For once Google are being honest and the others are being slimey. In one image they covered the sponsored ads in a box which hid the fact there is a clear differentiation between Sponsored and algorithmic results, they also say "Ads".
Eric Schmidt Testifies Before Congress
31–40 of 130 posts
Re: Eric Schmidt Testifies Before Congress
#32I think Google would be well served if Schmidt had a little more Steve Jobs in him. Not a lot, as I think Jobs might get so frustrated he'd melt down, but a little. Eric makes everything sound somehow slightly sinister, even when it isn't.
When asked about something like maps and places the correct answer is:
We realized that is what people wanted in response to their queries. We looked around, and the other map products sucked. Also, we couldn't use them in the way we wanted to serve the users, even if we had wanted to. So we spent a ton of money developing our own -- and it absolutely clobbered the competition. It was magical, far better than anything that existed before it. Way more information, way easier and faster to use. And the users have responded overwhelmingly positively to it.
If you're asking if we favor our own maps properties, damn right we do. Because it is better. Were the people that made other maps products happy about it? Of course not. We didn't build it for them. We built if for our users.
As a part of any online maps product, users want to use it to find information tied to the locations and businesses they are looking at. We call this places. We realized we needed to build something so that we could serve up this information in a highly integrated way, because we believed users wanted a unified experience. So we spent a ton of money, and we built out our maps product with Place information. Business hours, phone numbers, pictures, and reviews. We tried to partner on reviews. It didn't work out. So we built our own review system.
And it is brilliant, consumers love it. Maps and Places absolutely blow away anything else that exists in terms of ease of use and functionality and richness of information. It is one of our greatest feats. Again, consumers love it.
Were existing business directories and review sites happy about it? Of course not. We didn't build it for them, we built if for our users.
Maps, and Places, and Product Search -- they are all part of search. They are all part of finding information, and answers. And that is what we do, and we'll continue to push forward on that front. Because that is what consumers want.
Re: Eric Schmidt Testifies Before Congress
#33Seems to me that one way you can tell Google has competition is the facebook.com/cspan tag at the bottom of the screen.
Huh? Google doesn't really compete in hosted company pages -- at least not until yesterday.
Re: Eric Schmidt Testifies Before Congress
#34I wonder how Apple feels about Congress, and others, referring to Google's and Yelp's services as "Apps", hah!
Re: Eric Schmidt Testifies Before Congress
#35at D9: According to eric at D9, these are the top consumer companies 1-4-the gang of four(appl,google,amazon,facebook) 5-6(paypal,twitter) Schmidt said he believes Microsoft is “not driving the consumer revolution.” He doesn’t count Microsoft’s Xbox business because it’s “not a platform at the computational level.” today before congress: Microsoft's Bing has continued to gain in popularity, perhaps because it comes p…
Indeed, but one is comparing the consumer tech market as a whole and the other is just in the search market, so this isn't apples to apples (so to speak), no?
Really? Microsoft does:
Bing -- second largest search engine
XBox -- one of the largest gaming platforms, including Indie games.
Windows -- most popular consumer OS
Halo -- one of the most popular game franchises ever
Kinect -- hottest selling consumer electronics gadget ever
Windows Live Messenger -- most popular IM platform in the world
Hotmail -- one of the largest email sites in the world
IE -- one of the most popular web browsers in the world
Metro -- one of the most interesting consumer UIs currently available
And all this puts them behind -- Twitter? Really?
Re: Eric Schmidt Testifies Before Congress
#36For fuck's sake senator Blumenthal just asked if Google "Has ever scraped content?" !!
Re: Eric Schmidt Testifies Before Congress
#37The central question seems to be the following, articulated most precisely by Mike Lee (R-UT): even if the organic search results are entirely unbiased, Google also programmatically (via "Google Universal Search", the system that organizes the overall search page) inserts specific links to other Google pages--such as Places, Maps, Shopping, or News--in very prominent positions. There are competitors for all of those…
Google is free for users and free to anyone wanting to get in their index, so they do not owe any self proclaimed competitor anything and that is the crux of it, the law is on their side, you cannot monopolize "free" and all this politicians' propaganda is waste of time and tax payer dollars..
Re: Eric Schmidt Testifies Before Congress
#38Susan Creighton knows her shit.
She is smart, but she did skate around the question of scraping. They asked whether Google had scraped content, but instead she attempted to change the question to whether or not it is scraping when they show the excerpt about the site in results - not whether they had scraped Yelp reviews.
Re: Eric Schmidt Testifies Before Congress
#39Senator, you have so many hypothetical !
Re: Eric Schmidt Testifies Before Congress
#40They keep pounding the same misconceptions again and again in endless repetition, and I can't help but wonder, who hired these guns? (that's not to say that some of their arguments don't hold water, but they are going to incredible lengths to cast Google as a monopoly, why?)
The cynic in me doubts that the cause is a lack of understanding.