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NYT On Google's Role In Internet Advertising 276

Posted by timothy from the as-yet-no-popups dept.
prostoalex writes "John Markoff and G. Pascal Zachary from The New York Times take a look at Google, its already dominant position in the field of Web search and its increasing influence in the field of Internet advertising. Google is driving advertisers away from larger advertising venues, like AOL-TW et al., since (surprise!) people actually pay attention to relevant text links and are quite annoyed by pop-ups and similar "innovations". Some interesting data about Google: number of employees is about 800, number of buildings is 4, number of servers is 54K, for which there are about 100K microprocessors and 261K hard drives. This is claimed to be the largest computing system in the world, and that also raises barriers for anyone entering the field of Web search - most of companies out there can only imagine a Beowulf cluster of these, let alone build them so that the Web searches are delivered within a second."
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NYT On Google's Role In Internet Advertising More

NYT On Google's Role In Internet Advertising

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  • The Link (Score:5, Informative)

    by spoonist ( 32012 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @06:30AM (#5720458) Journal

    The REAL link to the article is this:

    • Re:The Link (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Related Article: Back in January 2003, Wired ran an article entitled "Google vs. Evil", with much focus on Google's potential for censorship and related matters.

      Google vs. Evil [Wired Archive] [wired.com]

      And here's the intro:

      The world's biggest, best-loved search engine owes its success to supreme technology and a simple rule: Don't be evil. Now the geek icon is finding that moral compromise is just the cost of doing big business.

      They even mention Slashdot:
      ...the reaction from the Slashdot crowd and most other

  • Well there's just one thing missing right now ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ngdbsdmn ( 658135 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @06:30AM (#5720459)
    ... and that is for Google to make a wrong move so that everyone goes "monopolist paranoia". This should be fun if it happens, think about arguments like: "these search results look rather suspicious to me".

  • Alltheweb looks quite nice compared to Google (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 13, 2003 @06:32AM (#5720463)
    I think that Alltheweb is a viable competitor to Google. They removed banners (only textual ad links left), and they have lots of nice touches like filtering search results in several languages (I know four, and Google allows me to see either everything or only one language), boss button for those pr0n searches, similiar searches, automatic quote adding (duke nukem 3d levels turn into "duke nukem 3" levels), etc. The only thing that Google does better is the image search and cache.

  • NYTimes registration. (Score:4, Informative)

    by termos ( 634980 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @06:34AM (#5720475) Homepage
    It was starting to piss me off, so I created:
    Login: sladotter
    Password: slashdot
    Feel free to use it.
  • > number of employees is about 800, number of buildings is 4, number of servers is 54K, for which there are about 100K microprocessors and 261K hard drives

    > most of companies out there can only imagine a Beowulf cluster of these, let alone build

    I really don't find this too big a company. Sure, it was formed on the good financing of the dot-com boom, but 54K servers, 100K... 261K... must be about $1m of capital here. And you're suggesting AOL-TW or M$ can't raise £1m of capital? Web search

    • TYPO IN ABOVE POST (Score:2, Informative)

      by Uber Banker ( 655221 )
      Opps, $10m is more like it, sorry typo, dunno how is did it twice... :\

      But yes, $10m is not a lot for big corps.

      • Opps, $10m is more like it, sorry typo, dunno how is did it twice... :\

        $10m for 54000 servers? Considering these servers are said to average 2CPUs and five hard drives per, I'd say your estimated $185.00 per server is a little on the slim side.

        Estimating a more round $2000 per server, we come to a figure of $108 million. Factor on top of this the costs of housing these servers, including backup power (UPS and generator), the real estate (you can't shove 54k servers into a spare equipment closet), the

    • Re:Google aren't big... (Score:5, Informative)

      by packeteer ( 566398 ) <packeteer@sub d i m e n s i o n . com> on Sunday April 13, 2003 @06:48AM (#5720511)
      Ok your are EXTREMELY far off. You may be a banker but you seem to not have experiance with technical situations. A company like google could end up spendind a million dollars on one person. Remember that to run an entire building is expensive. They have to pay all the people who many of which are expensive techs. Each server probably has thousands of dollars of equipment between the multiple procs and hig performance hard drives. The computers had to be setup of course which im sure costed a bundle as that would be no small task. Maintenance of the equipment would be a bitch. I doubt anyone could do what google has done with less than $100 million.
    • They've been profiled on Slashdot how many times? And just going from memory I have to say this can't possibly be right.

