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Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

#111

Post by jlgreco »

patrickk wrote: post #65
ChrisClark wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all subjective but I love the new Gmail interfaces, Hangouts is much better than Talk and keeps getting better. Google+ photos is so much better than Picasa, I love how I can search for 'blue cars' in my photos and it returns them even though I've never tagged any of them. Android has seen enormous improvements, I love stock 4.3 and Google Now. Chrome's new 'native' apps wrapper-like thing is neat. Even Youtube…

I'm using a poor internet connection (because of geography) and my experience is that the usability of Youtube has gone down dramatically. They made a change a while back where the video will only buffer a few seconds beyond where you've paused it. Previously, you could go a few seconds into the video, pause it, and let it buffer 100% in whatever quality you needed, now I find myself having to constantly pause the vi…

The continuing problems with buffering on youtube have caused me to resort to youtube-dl/mplayer.

Re: Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

#112

Post by iamhungry »

moultano wrote: post #102
fear91 wrote: post #2

I guess the June search-algorithm updates really worked. (Kicking out everyone that earns without giving Google it's piece of the pie). Google keeps removing small business websites from its results, forcing them to use Ad-Words. This strategy cannot be sustained unless they want 100% commercial / 100% junk results. I wonder what will they do in the future.

Google does not make ranking changes based on revenue. We don't even collect statistics about that for ranking changes. Worrying about the fate of small sites in Google's rankings is a reasonable concern, and one that we share. But whatever you think we are doing incorrectly in ranking, it has nothing to do with making more money.

We don't even collect statistics about that for ranking changes.

Who's "we"? Are you Larry Page to speak with such confidence? Nope, just a lowly engineer being observed by hundreds of Stanford and ivy League MBAs as your changes impact Ad Clicks, the golden eggs.

Re: Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

#114

Post by epsylon »

r0h1n wrote: post #93
lawdawg wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is because Google has started optimizing for the 99% use case, which most HN'ers usually don't fall under. They originally optimized for what most Googlers like (who are generally the 1%) and have since learned that you can't run a business just pleasing the elite and whiny ones.

Surely it can't be the case that Google was serving the 1% till recently. Their products - Gmail, YouTube, Android, Search, Maps etc. - are all leaders in their categories. So the 1%-to-99% argument doesn't quite hold. I personally think Google held itself back from OTT monetization strategies all these years as it waited for (a) its individual products to become undisputed market leaders, and (b) a unified privacy/s…

That's the wrong way to look at it. They served the whole 100%, and now they are starting to optimize for the 99% at the expense of the 1% of power users. (My guess would be more like 95% / 5%, but I may have a biased view myself)

That's the only explanation to the whole set of stupid decisions they've been taking lately (reader, yt UI, gmail compose, ...): they make more cash by doing so.

Re: Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

#115

Post by leephillips »

moultano wrote: post #73
JonSkeptic wrote: post #3

I think this is interesting because it matches my user experience with Google products in a very inverted way. Google search has gotten worse and worse lately, forcing me on to other search engines with worse UIs just so that I can get useful results. Youtube UI gets worse every time they update it. They cancelled the RSS reader. The email UI keeps getting worse and featuring more ads. But the stock value hit $1000.…

If you have any example bad queries, I'd love to see them to debug. If you have your search history on, you can find them here: https://history.google.com/history/

This is the exact reply you offered me a few weeks ago when we were complaining about w3schools ranking at the top of Google's results. Ultimately, your "debugging" amounted to explaining that you rank lower-quality results higher because they are more "popular", and therefore, somehow, more useful.

I still don't understand the strategy of promoting less reliable, poorer quality information as a way to help the user. But it's easy to understand as a (short term) way to help Google, as these low-quality sites invariably carry Adsense, and the better sites often do not.

Re: Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

#116

Post by astrodust »

nonchalance wrote: post #99
astrodust wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could've hit this years ago by doing a 10:1 stock consolidation. Fetishizing over share prices is meaningless. What if they had only six shares? Market cap is what matters.

Berkshire Hathaway class A is current 175821/sh :) extreme example. But my point was that, while market cap is all that matters, people still fixate on round numbers

That's one way to exclude peasants from investing in your company.

Re: Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

#117

Post by qdog »

Google doesn't pay dividends or give public shares voting rights, while I get it that people believe the intrinsic value will appear at some point, this is not how I would like to invest money in a company, regardless of what price the stock hits.

Re: Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

#118

Post by moultano »

iamhungry wrote: post #112
moultano wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google does not make ranking changes based on revenue. We don't even collect statistics about that for ranking changes. Worrying about the fate of small sites in Google's rankings is a reasonable concern, and one that we share. But whatever you think we are doing incorrectly in ranking, it has nothing to do with making more money.

We don't even collect statistics about that for ranking changes. Who's "we"? Are you Larry Page to speak with such confidence? Nope, just a lowly engineer being observed by hundreds of Stanford and ivy League MBAs as your changes impact Ad Clicks, the golden eggs.

I know you're basically just trolling, but I'll reply seriously anyways.

I'm one of the people who makes changes to Google's rankings. As a result, for any change I want to make, I have to collect the statistics to justify it. This is done with the help of an analyst who has a different reporting chain from the ranking engineers in order to ensure that they remain unbiased. These statistics include things like what results people click on, how often people hit "next page," how humans rate the results before and after the change, etc. (None of these statistics involve ads or revenue in any way.) Once we've collected those statistics, the analyst writes up a report about the change summarizing their findings and pointing out any areas of concern.

This report is then presented at a weekly launch meeting, where the ranking leads review each change both for its metrics and for its complexity, ongoing infrastructure cost, etc. and make a decision about whether to launch it. You can view an example launch meeting here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtRJXnXgE-A

Re: Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

#119

Post by epsylon »

chill1 wrote: post #70
oellegaard wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 Their new Google Apps control panel is impossible to use. It has icons that doesn't correspond to the function and no labels. It's like walking around in a nuclear control panel with no lights on. While I'm moving my e-mail away from Google, the last thing I still use is the search, which still feels light weight and easy to use.

> .. the last thing I still use is the search, which still feels light weight and easy to use. If you haven't, you should really give DuckDuckGo [1] a shot. I used Google's search for the longest time, and finally just forced myself to switch to DDG this summer. It was rough for a while, but either I've gotten used to their search algorithm / results, or the results have gotten better. I hardly ever have to use Googl…

DDG's search results are terrible for me most of the time.

Though DDG as a frontend is quite nice. I use the bang shortcuts all the time. It's actually a better frontend to google's search than google's search itself: I can easily switch between google France results (which emphasize french speaking pages) and normal google results, something that I haven't been able to do in years since google.com/ncr (no country redirect) no longer works when you're logged in with a user account.

Overall I love the idea of DDG's bangs. I've found many of them useful and you can infer those you don't know easily (if !a is amazon.com, then !afr is amazon.fr; !hn is very useful as well!)

Re: Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

#120

Post by md224 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #103

Google historically left a lot of money on the table (not using every spot on the page for ads, giving away services with real value, etc.) They decided to stop doing that when they decided they were a 'peer' of Apple's. The shareholders love it because it means Google will finally be pulling in as much cash as they 'can' vs as much as they needed. Users seem to be somewhat divided on the issue. Sophisticated users a…

> 'Ranking' on Google is very much a pay to play kind of thing these days with their page layout

Could you expand on this? Are you referring to how AdWords content is visually privileged over organic search results?

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