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Sergey Brin's Clarification On Guardian article

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Re: Sergey Brin's Clarification On Guardian article

#31

Post by tferris »

brudgers wrote: post #25
tferris wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I don't get your point. You can be successful with your product on the WWW without employing any Google services, being totally independent. If people and other sites like you and link back to you your traffic will quickly skyrocket —which feels natural. You are not obliged to use any Google service like GA. Just use the Internet and its open standards and you are ready to go because Google left the Internet's…

"You can be successful with your product on the WWW without employing any Google services" It is often more difficult to be successful on the internet without devoting significant resources to Google specific SEO. Doing so without the benefit of Google search would be orders of magnitude more difficult, and Google is under no obligation to return any particular website in their results (e.g. Safe Search). Google is a…

I don't agree.

If you build a really great web based product you don't need to do any single SEO activity to get strong traffic. No white or black hat or anything needed. People will come anyway.

It's all about the product. If it's good people will tell and Google will notice. And Google is so smart that every crappy site powered by 100,000 system generated backlinks blasts will stay inferior.

Re: Sergey Brin's Clarification On Guardian article

#32

Post by rbarooah »

tferris wrote: post #27
rbarooah wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that you don't get my point. The reason Google hasn't built a walled garden around the internet because they simply don't yet have the power to do that. You talk as if it was something they could easily have done but have chosen not to. I disagree. They just aren't in a position to do it. It makes no sense at all to say that innovation on the web has vanished because of the Appstore. We are in in a boom time…

Pardon, you are totally misleading. Google could do this—there are multiple options to silently wallgarden the user. Just check how much traffic Google moves. If they want they could arbitrarily redirect traffic and subtly punish user's not using their tools. But that's not their culture. Just look at their products, how far they pushing the boundaries and still stay open, give back and contribute to the community. L…

You've actually made my point for me. "Redirecting traffic and subtly punishing users" is far from a walled garden, and would lead to an instant backlash if detected.

As I said, they don't have the power to close the internet that you attribute to them. This has nothing to do with their culture, however great you might think it is.

Re: Sergey Brin's Clarification On Guardian article

#33

Post by sounds »

eternalban wrote: post #30
tferris wrote: post #3

Imagine Apple, Facebook or whoever controlled the Internet like Google does: How long would it take until they abused their power? If someone is dominating the web it's Google and looking at their power and how much traffic they move—their actions feel balanced and neutral compared to any other player.

> their actions feel balanced and neutral compared to any other player. There are distinct business models at play here and that should be noted before arriving at a conclusion that Google is a benevolent corporate actor. The fact that Google (or any company for that matter) can dominate and observe traffic patterns and content should be a matter of concern to the democratically [in the contemporary sense] minded ind…

I follow your logic. I agree.

What concrete action would you suggest to make the internet more democratic?

Re: Sergey Brin's Clarification On Guardian article

#35

Post by zerostar07 »

brudgers wrote: post #25
tferris wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I don't get your point. You can be successful with your product on the WWW without employing any Google services, being totally independent. If people and other sites like you and link back to you your traffic will quickly skyrocket —which feels natural. You are not obliged to use any Google service like GA. Just use the Internet and its open standards and you are ready to go because Google left the Internet's…

"You can be successful with your product on the WWW without employing any Google services" It is often more difficult to be successful on the internet without devoting significant resources to Google specific SEO. Doing so without the benefit of Google search would be orders of magnitude more difficult, and Google is under no obligation to return any particular website in their results (e.g. Safe Search). Google is a…

Twitter, facebook, airbnb didn't do any SEO

Re: Sergey Brin's Clarification On Guardian article

#36

Post by zerostar07 »

j_col wrote: post #28
tferris wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon, you are totally misleading. Google could do this—there are multiple options to silently wallgarden the user. Just check how much traffic Google moves. If they want they could arbitrarily redirect traffic and subtly punish user's not using their tools. But that's not their culture. Just look at their products, how far they pushing the boundaries and still stay open, give back and contribute to the community. L…

Facebook have given back plenty of open source to the dev community. Scribe (their federated logging server) and HipHop (their PHP compiler) come to mind immediately, but there may be others.

Their business tactics are ridiculously sleazy though. Aside from the google smear campaign fiasco last year, do you know that facebook does not allow AdSense advertising on it's 3rd party applications? They don't want FB ads performance to be compared with Google's (more profitable ads) on the same pages.

Re: Sergey Brin's Clarification On Guardian article

#37

Post by eternalban »

sounds wrote: post #33
eternalban wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> their actions feel balanced and neutral compared to any other player. There are distinct business models at play here and that should be noted before arriving at a conclusion that Google is a benevolent corporate actor. The fact that Google (or any company for that matter) can dominate and observe traffic patterns and content should be a matter of concern to the democratically [in the contemporary sense] minded ind…

I follow your logic. I agree. What concrete action would you suggest to make the internet more democratic?

Central servers must go. We must also disentangle presence management, identity, and services built on top of those layers. Access to identity must be layered and fully subject to user control.

I am personally remiss in this matter as I thought deeply about all this when ICQ came out in mid 90s (and even filed a PPA on April 1st 1997 with USPTO on my take on the solution) but did not advocate effectively enough for the (obvious) architectural remedies. Frankly it bugs me to this day and weighs on me like a still born child.

Re: Sergey Brin's Clarification On Guardian article

#38

Post by gbog »

tferris wrote: post #3

Imagine Apple, Facebook or whoever controlled the Internet like Google does: How long would it take until they abused their power? If someone is dominating the web it's Google and looking at their power and how much traffic they move—their actions feel balanced and neutral compared to any other player.

Agree with that and other points you made but one can also be concerned by some recent evolutions off Google. Their move toward a more "designed" ui, with hover popups everywhere, etc, is a bit alarming. Their catch up game with Facebook could be a slippery slope. The recent removal of many labs. And so on.

For me they can keep the benevolence as a priority only if they become more something like a great worldwide university paid by some ads in a search engine.

Re: Sergey Brin's Clarification On Guardian article

#39

Post by j_col »

j_col wrote: post #28
tferris wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon, you are totally misleading. Google could do this—there are multiple options to silently wallgarden the user. Just check how much traffic Google moves. If they want they could arbitrarily redirect traffic and subtly punish user's not using their tools. But that's not their culture. Just look at their products, how far they pushing the boundaries and still stay open, give back and contribute to the community. L…

Facebook have given back plenty of open source to the dev community. Scribe (their federated logging server) and HipHop (their PHP compiler) come to mind immediately, but there may be others.

> (please don't mention some minor FB side-products; Apple has tons of innovative products but none of them is free).

Please don't rewrite your original comment after I've responded, not cool.

Re: Sergey Brin's Clarification On Guardian article

#40

Post by brudgers »

tferris wrote: post #31
brudgers wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You can be successful with your product on the WWW without employing any Google services" It is often more difficult to be successful on the internet without devoting significant resources to Google specific SEO. Doing so without the benefit of Google search would be orders of magnitude more difficult, and Google is under no obligation to return any particular website in their results (e.g. Safe Search). Google is a…

I don't agree. If you build a really great web based product you don't need to do any single SEO activity to get strong traffic. No white or black hat or anything needed. People will come anyway. It's all about the product. If it's good people will tell and Google will notice. And Google is so smart that every crappy site powered by 100,000 system generated backlinks blasts will stay inferior.

>"If you build a really great web based product"

Assuming a really great web based product begs the question a bit. It's a pretty select group.

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