      Those employees cost money... a few may sweep the floors, and some may simply be hard-drive-swapping monkeys, but others actually write the software they use.

      I'd bet their electric bill alone would eat up a chunk of that 1 million per year...

      • Re:Google aren't big... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by madfgurtbn ( 321041 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @08:58AM (#5720770)
        some may simply be hard-drive-swapping monkeys,

        According to Cringley, they don't replace bad drives at Google. see http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030410. html
        for this quote:

        These are not racks and racks of state-of-the-art blade servers, just el cheapo PCs. So the magic must be in the software.

        Now here is the part that sticks in my mind: the fault tolerant nature of the cluster is such that if a machine fails, the other machines simply take over its functions. As a result, whenever a server fails at Google, THEY DO NOTHING. They don't replace the broken machine. They don't remove the broken machine. They don't even turn it off. In an army of drones, it isn't worth the cost of labor to locate and replace the bad machines. Hundreds, maybe thousands of machines lie dead, uncounted among the 10,000 plus.
        • If this is true the google is doomed. If they would rather build a new building than replace a machine this is incompetence that will cause not just a machine crash, but a company crash... when they run out of room or money...
          • Actually if that were true and I were Google, I won't be worrying that much about space or money. They have money and money buys space.

            It doesn't really matter as long as machines are reliable enough, don't catch fire or if they do you can keep things under control.

            If it ever gets to be such a big problem, they should just start turning faulty PCs off, and swap them in when installing new PCs. Or make the half dead ones beep first.

            But it may be a while before that gets economically justifiable.

            BTW if I

    • Re:no kidding (Score:5, Interesting)

      by error0x100 ( 516413 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @07:11AM (#5720563)

      Why do companies 'need' to be big anyway? The main point of a company is to turn a profit and to avoid dying.

      IMO technology development companies/teams are far better off with a smaller group of highly talented and intelligent (and flexible!) people, than a large team of mediocre talents. That is, I think that a "smaller, smarter, nimbler" development team is actually a critical asset in IT. I think growth just for the sake of growth can be the downfall of a decent IT company. People are too focussed (sp?) on size as a measure of a company.

      • People are too focussed (sp?) on size as a measure of a company.

        And that surprises you? How many contests, business or otherwise, boil down to size? How many are just complex ways for little boys to whip out their willies and measure them against one another?

        Hell, dick-measuring seems to be genetically encoded for most men, especially when the actual equipment is substandard. Just take a gander here at Slashdot to see techno-geeks engaged in the same stupid games as men in other walks of life. They

        • Re:no kidding (Score:4, Insightful)

          by error0x100 ( 516413 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @07:41AM (#5720622)

          Very true :) There seem to be no limits in life as to what men will turn into a silly 'dick-size' contest. Men turn practically anything and everything into a contest, no matter how pointless and trivial something is (or for that matter, no matter how lofty and meaningful something is). I think its one of humankinds more useful traits, competition 'gets the blood going' (figuratively I mean) and spurs us on to be better and to make better things.

          • I joke from time to time that if a woman has a strange compulsion to wash her hands very often, she either hides it from others and/or consults professional help.

            Whereas it's conceivable for a guy with the same problem to brag about how many times he washes a day (an hour even), argue about the best soap and hand treatment to use, maybe even form a club or special interest group of like-minded guys.

            As for why do some companies need to be big? Coz the bosses want more money. Money is one of the popular way
      • id's always had a policy of staying small. As a result, they don't have very high costs (which means that they don't have a huge amount of presure to produce or go out of business). They're fairly flexible, and developrs have a large amount of say within the company (which is why we get Linux releases).

    • Re:Google aren't big... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by afidel ( 530433 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @07:29AM (#5720596)
      Um, let's see $1,000,000 / 54,000 = $18.50 Hmm, for dual cpu, 4GB ram, rack mount machines I think you will need a bit more than that =)
    • You're missing the point. And your math is wrong.

      2: 54000
      1: 300
      *
      1: 16200000

      The point isn't that spending a couple million on servers is what's required to take part. How do you manage them? That's not trivial. Google is as much an IT company as they are an ad provider. Oh, ans search firm.

