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Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

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Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#111

Post by AlexandrB »

waqf wrote: post #94
danilocampos wrote: post #56

A few decades from now, when someone writes up an HBS case study on Google, how will it read? My suspicion is that Google is going to treat us to a very painful object lesson: what happens to your business when you compromise the values of a beloved core product. Here's the thing: having the most complete, most accurate, most relevant search results means never having to say you're sorry. You can add ads, you can do…

I think Google thinks that you and I, who want a search tool that does what you ask for, are a niche market not worth going after. I have no idea whether they're right.

It won't happen overnight, but this could be trouble for Google. If it was still Google vs. Yahoo, it would be no contest, but Bing is nipping at their heels (at least in terms of search quality) and is actually pretty damn good.

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#112

Post by marshray »

zheng wrote: post #34
kls wrote: post #28

I can't help but feel like this is the equivalent event of Ballmer throwing the chair. It's good to have decent among a company so long as it is promoted in a healthy manner, having employees grumble about it at the water cooler only serves to infect the ranks but promoting an open forum where any person can decent and others can rebut allows people to at least understand why the decision where made. In some manner t…

Not to nitpick, but it's "dissent". I learned the hard way ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3262893 )

Yeah, but "descent" works well too. :-)

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#113

Post by MartinCron »

zheng wrote: post #34
kls wrote: post #28

I can't help but feel like this is the equivalent event of Ballmer throwing the chair. It's good to have decent among a company so long as it is promoted in a healthy manner, having employees grumble about it at the water cooler only serves to infect the ranks but promoting an open forum where any person can decent and others can rebut allows people to at least understand why the decision where made. In some manner t…

Not to nitpick, but it's "dissent". I learned the hard way ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3262893 )

That was the word that knocked me out of a spelling bee when I was in junior high school. I still hate that word.

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#114

Post by joebadmo »

danilocampos wrote: post #107
joebadmo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can wave your hands around in pretty patterns all you want – the fact remains I'm a user who used to enjoy the product and now is frustrated by it. I'm not alone in this. Have they annoyed enough users for it to be a big problem? We'll see. But big or not – it's a problem. I'm not sure what you mean by "wave your hands around in pretty patterns." I'm not denying that these things annoy some or even many users. I'…

I think we disagree on Google's legendary omniscience. Minimizing the years-long frustration I, and many I've talked to, have experienced because Google knows best is a hollow argument to me. The quality of their product degraded and they just kinda... did nothing about it for awhile. It got so bad it had to turn into a press thing before they did something about it. The press is damn lazy, so for my money, that mean…

That seems like a perfectly reasonable point to collegially disagree on. I can't say that I have any special insight into what goes on inside Google, but contrary to your experience, I feel my search experience has generally gotten better. I doubt that Google at any point "did nothing" about search quality, but again, I have no special insight there. I do think that Google frantically doing something in opposition to a hostile SEOsphere can look like nothing, while in fact being a whole lot.

I do agree that the tactics are often dubious. I certainly don't always agree with them. But I can simultaneously understand the motivations behind them. I would have loved to see more grand, open initiatives like Wave, even as it failed spectacularly, but I can understand the trepidation.

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#115

Post by mekoka »

How did it go from

This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else.

to

If you don't get SPYW, work somewhere else.

I understood the first as "if you don't understand our goals, you should probably not be working here" and the second as "our way or the highway".

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#116

Post by tnuc »

thought_alarm wrote: post #68
rhizome wrote: post #4

SPYW: "Search Plus Your World"

If you google it, it's currently the 3rd and 4th search results. Now, if you google SPYW on Bing then it's nowhere to be found, and that's ultimately why I continue to use Google for search regardless of whatever nonsense they put in the side bar.

>if you google SPYW on Bing...

You don't "google" on bing, you "bing it".

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#117

Post by nooneelse »

AlexandrB wrote: post #111
waqf wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Google thinks that you and I, who want a search tool that does what you ask for, are a niche market not worth going after. I have no idea whether they're right.

It won't happen overnight, but this could be trouble for Google. If it was still Google vs. Yahoo, it would be no contest, but Bing is nipping at their heels (at least in terms of search quality) and is actually pretty damn good.

Isn't Bing also including social signals in personalizing their search results? If so, neither of them are just sticking to the task of being a simple search engine like we knew and loved years ago.

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#118

Post by ay »

gfodor wrote: post #87
ay wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not straying, they are pivoting.

And there goes the last slice of meaning to the word "pivot." I think it's now officially dead.

I assumed that I did not need to mark the post with .

What I implied is that companies are no different to humans in some respects - your life's mission when you are 5 is different from your life's mission when you are 15, and is different from your life's mission when you are 35. And there's nothing wrong about that - companies, like people, have the age. Welcome to the new grown up Google, I suppose.

(of course, all of the above rant assumes that the quote is real. Which I decided to hunt down, and it is, apparently: http://glinden.blogspot.com/2004/08/google-playboys.html)

But the other part of the quote got me thinking - "...analogous to taking money for search results. "

I caught myself a few times this year that I'd prefer to pay for the premium quality content rather than have to wade through the soup of the ads mixed with semi-relevant results. So maybe therein lies some version of the future.

EDIT: of course, the rule "don't attribute to malice what you can attribute to ignorance" still holds and it might be just an experiment that went a bit too far - I can not reproduce the "ads above the search results" on my browser right now.

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#119

Post by staunch »

DanBC wrote: post #67
staunch wrote: post #23

I would be much more interested at working at the new Page dominated Google than the old Schmidt one. At least he's trying to do what Steve Jobs did so well: make big leaps forward. Apple found it necessary to own more and more pieces of the stack to innovate. Google is finding itself in the same position. Almost all of the best products are restricted/closed/proprietary systems. Macs, OSX, iPhone/iPad, Facebook, Twi…

Why are big leaps good? Why not small iterative steps?

In most cases it seems companies either do small incremental improvements OR big leaps at roughly the same pace. Doing something bold doesn't have to take more time -- it just requires a lot more vision, effort, and balls.

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#120

Post by redthrowaway »

flyt wrote: post #100
redthrowaway wrote: post #65

I'm seeing a whole lot of hyperbole around here for what still seems to be pretty much a non-issue. Don't like SPYW? Don't use it. It's one button . Click it, and move on. Between the Don't Be Evil script stunt from facebook/twitter and the content-free blogspam from Sarah Lacy/pandodaily, it seems like there are a few people out there who really, really want this to be an issue. It isn't. Get over it.

I don't understand: one click opt-out is ok for Google but not for Facebook's product launches?

Facebook's ongoing record is one of introducing opt-out products that harm user privacy. This is just a matter of preference. Nobody is hurt by SPYW, and it's far easier to disable than many of facebook's updates.

The issue with Facebook's changes to privacy was not that they are opt-out, but that they were opt-out and significantly impacted user privacy. Opt-out services on their own may be annoying, but they aren't a cause for alarm unless it hurts the user.

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