171–180 of 258 posts
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Both Google and Apple have reached this stage at around the same time in my opinion - both are now milking existing users rather than looking for innovative new markets or products. Once companies grow to a certain size it seems almost inevitable.
Yeah, self driving cars, google glass, and loon are not innovative new markets at all.
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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.
I'm a bit confused about that. Doesn't their algorithm take the user's profile into account?
That is the reason why AdWords location targeting is kinda broken currently (at least on non-mobile devices it relies on IP geolocation). If one day AdWords start serving geographically correct ads for everyone, that's the day when the ad people got access to account data.
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.
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> '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?
I think Danny Sullivan over at Searchengineland has done a better job of chronicling the changes but to give you a flavor, the size of the ad space before the first organic has grown tremendously, the injection of Google properties (G+, Youtube, etc) has further pushed on search results. When a buying intent is detected the 'shopping' bar activates which only shows shopping results from people who advertise on Google…
My search was: jwt web toolkit
The search page itself had no Google ads on it.
The top link was the homepage for the toolkit project. There were no ad links on the page.
The second and third links were for wikipedia, which contained no Google ads.
The fourth link did have Google ads on it. The fifth and sixth lengths did not. The seventh link did.
I tried again with a different set of search terms: neutron spin echo
The top of the page did contain a link to Google Scholar, followed by three links to pay walled articles. I am not aware of any profit agreement between Google and the publishers, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that it's there.
The remaining links were either to pages containing no advertising (Google or otherwise) or to more pay walled articles. Short of Google have a relationship with the publishers, Google again made no money on this search.
For the record, I don't have an ad-blocker turned on, so I would see ads if they were there.
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"You didn't really give me a query to debug." It's right there in quotes, at the top of the very discussion page you link to. I'd like to think you are really interested in these issues and not mounting a disingenuous public relations campaign, but you don't make it easy.
I am very honestly interested in these issues, and in the past HN has been a great source of queries that fail in interesting ways, which is why I keep posting this request. On "html title tag" what do you want to know about it that the w3schools result at 1 doesn't give you? I know you may not like the site in general, but is there more to a title tag than that?
A better example is: "html iframe element". Go ahead and look. What's more interesting here is that if you modify this query to "html iframe element scripting" the top 3 results are now w3schools, one related to the tag, while the relevant section header in MDN on scripting isn't even highlighted in the matching result from MDN. The word "scripting" does not even appear in the rendered DOM of the w3schools page for .
At this point, it's pretty safe to say that there's a reason, distinct from content quality, why w3schools is always promoted over better sources of information. Popularity doesn't seem likely either (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/mozilla.org vs http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/w3schools.com). The site is:
1. Covered in questionable and low quality ads.
2. Intentionally misleading in general but especially in name (w3schools is not affiliated with the W3C or any standards body).
3. Abusing its position (in both search rank and in its misleading name) to sell useless "certifications" that not one company in existence would take seriously.
Why doesn't Google consider this a scam and factor that into its search ranking?
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> '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?
I think Danny Sullivan over at Searchengineland has done a better job of chronicling the changes but to give you a flavor, the size of the ad space before the first organic has grown tremendously, the injection of Google properties (G+, Youtube, etc) has further pushed on search results. When a buying intent is detected the 'shopping' bar activates which only shows shopping results from people who advertise on Google…
From the end user side this one is particularly frustrating. Google Shopping has gone from being an incredibly valuable tool when I was looking to make a purchase to being practically worthless. I don't even bother with it anymore.
Fun fact: If you had bought a call yesterday for $300, it would now be worth $3100. 1000% return on investment. Yesterday I bought a chipotle call (because of earnings release) for $600 and now its worth $3600 Now that the political budget debate is over, I think we will see a spectacularly volatile movement upwards and strong earnings will push stocks to absurd prices way over any reason. The best thing to do is to…
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…
Current revenue increase is because of YouTube's contribution that's finally happening. YouTube had been time bomb in terms of revenue explosion that has been ticking for a long while. YouTube probably generates more views then most popular TV channels but there were hardly any ads until recently. My guess is that YouTube might come close to revenues eventually to web search itself.
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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.