  • Imagine... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 13, 2003 @06:37AM (#5720482)
    those servers running Windows 2000.

    Well, maybe not.
  • people really do click those ads! I've always tuned them out, so I wondered if they could really make money with them. Apparently they've been quite profitable. I hope they keep things the way they are.

    • Re:What do you know, (Score:3, Informative)

      by BrookHarty ( 9119 )
      Hey, people do click those ads, they do respond to spam. Look at Iwon.com [iwon.com], they are still in business and they pay people money to use their search engine!

    • Re:What do you know, (Score:4, Interesting)

      by AlecC ( 512609 ) <aleccawley@gmail.com> on Sunday April 13, 2003 @06:56AM (#5720530)
      Not only do I click on the ads, in Google and Google alone, I ask for them. If I want cheap flights, I ask Google for cheap flights and click on the resulting ads. Since Google knows I am in .uk, it filters the ads accordingly. It works. It may be contributing to a monopoly, but hey, I'm lazy.
    • Yep, in fact if I am looking for a niche item I will often visit nearly every adword advertisement to find more info because the resellers websites will either have the info or links to the sites that will have the info. Sometimes even google can't find all the info on a particular gizmo =)

  • Our cage is next to theirs (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 13, 2003 @06:50AM (#5720513)
    and lots of those 54K servers were the cheap, 4-systems-on a-fiberboard-shelf systems. They told us they had a 25% failure rate with those. They were Pentium and Celeron based. And they dump A LOT of heat into our cage.

    Then Google moved to a newer, more elegant system from These guys. [rackable.com] Better heat dissipation as well (heat pumped up and out, instead of in all directions). And don't get me started on the wiring mess that was once Google - spaghetti everywhere, and HP switches strapped to the cabinets.

  • the only ads I ever use (Score:5, Interesting)

    by treat ( 84622 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @06:51AM (#5720520)
    Not only are Google ads the only ones I ever click on, when the search I'm doing is for a product I intend to buy, I happily welcome the ads and in fact sometimes do a search just to see the ads.

    This confirms what intelligent people have been saying for years. The problem with Internet advertising is that ads are not relevant, not selling products that anyone wants, and not even clear what message they are trying to convey. Google ads have none of these problems.

    • This confirms what intelligent people have been saying for years

      You seem to imply that other advertisers never realised this point. Of course they did, its just harder for them to do so than a search engine. I used to be a CJ affiliate, and this is one of the things they stressed over and over again - make your ads relevant to your visitors. The same in the Amazon associates program, they stress the same point. If you visit a website such as slashdot.org, they cannot possibly know what you are interested

    • The problem with Internet advertising is that ads are not relevant, not selling products that anyone wants...

      I believe the problem with internet advertising is due to a couple of things. First, this is the 1st medium of advertising where there is some actual data regarding the "effectiveness" of the ads. Also, many internet ads are generated from a 3rd party. This is not true with other mediums of advertising like tv, radio, newspaper, etc. The latter media formats have an advertising department and th

  • Worrying is all the rage these days.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Cebu ( 161017 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @07:01AM (#5720543)
    You have to respect a company that hires knowledgeable, intelligent, dedicated individuals, which provides a solid useful product while resisting the urge to expand at non-self-sustaining rate. They also have a very firm grasp on that strange pragmatic reality will live in and just for that it will be difficult to compete with them.

    That being said, I always find it somewhat odd that a large number of individuals worry about Google's somewhat pivotal role in searching and cataloguing the Internet. Almost every article has some comment pertaining to how the company seemingly holds too much power. But, Google has no shareholders to please, no largely fragmented ownership nor fragmented ideals, no corporate megalomania, or even long history to shape their goals.

    If there is anything to worry about, it is that Google's situation will change thus causing there to be a reason for concern. I see worrying about Google as it stands now as a waste of time.
    • Follow this [google.com] link. The title of the page is "10 things Google has found to be true".

      Look at number 6 it's titles "You can make money without doing evil."

      Maybe that's a strong reason why people continue to use google despite the competition that keeps popping up (hey whatever happened to snap.com?).

      I admire any company which holds as one it's core values a commitment to not doing evil. Unfortunately they are in the minority.

