have to be qualified with -ebay, -amazon, -wikipedia, -about, etc. to find relevant results. I'm still faced with about five SEO link farm sites per page for most searches.

What the fuck are you searching for? I *never* run into this problem. Please provide some real world examples other than searches about celebrities.

Re:

[Snaller]

"Instead of sitting here bitching, why aren't you developing new search algorithms that work better?"

How old are you anyway? 10? People do not have to be programmers to point out something is not working so well.

"What the fuck are you searching for? I *never* run into this problem."

No, but then you are either a moron or a paid shill.

Re:

[Vexorian]

seriously, "-amazon -ebay -wikipedia", that guy is on crack or something, google would max show 2 results per site, and it doesn't really burn too much neurons to go to the second page...

Hear hear!

[Snaller]

You can stay logged in to the search engine - then why the hell can't you block sites you never want to see again?

Why can't you define standard exclusion sets for quicker supressed of stuff you don't want?

Presumably because google want you to say logged in to get an advertising profile, not because they really care.

After all Google thinks censorship is good for business.

Re:

[Gorimek]

2. It's been around ten years since there was any significant breakthrough in search technology. While it IS hard, that's still kind of lame. I suspect part of the reason for lack of development is that search, you know, kinda mostly works, and Google, kinda mostly, does an ok job. If it totally sucked, I bet we'd have new tech by now.

Just because the result page looks pretty similar doesn't mean there hasn't been huge technology improvements on the server side.

You may remember search as being just as good

Ask

[falconwolf]

Google has very serious challengers. Microsoft and Yahoo are throwing billions at that problem right now. As is Google itself. Ask is also in the game.

I don't think Ask presents much of a game. It used to be that when I googled for something but didn't get any results I'd go over to Teoma and I'd get results there. However since Ask bought Teoma it has gone downhill. I've found another SE that returns results when Google doesn't, Mooter [mooter.com].

Falcon

Re:

[LionKimbro]

4. Few people know how to legitimately promote a website on Google.

No, they know how. They just don't want to.

My friend with his company calls me, asking about different SEO options. I say, "(A) Change your title from (default) to the actual title of your website, (B) buy Google key words. Guaranteed, number one."

He'd much rather shell out thousands for SEO, than buy google key words.

Google stands down

[noidentity]

In response to claims that it is too good for its own good, Google is voluntarily scaling back its search engine to version 1.0. This move will allow other search engines to gain a larger share of the search market, and end Google's monopolistic practice of making a good product that makes rational people unable to avoid using. Even though users will have to accept this step backwards in search quality, this is necessary to make it a more even playing field for other companies. Google is also providing a search engine randomizer to further avoid any one engine becoming too dominant.

Failures with delusions of self-entitlement

[Anonymous Coward]

privacy experts, advertisers, startups, and Hollywood executives

Privacy experts are worried about all search histories and to be fair, Google is the only major search engine that refused to freely surrender search terms. Advertisers are scum who are pissed off that google is a less scummy advertiser than they are. Does anyone give a shit about Hollywood while they continue churning out the same tired crap and why are startups pissed at google?

This 'tides are turning for Google' is getting tired, they have the best search. Wake me up when one of these bozos does something proactive like setting up as serious competition. It's not even comparable to the MS monopoly because Microsoft never had the best operating system and they're still peddling shit. Try 'tides are turning for Microsoft' and I might agree.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Search engines tend to regulate themselves...

[3seas]

The bigger they get the higher the likely hood that the results won't be what the searcher is wanting.

So this is really not about search enignes but about googles incomming advertising dollar and perhaps what they chose to do with it.

Or in a word to express the competitions POV "envy"

...when their customers can't do without it

[Bandman]

Gee, I'd love to email you, but google's down. Sure I could use my yahoo mail, but you're on google too. I guess I could call you, but your contact information is in my spreadsheet on Google Documents. Damn.

Re:

[The Cisco Kid]

More importantly, is your contact information at google (or documents, or email messages, or anything else) locked into a proprietary secret format that is non-trivial to convert away from?

I think you'll see that the answer is 'no'. Compare to documents created and stored in one of MS-Word's many formats.

Re:

[perkr]

There gmail has gone down for sure. Although only in the order of minutes as far as I've experienced.

This is not like david vs goliath

[gunnarstahl]

This "fight" is about goliath vs goliath.

In the original story david was a person who tried to free his people. He even was willing to put his own life to risk to safe his people.

For some reason or another I don't think that these "davids" have the same altruistic motives...

Yt,

Gunnar

Re:

[Antique Geekmeister]

David was a lucky bastard who took on an arrogant giant and got in a lucky shot. He also turned out to be one of the worst kings in Biblical history: kind of like Bill Gates and his early effective defeat of IBM in the small computer market.

