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A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

diegobasch.com

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Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#101

Post by tytso »

lubujackson wrote: post #49

Most interesting to me is that Inktomi had all the power to beat, acquire or replicate Google but didn't have the right mindset. They were operating under a few bad assumptions: - search is a commodity for licensing (making them resistant to launching a "cleaner" engine that would alienate their clients) - what worked for a smaller internet (100 million pages) could scale appropriately with the growing internet (100…

- users always want faster, more direct answers (rather than controlling the filtering/categorization of their searches)

That's a very power-user centric attitude, don't you think? As a power user I preferred to type long, complicated Sabre queries to find exactly which airplane flight I wanted. It was much faster, and I had memorized all of the complicated mnemonics. But that's not what a casual user would want to use.

Asking users to specify categories for what they want means requiring a certain orientation in their thinking which is shared by computer scientists and trained librarians. But to an average user, that's extra work. And think about how this might work if you're talking to an actual human librarian: if you start asking about TV shows, and then mention "The Big Bang Theory", do you think the librarian will ask you, "Did you mean the scientific theory, or the TV show?" That's only something a stupid computer would do. A smart librarian would take the context of the previous queries that you've made of him or her, and provide the right answer quickly and efficiently. Wouldn't you want the same thing from a search engine?

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#102

Post by anamax »

gaius wrote: post #43
paulsutter wrote: post #7

Great article. One note: Google's dynamic abstracts were not only very useful, they also improved perceived relevance because they let users see why the pages were selected. When I was at Altavista, we were also blocked from doing dynamic abstracts by cost. Google's main advantages were: - managed by the founders with a total focus on search and measurable results - google's hiring process produced a very strong team…

When Altavista launched, it was an impressive showcase of the DEC Alpha's power. Intel only became usable for serious servers (with the exception of exotic stuff like Sequents), as did Linux, years later. Google had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time, when Lintel became a commodity in the datacentre. 5 years earlier, they'd have been on Sun probably.

> When Altavista launched, it was an impressive showcase of the DEC Alpha's power.

Altavista was started by Paul Flaherty. One of his jobs was to find some way to showcase Alphas.

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#103

Post by gaius »

anamax wrote: post #100
gaius wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would have affected their cost base certainly, and probably their entire datacentre strategy. With SPARC kit, you wouldn't build assuming that machines will often fail and simply be swapped out, for example, something that Google is famous for.

> With SPARC kit, you wouldn't build assuming that machines will often fail In the late 90s SPARCs did fail. Yes, they were more reliable than commodity x86 boxes, but they failed often enough that it was an issue if you had 100 or so, and search engines hit that level very quickly.

Right, but look at what Google do, their boxes are basically disposable. Why invest in dual-redundant-hotswappable-everything boxes when you just throw the entire thing away if any bit of it breaks, 'cos it's cheaper to replace it than to even try to repair it in-place.

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#104

Post by bira »

simonh wrote: post #94
davidjohnstone wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like http://duckduckgo.com/ ?

It seems like a nice idea. But I use other Google services like GMail, Google Docs, Google Maps, etc. If I switched to duckduckgo but still used the other Google products I'd feel wrong about it. There aint no such thing as a free lunch. Now if their search results got so bad that other alternatives were clearly superior, that's different. They have an obligation to provide a good service to us the customers too, but…

After the recent penguin update, their search results have got REALLY bad.

Don't you guys agree?

That's an opportunity, right there.

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#105

Post by ajays »

aidenn0 wrote: post #78

Inktomi engineers using Google reminds me of TI engineers using HP calculators. TI banned them, which apparently just moved the calculators under the desk

When I started at Yahoo Search (in 2005; it was Inktomi), I quickly learned that "just Google it" was frowned upon, and modified my vocabulary to say "just use web search". To this day, I still use this phrase.

Most engineers that I knew in YST did not use Google at all. We preferred to eat our own dogfood, and filed query triages against bad results (and only used Google to compare).

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#106

Post by troytoman »

Diego,

Thanks for capturing the train of thoughts that seem to run through my head almost daily. Lots of lessons to learn from that experience. Although it is easier to connect the dots in the rearview mirror that it was looking forward at the time, There were some clear lessons about not forgetting the actual end user (which is not always your customer), using a single metric as a proxy for user experience, obsessing about a competitor and trying to get big instead of great.

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#107

Post by enfilade »

goochtek wrote: post #71
nirvana wrote: post #51

This was a very interesting read. I was working for a vertical search engine in this very same period. I, and the other engineers, also attempted to get our management to recognize what google was doing right. Unfortunately, we were delayed greatly by bad technology choices forced on us by venture capitalists (e.g. "build your search engine on top of Oracle! they say they have full text search, it will save you time!…

As you haven't mentioned what exactly your search engine will focus on, I'll just throw this idea out there. I would love a search engine that returned results equivalent to Google, yet offered me the privacy level that I desired. With Google, currently I am the product. I know this. I understand this. Thing this is, I don't want to be the product any more. I want to pay for the product on say a yearly fee which guar…

Have you tried http://www.startpage.com?

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#108

Post by wickedchicken »

boyter wrote: post #99
wickedchicken wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was simply unacceptable to use something other than Google in tech circles at some point. From what I recall, it was also the most programmer-friendly search engine at the time. http://www.bing.com/search?q=DGGEVX http://blekko.com/ws/DGGEVX http://duckduckgo.com/?q=DGGEVX http://www.google.com/#q=DGGEVX This is purely subjective, but Google is the only one that links to the Netlib 'real' LAPACK, straight to the…

Offtopic, but do you consider these results any good? http://searchco.de/?q=DGGEVX&cs=on

Basically, but you're getting the opinion of a random person on the internet :). The third result is the 'real' one (the top two are unit tests for the named function.

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#109

Post by PakG1 »

jahewson wrote: post #92
InclinedPlane wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Close. Lots of other companies were also hiring pretty high tier talent as well, and had intense focus. Google's success came down to effectively executing across typically disparate disciplines. You have hard core research level CS eggheads, you have top tier software engineers, and you have state of the art data center operations. In a typical organization these groups have competing interests, they fight amongst t…

The word "egghead" is rather demeaning, perhaps we can refrain from using high-school insults here?

If black people can call themselves niggers and not be insulted, can geeks call themselves eggheads and not be insulted? Not that I condone black people calling themselves niggers, but if anyone can, they can. So why not geeks and the word egghead? Heck, even geek was a high school derogatory word.

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#110

Post by anamax »

gaius wrote: post #103
anamax wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With SPARC kit, you wouldn't build assuming that machines will often fail In the late 90s SPARCs did fail. Yes, they were more reliable than commodity x86 boxes, but they failed often enough that it was an issue if you had 100 or so, and search engines hit that level very quickly.

Right, but look at what Google do, their boxes are basically disposable. Why invest in dual-redundant-hotswappable-everything boxes when you just throw the entire thing away if any bit of it breaks, 'cos it's cheaper to replace it than to even try to repair it in-place.

> Right, but look at what Google do, their boxes are basically disposable

We're talking matter of degree.

The claim was that building a search engine out of 90s sparcs meant that you didn't have to worry about things dying.

That claim is not true - reasonable search engines of that era required enough machines that the failure rate of 90s sparcs, while better than x86 of the time, was enough to require folks to handle frequent failures.

It's reasonable to argue that the cost/benefit tradeoff of sparc's extra reliability vs x85 wasn't worth it for those companies, but that's a different argument.

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