What Keeps Google Up At Night | Hacker News Reader

What Keeps Google Up At Night

forbes.com

17 pointsprakash20 comments

Larry and Sergey, from the very beginning, were convinced that advertising was something very complementary to search and the right way to monetize it.

This surprises me. I had the impression that it took them quite a while to come to this conclusion.

Yeah, surprised me too. The conventional story about Google's founding was that they were going to sell search appliances or license their tech and only got into advertising when nobody would buy. Though I guess I shouldn't be too surprised, since Ron Garrett's blog describes working on AdWords when he joined in early 2000.

Also...w00t, demo days is public now. I participated in that, worked with lacker (also a HackerNews reader). Was a lot of fun.

I don't see how that is contradictory or surprising; the fact that they had an engineer for advertising doesn't mean much, since all the other search engines had advertising.

The fact they hired an ad engineer doesn't equal adwords. What she's saying is actually common sense: other search engines had ads at the time, and targetted to the appropriate search queries and results. Google had lower burn because all they had was a search engine, while othrs had massive portals. Google's search technology was done in house, while others licensed Akamai. (Yahoo had manual editors at the time, too.). This also meant the portals had nearly the same results and Google was where you could get an alternate opinion. Google kept their ads separate from search results, which was lauded by Slashdot users and Google picked up lots of word of mouth about that. After that, Google came up with the do no evil motto as an official stance. (Only as Google grew bigger did this motto get associated with Microsoft comparisons by the zealous Linux userbase of Slashdot.) When Google came out with AdWords, it was basically a clone of Overture; it was AdSense that was an actual innovation.

This is from my memory of the events, not press releases, biographies, or books, so it's probably more correct :)

"Google has been disruptive to industry as a whole"

Come to think of it, has it been? Surely without Google, some other search engine would have filled the gap?

I see some smaller sub-disruptiveness, such as popularizing AJAX with Google Maps, but overall, that statement seems exaggerated?

There's a reason "to google" has become a verb.

I don't deny that they have the majority of the market share, but somehow "disruptive" means something else to me. I haven't looked up the proper definition, though.

I think the disruption is mostly about the quality of competition. Nobody else really focused on the quality of the search results. Heck, Bing is not that bad, but they are still more focused on the GUI vs. higher quality search.

This could not be more false. I worked at Inktomi for four years. Inktomi provided search results to a number of customers (MSN, AOL, Hotbot, Yahoo) through an api but did not control the UI. When Google came into the picture it had a superior UI compared to the horrible clutter on our clients' portal pages.

Our management believed that people used Google because it had better results, but our internal blind tests showed that it wasn't the case. We built internal metrics frameworks and improved our result sets until they were at least as good as google by objective and subjective measurements. We stayed focused on the quality of search results for a long time and disregarded the UI effect as we didn't control it. As a result we lost and ended up being acquired by Yahoo for a tiny fraction of what the company had been worth at its peak.

A fascinating comment. I never found Google's results to be noticeably better. What got me to switch were their simple UI and, most of all, how fast they were. These two things were of course related, since that lightweight goofy UI was so much faster to load. Indeed, performance is UI if you think about it.

I've read that studies show that if you put the Google brand on search results, people automatically rate them as having higher quality. So a lot of this is perception. (Quality is related to performance too. Once people notice that a piece of software is faster, they're primed to believe that it's better in every respect.)

Your comment confirms that the reason most people cite for Google's success is quite different from what actually gave them an edge. Of course, once they got it they capitalized on it bigtime.

I liked Hotbot's UI and switched to Google because Hotbot's results where terrible in comparison over about 2 months.

improved our result sets until they were at least as good as google

You may have fixed the problem, but at that point your reputation was already shot. Ford makes high quality cars today, but it took a long time and a lot of effort to change peoples perception that American cars are not total crap.

PS: When company's selling something think it's a good idea to outsource their core product there is a huge problem.

I think AdWords has been disruptive in advertising. The concept of extremely targeted ads being unobtrusively shown to you only while you're seeking information is huge. Compare that with offline CPM ads that are shown to tons of uninterested people within some demographic.

With AdSense, anyone can make money online if they have good content. Online advertising was around before AdSense, but it was more about distracting visitors with flashing animated ads than contextual text ads.

They didn't mention Facebook. Should they?

No, why ? Facebook and google operate in completely different spheres.

Twitter should be worried about facebook, after all twitter is a minor feature that can be grafted onto a whole bunch of other sites.

Facebook and twitter fans see facebook and twitter as the be-all-end-all, they don't realize that even though they're big they are not nearly as universal as google.

Search + ads = product, facebook / twitter / myspace / flavour of the day = fads / fashion.

Google wants to organise the world's information.

Hard to do that when a rival website has a large proportion of that information inside their closed garden.

I guess though similar arguments could be made for many academic journals, pay-walled sites and things like the deep web.

I don't think facebook is really something that is to be worried about except as an example of a broader problem.

From what I've read, Facebook has a completely different vision of search than Google - and possible competitor in a number of areas. They want you to be able to query your contacts as you would in "real life". A more humanistic search versus Google's algorithmic one.

Yes, but that is just within their own little garden. Google has declared the internet their garden, that's a completely different story. It turns them into a major player instead of into a large niche.

If facebook were to die tomorrow I doubt there would be any big disturbances in the force (and twitter wouldn't even be noticed, except for some deflation of some egos). If google would die tomorrow morning the internet as we know it would grind to a halt. Search now drives the majority of traffic, plenty of people don't even know how to properly use the url bar any longer and it won't be long before it becomes optional and the search box is your main avenue to the web.

You make a great point about how to intuitively calculate the value of a website.

(Although I should say that I believe the sudden disappearance of facebook would be a pretty big deal, just not along the same lines as the disappearance of google would be.)

What you're saying may be/probably is true. But I don't think it does much to detract from my point.

Facebook probably wishes they could target ads given all their demographic information. They probably want to be able to help users make decisions by leveraging their social graph, but I think in the here-and-now, and probably for the immediate future, that will not be the case.

I think it is silly to constantly worry about what everyone else is doing when it is substantially more fruitful to understand what you yourself should be doing.

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