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...

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

they won't have to

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:they won't have to

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:they won't have to

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.

So... It's simple.

Build me a better search engine...

 

Re:So... It's simple.

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!

Re:So... It's simple.

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.

Hear hear!

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.

Google stands down

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

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.

Search engines tend to regulate themselves...

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

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.

This is not like david vs goliath

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

In Soviet Russia...

...Chuck Norris is afraid of Google!

Auto insurance...

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 :

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

that point is long past.

Almost everybody should be

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 plannings or job applications from goffice

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

I am not (only) afraid of Google

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!

"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.

no comparision to MS

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.

Google ain't that bad...

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?

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.

Power corupts...

So let me see if I have got this? google corupts, and monoploy google corrupts absolutly? See the thing is I havnt seen them do something specficaly evil yet...so I think I'll reserve judgment until then...

hate google?

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.

I would find it hard to do without Google

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.

Google and Necessity

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

Google Is Vulnerable

Google doesn't just censor in China it does so in the US as well but follows it's own agenda at home. Even it's own board of directors objected to a proposal to block pro-active censorship: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/googles-boar d-objects-anti-censorship-proposal/story.aspx?guid =%7BE4924442-BA3A-4F47-A5B8-DCA66F1A9CB0%7D [marketwatch.com] Google also wants to index more government records at home while working to censor abroad. I think Google hs been going down a slippery slope, and when Google's own actions are considered against the governmnets desire to force Google to be an investigative/monitoring tool I think Google is more vulnerable to a viable backlash then Microsoft ever was. In any case that "do no evil" bit doesn't work anymore.

simply innovating

When you look at Google from another POV, it is not becoming evil at all. Google is pushing new technologies where "old" companies just let it go - and some people are seeing this as evil. We still have liberty to choose. The companies fear Google because they used innovation before all, and it seems that it worked. Only time will tell.

Why not mention the actual Davids hunting Google?

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 taking on the giant reverse-hydra on its home turf and its core competency. It's not impossible, it's not even unreasonable, it's just very hard.

As for the salary issue they mention, that confuses me. Who goes to a startup to make a higher salary? People who join startups join for the stock, not the awesome monthly compensation.

Powerset, the company I work for, is a real-life david-size phenomenon. It confuses me that the SF chronicle didn't even mention the SF-based startup that isn't dealing in billions of dollars to do what Microsoft is apparently struggling to do.

Oh no--they even pay engineers really well!!!

James Currier, a former venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur who sold the social networking site Tickle to job site Monster.com, said that a company on whose board he serves recently lost a prospective employee to Google. The worker, whom he described as a genius, turned down an offer of $120,000, plus stock options, in favor of a $375,000 salary from Google.

Oh No! You mean Google is willing to pay engineers the amount of money normally reserved for empty-suit MBA manager types? The HORROR of having to pay the people who actually build the product. What will the Yale and Harvard grads do now?

Standing on the shoulders of geeks

The only reason google is this prominent is because geeks (like me) told all our friends 'Use google!' There are only a few features that really set google apart from other searches, when someone duplicates these then google will not be so prominent. Let's face it google really has 0 intellectual property. The only IP I actually use (besides the search) is the toobar and that's easily replaced as I only use the spell check and 'click word search/highlight'. I could write a toolbar that does that in my sleep so I don't really see any 'technological' edge. The few 'features' that google has is really a lack of features:

1: Only relevant text is displayed, no 'you may also like!'
2: No graphical ads, no moving or blinking 'text' NO FLASH!
3: OK search results (just as good as Ya! or MS)

IMHO adwords (google's ad program) is the beginning of the end for the company. More than anything else adwords has created the 'evil' in google. That's exactly why google was so ready to work with red China on blocking 'evil words like democracy and freedom'. Don't forget that Bill Gates snubbed the Chinese president (or whatever he is called) in one of their last meeting over human rights issues, while google was busy constructing their word filters for the communist party. Google is happy to grab up all the videos on the internet and redistribute them with their crummy flash player (may flash burn in hell), meanwhile Bill Gates comes out and says 'DRM is dead' while google is working on their next inception of 'How to DRM everything, even though we don't actually own it'. Not that MS has abandoned DRM but you don't get people like Sergey Brin or Lawrence Page steping out and saying 'DRM is evil and we shal abandon it's use', rather they embrace it's evilness. They also don't say 'Sorry filtering words like "freedom" and "human rights" is evil' when everyone was hoping they would say that.

As soon as the geek community find a more appealing search google will be history, just as google was created it can be uncreated - word of geek.

Not hard to improve search if not selling ads

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.

As a technology demo, we have SiteTruth [sitetruth.com], a consumer-oriented search and rating system, in alpha test. We rate commercial web sites based on "business legitimacy". That starts with finding the business name and address of the organization behind the web site. That bypasses most "affiliates", "doorway pages", and similar junk sites, and gets you to the actual site selling something. As we take this further, we'll be validating incorporation status, business licenses, business credit ratings, and the other things one checks when checking out a business. You know, all that stuff you're supposed to check, but nobody ever does.

Then we push the sites with bad ratings to the bottom of the search results and off into obscurity, where they usually belong.

Site rating has been tried before, but usually based on user recommendations. User recommendations are too easy to fake; most of the people who write them are interested parties. (Our neighborhood video store is offering a free rental if you say good stuff about them on Yelp.) And coverage is usually narrow; there are more sites than people rating them.

bah

tired of this propaganda.. it's like that stupid ass documentary "Google Behind the Scenes".. it seems that if you use just the right wording, you can make anyone look bad.. thank you typical media!! please let us not forget that people hardly knew what or who Google was 5 years ago.. it's inevitable that with all the technology that exists today, that some company has tons of information regarding you.. Walmart probably knows more about you than Google does.. as long as Google keeps my information private, then there's nothing I'm afraid of.. and if they go against their motto, then they will feel the karmic wrath..

Phasing out Google ...

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?'"

This is so completely on point and timely, from a personal point of view.

I definitely classed myself as love-struck, dumb-struck Google fanboy ... but just a few days ago Google Checkout customer care annoyed me so completely to the point where I am now phasing out Google.

I'll still use their search option, because I still class them as the best in that department (alternative suggestions welcome) but everything else has a better, and usually open source alternative.

Greatnews RSS Reader.
Block Google via hosts.
Etc.

For me, Google overstepped the mark. Sure, their high and mighty may still give a damn. But I got rough end of the stick. And I got to thinking about how much power and info they had in that situation. Ten years down the line and they'll probably be more powerful, and give even less of a damn. And the transformation will be complete. I don't want to be just another cog in their power play.

The only positive side of this is that they opened my eyes up to open source, secure, locally hosted alternatives out there that are ... better.

If anyone could suggest an alternative to Gmail, I would appreciate it ... I definitely got sucked into that one hook, line, sinker ...

Cheers

Who Isn't Afraid of Google?

I'm not. Virginia Woolf now ...

Goliath?

Shouldn't it read Gooliath?

We should all be so unsuccessful

...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 the 'more' list when I pull up google to do a search. Yeah, they're small niches individually, but they're strong competitors in many of those niches.

Come to think of it, YouTube and google video earn it a more-than-a-few count for how many apps have much of a following.

Most wanted slashdot feature

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

What happened to the dominance of Altavista

Back in the early days of the Internet when Netscape was king and Geocities was awash with individuals poor attempt at a homepage there was Altavista. Now I know its still with us, but back then it was by far the most used search engine - possibly website - there was. Is there any chance of another search engine coming from nowhere and taking over from Google? I find it hard to see how, but nobody seems to be trying very hard...

east coast models [eastcoastmodels.co.uk]