  • another (unsubstantiated) google fact! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by beckett ( 27524 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @07:03AM (#5720545) Homepage Journal
    There was an earlier Slashdot article [slashdot.org] where PBS' Robert Cringely had this to say about Google in his article [pbs.org]
    ...the fault tolerant nature of the cluster is such that if a machine fails, the other machines simply take over its functions. As a result, whenever a server fails at Google, THEY DO NOTHING. They don't replace the broken machine. They don't remove the broken machine. They don't even turn it off. In an army of drones, it isn't worth the cost of labor to locate and replace the bad machines. Hundreds, maybe thousands of machines lie dead, uncounted among the 10,000 plus. We have reached the point where we are totally dependent on computers, yet the marginal cost of a computer -- at least for Google -- is nothing. This may be an historical first.

    Until these this article and Cringely's, i had no idea Google's sheer size and computing power. i'd like to find a reference for Cringely's article, though, but it is certainly believable.

    • In 2001 I saw a seminar by one of the Google representatives. What they said agrees with what you said -- they HAVE to build redundancy into their clusters. In particular, the sheer number of hard drives they use makes them very vulnerable to drive failure (for one reason or another) so they had to develop their own mirroring system. I can imagine that they have to account for buggy or failing memory and network components as well.
    • I can't believe they would leave thousands of dead machines powered up and taking up rack space. Surely it would be more economic to hire anyone to swap them out or at least remove them and save paying x-thousands per week hosting costs... In any case, presumably someone originally made the descision to buy all these machines, so they would be replaced anyway eventually.
      • The electricity consumption on a modern PC is about 60-90 watts or about $25/yr for electrity. It would at least pay to have a low end staffer or an intern to go digging them out. Especially when you consider the cost in rent for a thousand dead machines. 20/rack and each rack is about a yard sq. Rent is probably a few dollars per sq foot per month. The costs just start piliing up when you factor in cooling and all of the other ancililary factors.

        • Re:another (unsubstantiated) google fact! (Score:5, Interesting)

          by mysticgoat ( 582871 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @12:25PM (#5721612) Homepage Journal

          Not to worry. Cringely et al are simplifying things to keep their point clear, that's all.

          As with any other major physical corporate asset, Google's servers are taxed items that are depreciated over their service life. Google has probably set their service life very short-- on the order of 2 years instead of 5 or 7 which is the standard. They can justify this to IRS if they show that it is less costly for them to swap out entire racks periodically than to troubleshoot repairs. It means putting emphasis on MTBF when making purchasing decisions, but they would be doing that anyway.

          So why fuss with replacing individual servers if it is more effective to replace them a rack at a time on a regular schedule? You can keep your technicians focused on the real problems, and make a McJob out of routine maintenance chores.

          Another case where the effective business model is counter-intuitive to the techie mind.

      • When you consider that 1-2% of 50,000 machines is 500 to 1000 machines, this does not seem unreasonable. Would anyone notice a 1-2% decrease in performance of thier car, light bulb, toaster, or computer?
    • ...whenever a server fails at Google, THEY DO NOTHING. They don't replace the broken machine. They don't remove the broken machine. They don't even turn it off. In an army of drones, it isn't worth the cost of labor to locate and replace the bad machines.

      You know, it sounds a lot like the borg!

  • concentration of power worrisome? censorship? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Submarine ( 12319 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @07:04AM (#5720549) Homepage

    A troubling fact about Google is that Google can exerce de facto censorship by quietly removing sites from its index. Since Google is what many people use to look for information on the WWW (I myself don't use so-called portals, and I know many people who use Google as their startup page), this may effectively prevent them from finding those sites.

    Think that I'm paranoid? I'm not implying that Google would do that out of bad will, or that they have a political or economic agenda. Yet, Google is a US corporation, and US laws (on copyright, against so-called software piracy, etc...) can be used against it by corporations with larger pockets and larger legal teams. For instance, the Church of Scientology has had Google remove links to sites discussing the Church's teachings [com.com].

    This is all the more vicious since the user is not warned that certain sites are censored. We can therefore rightly fear that fear of litigation may force Google to take more and more controversial sites off.