In Soviet Russia...

[daybot]

...Chuck Norris is afraid of Google!

Re:

[Anne Thwacks]

Mod parent up. Its just so cool...

Auto insurance...

[scooter.higher]

Maybe Google should take a tip from auto insurance companies advertising... "We not only give you our results, but the results of our competitors."

Wake up you morons :

[unity100]

"when Google becomes so dominant that customers cannot do without it."

that point is long past.

Re:

[wbren]

Not necessarily [centernetworks.com]. Bottom line after two weeks Google-free:

So, the question on everybody's mind. Will I be unblocking Google? Has my blockade been fruitless? Although I miss the fantastic search results, I would have to say "No, and no". I've found that I can get by, and even be more productive, without Google. "Don't Be Evil" is a great motto to have. However, I consider gathering every move I make on the internet to be evil and a violation of my privacy. I don't want this to turn into a political discussion

Re:

[Kijori]

I really don't understand what they've written there. They miss the fantastic search results, but not having them makes them more productive? I have a feeling they're just trying to besmirch Google's reputation and are willing to say whatever it takes, whether it's true or not.

Re:

[ClaraBow]

I really don't understand the writer's motivation. He left Google for Yahoo over privacy concerns, but Google went to court and fought to have their customers' private data from being handed over to the U.S. government, while Yahoo happily handed over info to the government without a fight. I don't know what this guy is trying to accomplish.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Almost everybody should be

[Anonymous Coward]

If you regularly use many of their services, they have recorded data on you about

- interests, tastes, hobbies, obsessions, illnesses, allergies, addictions, fetishes, celebrity crushes, ...
- your friends, colleagues, acquaintances, physician, garage, bank, pizza delivery, ...
- where you live, work/study, plan to go to (gmaps) and actually went (if you loggin in gmail from there)
- email and chat transcriptions from gmail and gtalk
- plans and schedules from gcalendar
- private documents like personal finance p

Re:

[aussie_a]

And yet people give it to Google willingly. Yes, Google's services are just THAT good.

Google tracking

[falconwolf]

I don't believe any company or organization in history has ever recorded so much private information on so many individuals as Google.

However nobody is forced to use Google. Their terms of use are pretty clear and if you don't like them then you can use another search engine. And at the same tyme Google was the only major SE to refuse to turn over to the government thier records of people's searchs.

Falcon

Re:

[anandsr]

That is a side-effect of being on-line.

At-least Google doesn't roll over at the slight request from government like the other companies.
Or do you think that Yahoo, MSN, etc don't save your searches. What about your bank, your doctor,
are you sure they keep your data safe. At least Google tries to fight, where the rest of them would
actually sell your data. Google at least knows that they can directly make more profit from your data
without selling it, and will protect it for that reason.

I don't really expect t

I am not (only) afraid of Google

[Anonymous Coward]

I know about the dangers of Google. But I also see the dangers of all those who seem to be less important, less greedy, less dangerous, though they are using the verified data you gave them to collect highly specific data. And often enough don't tell you and don't get in trouble if you complain, because it's just local.

cb

Ha Ha!

[16K Ram Pack]

"The list of detractors is longer than other search providers, though; privacy experts, advertisers, startups, and Hollywood executives are all frustrated with the company for one reason or another. "

privacy experts - don't use it. You have other choices.
advertisers. Waaa waaaa. Sorry, someone came along and disrupted your business.
startups. What's their complaint? That Google does stuff better? I keep trying new search engines, and none of them are any better, so why would I switch?
Hollywood executives. Start to recognise that tools like YouTube are free PR.

It's Google that's with the consumer. They provide great search, great email, great maps. That's why they get lots of eyeballs. When they stop doing so, and just sit back and get complacent, they'll go down the tubes.

Look at Microsoft. It's hard to believe, but they were once considered as quite cool. They gave businesses a value proposition. Now, I know IT managers who only use them because of lock-in and legacy in-house applications (over time, as rewrites become inevitable, this will change). Google doesn't really have that. Their lock-in is the time it takes for someone to change their default browser URL.

Re:

[swillden]

Look at Microsoft. It's hard to believe, but they were once considered as quite cool.

When was that? When Win2K came out? No they were already known as the evil empire by then. Win95? Maybe a little cool, but not very much, and only among people who didn't know about anything else. Honestly, I think Microsoft's "coolness" probably peaked at about Windows 3.1, and that mainly because computers were new and cool to most people, and Microsoft drafted in. SOL.EXE is about as much coolness as MS ever mustered, and that was because you could play while pretending to work.

no comparision to MS

[timmarhy]

1. google supplies a free service, an MS computer was a $2000 investment.

2. you were tied to windows, there was no software then that could do the job, and changing required another huge investment of cash. changing search providers is as easy as typing in a new url.

Re:

[Timesprout]

changing search providers is as easy as typing in a new url.

Thats funny cos when MS wanted to default IE search to MSN in the same way Firefox defaults to Google it was a big deal apparently to change it.

Google ain't that bad...

[Xiph1980]

The fact that I read this article thru my iGoogle homepage, and the fact that google actually took the US government to court when they wanted to have google's search commands, shows me enough.
Google might have done stuff like cooporating with the Chinese government in censuring search results on the google.cn webpage, but I happen to agree with google there. If a company wants to do business in a foreign country, they'll have to agree with those foreign laws. In the case of China, that means certain subjects are taboo, and talking about certain subjects could get you killed. Is that fair? No ofcourse not, but it's the way that country works. Atleast they have a good search engine now.

If you hate Google for cooporating with this stuff, you'd better also hate Apple, for manufacturing there, and about every toy manufacturer.
Quite likely all bolts and screws in your car are probably manufactured in china aswell. Or how about the casing of your computer speakers and monitor?
If you hate google for that, hate all the companies for dealing with china, because the simple fact is, they all have to comply with Cn. laws and hence all do stuff that would make the hairs in our neck stand straight up.

How long would it take?

[Glowing Fish]

If for some reason, google ends their five to ten year winning streak, and starts being evil, or perhaps just bad, how long will it take people to switch off of it?

I imagine that it would start in places like Slashdot. and within a month or so, propelled by snarky comments and funny .sigs, the cognoscenti would realize that google wasn't cool anymore. From there, the regular, but not hardcore net users would start drifting off, and after a year or so, only the people who were clueless or didn't care would still be using it.

This is what I guess because this is how, for example, yahoo was slowly deserted in search, and mail, and maps, etc., by google.

Re:

[David Off]

> and after a year or so, only the people who were clueless or didn't care would still be using it

AKA the Microsoft demographic.

hate google?

[DaMattster]

I don't hate Google like I do Microsoft. I staunchly disagree with Google's censorship of information in China, but, Yahoo does it too so that is not reason alone to hate either of them. I hear people grousing about Google's "monopoly." No, you have a number of choices: Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos, and Webcrawler (note: I am not endorsing any of these.) This is quite unlike the Microsoft of the 1990s. Linux was still quite immature and you really needed a stronger compsci and UNIX background. BSD was and still is a viable choice but it really took more advanced users. As much as I hate to admit, Microsoft was unfortunately, the only real choice for the non technically savvy until recently.

So, why do I hate Microsoft? They stifle innovation under a pretext of encouraging it. As other Slashdotters have noted, Microsoft takes the embrace, extend, and patent attitude towards open source. This is what happened with Kerberos and the infamous PAC. They extended the olive branch to MIT then effectively changed Kerberos enough to make it their own. If that wasn't IP theft, it damn well should have been. Beware of any project sponsored by Microsoft as, "the appearance differs from reality." My eye is presently on the XORP [xorp.org] Extensible Open Source Router Project as Microsoft has taken a keen interest. Fortunately, there exists an implementation of BGP and OSPF that has been around longer than XORP and already outperforms it. See the OpenBSD [openbsd.org] project. Google, thus far, hasn't behaved quite like Microsoft; the coming years remain to be seen.

Google and Necessity

[Thumper_SVX]

Honestly, this article is really a bit of a shill. It's probably an article that was commissioned by Yahoo or Microsoft to try to "get the word out" that "Google is Not the Best". Well, to be fair to both of those search providers they're not bad, either... but neither of them really "gets" why Google IS the best search engine.

At the moment, Google has a database size that's "just right". Too much larger and results become muddled and inaccurate... too much smaller and you may never find what you're looking for. Yes, they wield a lot of power in this area because a de-listing or a reduction in your search placement will have an effect on your business. Deal with it... if your business is being reduced in priority it's because either (a) people aren't going to your site anyway or (b) you're doing something with your site to game the algorithms and Google's just changed them. That's life, that's business. If you want primo placement, you advertise with Google... that means you pay them. Everyone wins.

Now, another thing Google does right is they keep it simple. Their home page is fast, quick to load up and simple. When I'm using my cellular modem (UMTS) to connect and search, I don't want a graphics-heavy front page or graphics-heavy results pages. I want text, I want stuff I can cram down a thin pipe with some alacrity without waiting for the banner graphics to load up (I'm looking at you, Yahoo!) and I don't want my searches interspersed with flash animations that have nothing to do with the search I've submitted (Live!). Google does a lot of stuff right because they GIVE THE CUSTOMERS WHAT THEY NEED. Not what the company behind it wants to give them.