    • I think recently this happened with an article on the register, where they coined the phrase googlewashing. Almost all the sites that subsequently used the term linked to the registers article but its place on googles rankings fell very quickly defying logic. The register mentions it at: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30195.html

    • Any centralized search engine will be subject to such problems as censorship. They'll have to give in to litigation threats, threats by police, and even threats from organized crime. Things may become censored without their knowledge. A government agent (or mobster or script kiddie) may break into their network and delete entries.

      This is why projects like Freenet are important. Maybe such projects won't solve all the problems, but I think they will make censorship more difficult. The problem is oppressive

    • Re:concentration of power worrisome? censorship? (Score:5, Informative)

      by More Trouble ( 211162 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @09:17AM (#5720803)
      This is all the more vicious since the user is not warned that certain sites are censored.
      Nonsense. Search Google for "scientology+leaflet" [google.com]. Scroll to the bottom of the page. Note the warning. Note that the warning links to the list of removed links.

      Concentration of power is worrisome. But complaints should follow a problem, not a concern.

      :w
  • It AMAZES and depresses me how bad most companies are at marketing, especially technically knowledgeable companies. So, it's wonderful to see Google being run so well.
  • and are quite annoyed by pop-ups and similar "innovations".

    What??? There are still pop-ups on the web? I had no idea!

  • Google Topic Icon (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Does anyone one else think Slashdot should have a Google topic icon?

    Or maybe just an NYT icon....

    But seriously, so many have been added lately, what's one more going to hurt, especially since it's a company/search-engine discussed here so often?

  • Dont let me be the only one on /. to say this.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by I kan Spl ( 614759 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @07:44AM (#5720626)
    Don't let me be the only one here who has not only used an advertising link from google, but has actually bought something from one.

    I find that thse links off to the side actually aren't annoying. They are off to the side. They dont interfear with my search when I'm not looking to spend some money, but when I do search for something to buy they usully come in handy. At the very least, it indicates that the store has some income with which to advertise and is not being run by monkeys. Just my $.02
  • It is not a beowulf cluster, it is a distributed set of systems. In a beowulf cluster the memory is shared between hosts over "fast" networks connected to all of the peers. 54k is an awful lot of servers. How many SGI Origin 4000's running 512 CPUs per cabinet with it's high bandwidth I/O subsystems (disks and networking!) would it take to do the job of Google's cluster? Would there be benefits to managing 20 1048 CPU single-OS systems versus 54,000 linux machines? Other than the obvious fact that Linux te

    • Re:It is not a beowulf (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Cirvam ( 216911 )
      In a beowulf cluster the memory isn't shared, well unless you use one of those new shared memory things that they have (sorry forget the name) but either way its usually done over Ethernet or Token Ring. Most things which are memory intensive aren't good candidates for beowulf clusters because the movement of the data in memory takes so long. Most beowulf clusters use PVM and MPI to pass messages amongest themselves and that's how they communicate. The article doesn't give too much data on Googles software,

    • Re:It is not a beowulf (Score:3, Informative)

      by dubl-u ( 51156 )
      Would there be benefits to managing 20 1048 CPU single-OS systems versus 54,000 linux machines?

      Some, but they don't outweigh the costs.

      A 2 GB 2 CPU box is well under $1000, right? so 32 of those would be, say, $25,000? But the SGI Altix 3700 configured with just 64 processors and 64 GB of RAM costs a cool million dollars [com.com].

      Even if the multi-box solution demands more fuss to manage (higher failure rates, I'd guess), since you've saved $975,000, you can afford a little admin time. Plus, the cost of somebod

  • Well (Score:2, Interesting)

    by DarkSarin ( 651985 )
    i for one don't see either yahoo or msn being real competitors with google for the simple reason that they take them selves too seriously. Really. Imagine anyone that could be considered a founder at msn being photographed for the nyt on a segway (that is what he's on isn't it?) with a red and yellow background.
    The culture there insures that people like their job, which means that the talent will stay. You will have a hard time competing with that.

    Now if anyone from msn or yahoo can give proof that your

  • Linux Total Cost of ownership. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @07:53AM (#5720646)
    54K Servers and 800 employees that is is around 68 servers for employee. But you figure not all 800 people are System Administrators other people Sales, Management, Development and R&D, So lets figure there are 700 Sysadmins. That is basicly 77 Servers per sysadmin. Which seems to be about right. Lets see windows admins get those ratios. My experence one Windows admin can do 25 servers. So next time those people take this into account they should use google as a more prefered system configuration settings.
    • You'd be amazed how many windows machines one person can administer if every time a machine went down for a hardware or software fault you didn't even bother to take it down from the rack- just removed it from the list of good machines. For google it just doesn't matter how easy/hard it is to administer the machine. They image it once, and never touch it again.
      • "You'd be amazed how many windows machines one person can administer if every time a machine went down for a hardware or software fault you didn't even bother to take it down from the rack- just removed it from the list of good machines"

        I bet I can do 1K all by myself maybe even more. Must be Win 95 tho. After the first few hours I can remove most of them from the list. After 49.7 days all of them should be delisted ;).

        p.s. If running >> 1GHz machines, I might even be able to remove all of them on f

    • apples and oranges (Score:3, Interesting)

      by morcheeba ( 260908 )
      Admining googles' server machines is waaay different than admining user machines. There are a lot of things that make this simpler:

      - less variety of hardware. No Geforce 8 to download drivers for, no 1394.
      - Lots of machines. Actually, they could have one person specialize on each exact type of machine they use (not like they'd be substatially different though)
      - All machines run the same software. No registry hacking, just copy a master image onto the drive. No funky firewalls needed, no custom networking c

  • Makes me proud to be human :) (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mac Degger ( 576336 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @07:58AM (#5720656) Journal
    For all the power it may hold, Google still strikes me as a 'mom&pop' organisation (albeit a rather large one) instead of a powerhungry monopolist (or in this case, oligarchist).

    As the article states, they're popular by virtue of being good at what they do: no hassles, good results. And they add extra services which make sence: images, news, all building on their strenghts as data miners.

    I just hope they never go public; that would entail some kind of 'responsibility to the stockholder' (unless they somehow get to dictate their own charter)...other words for 'we have to make profit even at the cost of making a shitty service which you have to pay for'.

    But asd it stands they're a shiuning example of business done right.

  • Click-Through Ad Pricing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ty_kramer ( 262524 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @08:11AM (#5720681)
    So, if my competitor is running Google ads, why don't I write a script to click on those ads on a regular basis? That might cost 'em a pretty penny. Is the billing smart enough to recognize repeated clicks from the same IP?

    If so, it might be another business opportunity for the spam-meisters: paid Google ad-clicking from multiple unique IPs, to run up huge advertising bills against a specific company.
    • Besides being rathar Shady, I doubt your trick may work.

      The advertiser can set a limit where Google stops placing their advertisements, hence stops any click thrus...

      Tracking IPs is pretty much standard for Click Thrus pricing.

      Billing is done thru CPM, which means amount of views / 1000, so as long as you don't exactly match the stopping point, the advertisement will get more views, lowering the cost of the ad.

      Adword Pricing info [google.com]

  • Always amazing (Score:2, Interesting)

    by zachjb ( 221132 )
    I actually had the privilege of having someone from Google come to my college campus and show us "around" the Google facilities and it is actually quite amazing. He also talked about their purpose; to be the best search engine out there without the fluff. And that is exactly what they are doing.
  • i havent rtfa'd yet, but just seeing markoff's name pisses me off. He's the bonehead reporter who hyped
    up the Mitnick case to OJ Simpson levels.

    http://www.freekevin.com/news-012300.html

  • i don't see what's so good about google (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The main pro-Google argument is that it's not intrusive: this can be fixed by turning off pop-ups and graphics. Advanced users might even like to filter page output from any search engine to only get the links themselves.

    The second pro-Google argument is that doesn't reorder results in a naughty way. Yet countless articles provide evidence of results changing from moment to moment, pages appearing and disappearing. In some cases, censorship of sites has occurred.

    Encompassing the above argument is that G

    • "The small but relevant web sites who don't spend time "marketing" with good keywords / spamming with duplicate sites still find themselves lower down."

      Google's problem at the moment seems to be coping with people who run a thousand webservers, then link from each of them to every other, using popular keywords. Scientology are famous for pioneering this attack, but Hotels, travel-agents, and inkjet cartridge sellers have all used this tactic to screw up access to information for the rest of us.