I'm not saying Google is perfect; it's not. Its search algorithms though are extremely good, and a quick search returns a good number of relevant searches. There are easy and well documented ways to get more targeted results (putting phrases in quotes for example) and generally only a few minutes of searching will turn up anything you want on all kinds of esoteric subjects. And if you can't find it under "Web", you can probably find it under "Groups" (Usenet). The only thing that sometimes skews those results are the Usenet aggregation sites, but they're usually easy to spot because you've received multiple hits that all contain exactly the same preview text. And who knows? They might be relevant.

In my job as an IT guy, I use Google daily. Multiple times daily, in fact. When I upgraded my work laptop to Vista lately I started giving Live a shot simply because it was the default. Sorry, Microsoft... it took me longer to sift through the results and fewer of them were relevant in my opinion. I switched my default search back to Google and the world has become a better place. Well, not really... but I at least get the consistency of results I've come to expect.

If someone creates a better search engine that fits my needs, let me know. I've tried them all. Back "in the day" when Yahoo! became popular, I was using Alta Vista because its results were more relevant. They lost their way... it's possible Google will... but for the foreseeable future I'm going to continue to use them.

And as for those who scream about the data gathering, the privacy stuff and so forth I say fine. If they're using that information to better tune the search results to my needs, then like an artificial intelligence Google is becoming even more useful to me. I really don't care if they accumulate stats on me... it's not like there aren't people out there doing it anyway, even without Google. We live in a world of advertisers, of corporations and data mining. We live in a society that has in a sense sold a bit of its soul to "the man" in order that we may lead comfortable lives for what we consider to be a reasonable cost. If you don't like it, opt out... but realize that opting in is what allows you to function in this society, allows you to buy things, do things and raise a family. I may not like it, but I live with it. I know I should try to change it... but at this point in my life raising my kids in the Midwest, why should I? It meets my needs today. Tomorrow? Who knows.

Why not mention the actual Davids hunting Google?

[Paradox]

What confuses me most about that article (besides the ugly picture of the inverse hydra) was that they sort of implied that it's impossible for any small company looking to oppose google to make any kind of capital, but nothing could be further from the truth.

What google has done to that space is remove all the BS, not all the "oxygen" as the article quotes. Your product has to be good, your plan has to be merciless, your people have to be dedicated not just to making a new product, but also to actually tak

Re:Why not mention the actual Davids hunting Googl

[ScrewMaster]

People who join startups join for the stock, not the awesome monthly

More to the point, the creative minds in startups do it because they have ideas that they care about, and want the ability to bring those ideas to fruition on their own terms. Maybe their stock options become worth something, maybe they don't, but money is not always the most important reason. Maybe it never is. Page and Brin formed Google, rather than taking their ideas to an established search company. They got lucky: most startups fai

Re:

[anandsr]

Actually they did go to Yahoo etc, with their ideas, but everybody turned them down.
All they had wanted was a measly 1 million dollars for their algorithm.
Actually for some researchers creating an startup is too much of an effort, but if they can get their research out to the people by selling it, they will be very ready for it.

Not hard to improve search if not selling ads

[Animats]

It's not all that hard to improve search. The problem is improving search when you're really in the business of selling ads.

With Yahoo, this is painfully obvious. Yahoo has a good search engine, but their home page and search result pages are so ad-heavy that they're annoying to use. Google has so far resisted the temptation to run picture ads, but there's heavy pressure for them to do so, from both investors and advertisers. The smaller search entrants tend to have more ads; they need the revenue.

A

Who Isn't Afraid of Google?

[ScrewMaster]

I'm not. Virginia Woolf now ...

We should all be so unsuccessful

[ediron2]

...few [google applications] outside of search have much of a following...

Yup. Just a few. Gmail, maps, froogle: I can't live without 'em. That's the few that have a solid following. Then there's phone-based search, the apps, code, blogs, google finance's awesome graphs/data. They're a bit more obscure. And finally, there's the rather substantial mountain of up-n-coming things: radio and TV ads, blogs and scientific journals, content of books, video, and the dozen(s) of other API's and products on th

Most wanted slashdot feature

[sinewalker]

An author filter. Zonk still posts fud drivel it appears...

Re:

[falconwolf]

I hope that it does not fall into the hands of those who are only seeking "Shareholder Value", then all users lose and a few wealthy people gain more cash.

When users loose, so does the investors.

Falcon