      As an exam

  • Google ads (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    To block the google ads, add this to your usercontent.css in mozilla:

    TABLE TR TD.ch {display:none ! important}

    P.e TABLE TR TD SPAN.f { display: none ! important }

    P.e TABLE TR TD TABLE { display: none ! important }

    P.e TABLE TR TD FONT A.fl { display: none ! important }
  • Another intresting factlet is that google has 8 datacenters as shown as Google Dance [google-dance.com]

    rus

  • The barriers to entry... (Score:3, Informative)

    by cperciva ( 102828 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @09:30AM (#5720849) Homepage
    ... are not quite as high one would think. Competing in the search engine business does not require having the largest network on the planet.

    For that matter, you don't even need to have the largest index. Not all sites are created equal -- an index of even just 10% of the web would satisfy most people, as long as it is the right 10% and is searched effectively. There are some advantages to being complete (non in googlis est, ego non est) but for common place searches it isn't necessary. While indexing the entire web may be very expensive, indexing a small *useful* part of the web is much less so.

    The largest barrier to entry is simply the problem of coming up with a better way to search. Google has a very effecting algorithm, and they've got lots of smart people.
    • It's really the wrong term. It's not barriers to entry, it is economies of scale.

      In other words, as the company gets bigger, the cost per customer decreases relatively -- increasing returns to scale. So, larger firms will always have that advantage over smaller ones, which makes it difficult for a new company to enter the market successfully.

      There are different conceivable curves of (num. customers * cost/customer), so it may become flat or go up at some point, meaning that there will probably be severa

  • Unlike most sites, where I am assaulted with an offensive animated GIF banner ad (I don't see pop-ups anymore... thanks to Mozilla), Google has very intelligently targetted ads. I was doing a search on LED flashlights just to learn more and ended up buying one from one of Google's advertisers. The advertiser was someone that I had never heard of before, and wouldn't have come up high in the search results on its own, but they had a nice non-offensive placement right where I needed to see it (and I did see
  • This is not that much of an inside look at Google as it is a guess, they don't know what hardware Google is running on, they are guessing and spreading rumours.
  • In case Google gets /.'ed, here's a mirror [216.239.53.100].

  • The best thing about Advertising on Google (Score:3, Insightful)

    by esconsult1 ( 203878 ) on Sunday April 13, 2003 @11:19AM (#5721320) Homepage Journal
    Gonna break the mold here...

    But I am an advertiser at google. People here seems to be complaining about the ads at the side.. etc.etc.

    Looking at advertising at the top pay-per-clicks (Overture, Google, Findwhat), Google is the only one that has Instant Gratification. We created an e-commerce site and were able to start driving qualified traffic to it in about 15 minutes. With Overture or Findwhat, we would have had to wait for several days to a week, and to top it off, they might have rejected many of our listings through their brain dead editorial process.

    Google at least is fair in the way how they reject listings... they have editorial guidelines, so you know upfront, and secondly... if your listings suck for relevance they get automatically booted.

    I think the NYT writer fails to take into account the instant gratification factor, which IMHO is the greatest advantage to using Google. Because you can test your business model right away. If it sucks, then you can take your business model offline before it gets too late.

    Finally, because of Googles contextual ads (some of which are shown on Slashdot), they have really co-opted advertising on the web. Because of this, Overture's stock is in the barrel and I think they will become a no-player in the near future, simply because of pending moves by Yahoo and MSN, their largest search suppliers. Even though they've bought Altavista and Alltheweb, when was the last time you saw traffic coming in from those searsh engines into your Apache server logs?

    My only fear with this, is that Google can become too powerful (see Microsoft), and can then call the shots with advertising on the web in general. We saw that behavior with Overture, just before Google launched their program.

    Don't laugh, we revel in Google's friendliness, relevance, and geek cred right now, but I hope they don't go public too soon. I hope that Page, Brin, and Schmidt hold on to the reins tightly for the time being... because once Wall Street steps in, the ride for the consumer is over guys!!

  • Why go public? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by TheNumberSix ( 580081 )
    In every last article on Google they always talk about when they might go public.

    For the life of me, I can never figure out why this is a good idea for Google, or for users. A stock issue gives up ownership of the company for a capital infusion. If Google has enough cash to operate and invest (and it sure seems like they do from the article) what is the point?

    Once they go public, Bill Gates can gobble up their stock and take them over, or any other big investor. Then, under profit pressure from non-

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