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How did Google get so big?

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Re: How did Google get so big?

#261

Post by throwaway080383 »

nunez wrote: post #254
samstave wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall one of the questions in my interview at google years ago: "Do you know what kind of company Google is?" "Sure, everyone thinks you're a tech company or a search company or whatever - but Google is an advertising company, and thats it. All the other stuff distracts from the fact that youre just the most profitable ad company."

Well techncially Google is an information company that happens to use ads to fund its mission of making information more accessible and useful.

Spotted the Google employee.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#262

Post by jhall1468 »

c3534l wrote: post #102
zjaffee wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so much they are hurting anyone, since they have made it virtually impossible to compete with them. Say you do a search for a particular location, the first thing that pops up to the the top of the page is a box with some information pulled from wikipedia and a link/image of it on google maps. Search for a band, and you see the same with links to youtube and google music. Search for online storage and you se…

Bing works just fine, but people don't use it because it's not what they're used to. Rarely does Google have an actual monopoly where new competitors can't enter the field - in fact, for every Google product I can give you a viable alternative. The only difference is that Google is winning.

> Bing works just fine, but people don't use it because it's not what they're used to.

I don't use it because it isn't better. I'm not going to switch to something of equal value. Make something better and then I'll switch.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#263

Post by gnusci »

I believe they are selling the metadata which is a very hard to define information about all machine processed information of every human that use their systems. Now-a-days it is a mine for several large scale social objectives, and so very precious. The way and form they sell it may differ depending of the end-front application. Nevertheless, interesting how they did figure out that people information is a mine of money. So we are their product :)

Re: How did Google get so big?

#264

Post by jhall1468 »

stuckinarut wrote: post #233
briandear wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does splitting Google benefit the consumer? Is the consumer being harmed right now? Are they being price gouged or forced to use inferior products?

> or forced to use inferior products? Potentially, yes. Google abuses their search monopoly and ads duopoly to kill off competition in other areas. They use their browser control to control internet standards. They do things like effectively kill RSS via EEE style tactics.

Do you have any examples of these things taking place in reality or is it just "possible" stuff. And Google did not kill RSS lol, it was always super niche.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#265

Post by bduerst »

earenndil wrote: post #21
bduerst wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG is essentially a reskin of Bing search. Yahoo! is also Bing.

I thought they have a number of sources, of which bing is the primary, but sole?

They also use Yandex for Russian pages, and then there's a hodgepodge of sites that webmasters manually submit/index (i.e. 1990's level of indexing).

So DDG is essentially Bing.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#266

Post by ocdtrekkie »

jhall1468 wrote: post #259
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny you mention this: I've discovered that Google is injecting an ad above searches for "mapquest" that leads users who make the mistake of clicking on a Google ad to install a browser hijacker plugin before they can get the directions they're looking for. This hurts MapQuest's brand, gives people malware, and of course, conveniently, makes Google a lot of money. They've been doing it for at least a number of…

You honestly think Google cares about MapQuest at all? The ad you're mentioning is using MapQuest as a keyword. It needs to be reported. Job done. Google doesn't care about MapQuest and it remains the top non-advertised listing for searching MapQuest. MapQuest is a has-been and it has nothing to do with Google's ranking them, and everything to do with a terrible UI that was entirely inferior to Maps on release.

You've missed a lot of the point here. MapQuest isn't something Google cares about, but it is an extremely popular search term, particularly among the computer illiterate, who learned what it was back in the 90s, and have ever since considered it "where to get directions". Like many other search terms, it's a high value term for malicious content, and Google's happy to rake in the cash. While "Google does not sell your data", they're more than willing to redirect you to a malicious browser extension that does.

Those of us in the tech industry don't use MapQuest. We don't click on ads. A lot of us have ad blockers. So we don't really think about the fact that the cushy online presence adtech has built for us is built on taking advantage of less technologically savvy. You may not pay for Google, but indirectly, the old lady down the block does, every time she has to take her computer into Best Buy to have the garbage scrubbed off of it.

And where the antitrust drops back in: Google doesn't let people bid on ads for their own products, so "google maps" never returns a malicious map site.

And, as I noted above, this site's been heavily promoted in Google Ads for years, at least five, and there's no way to report it in Google Search. Several Google employees are likely reading this thread who have the ability to do something about it or know who to escalate it to, but I'm reasonably confident it'll still be there next week.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#267

Post by giobox »

philg_jr wrote: post #118
RestlessMind wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which successful companies came out of EU in the last 20 years? How well do they stack up against US (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber etc) or China (Tencent, Alibaba etc)? If not many, does that mean EU entrepreneurs are hindered by the regulations? One might also argue that European model is better because it might prevent one company from dominating the market. But if that is the case, why does EU face technology do…

How about...Nokia? Seimens? SAP?

I'm not sure this works all that great as a rebuttal, given Facebook alone just lost more value in a single day this week than the combined 2017 revenues of those three...

Also, Nokia and Siemens were founded in the 1800s, they did not emerge in "the last 20 years". SAP dates to the 1970s as well.

It pains me to admit as a European, but the lack of any real large modern internet success stories to emerge from our continent is a real shame.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#268

Post by 0xEFF »

snikeris wrote: post #24
wallflower wrote: post #8

If I could give a six word response for the technical side: "Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat and team". To paraphrase some Cal/UC Berkeley professor that I cannot remember, he said that the problem with scaling is that when you go up a magnitude or more, you may need a qualitatively different solution for the same problem. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and their team have time and time again managed to design and build st…

Also, the Google SRE book makes the point that they couldn't have achieved their scale w/out approaching ops from an engineering perspective. Linearly hiring ops people as services scale would have been too expensive.

Approaching operations from a software development perspective wasn’t unique to Google.

Also ops is engineering and has been since before Google existed.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#269

Post by btilly »

nostrademons wrote: post #122

On the market end - Google got huge because they inserted themselves as a critical part of peoples' usage of a resource that got even huger. As late as 2013, my coworkers and I would mock the Wall Street analysts who covered Google because (you could tell from their questions on the earnings call) they assumed that the Internet was no longer growing. So all the focus was on CPCs and Google's ability to monetize, when…

This was one of the points made in http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf about why people find Metcalfe's law compelling despite the numerical evidence against it.

Our personal perception of the size of a network is directly proportional to the value that we get from it. Extrapolating from that we estimate a square law. However we are neither aware of nor directly value the long tail of people distant from us in the network. From multiple ways of estimating, the value of that tail works out to be O(log(N)), leading to a O(N log(N)) valuation for a network.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#270

Post by refulgentis »

yodacola wrote: post #204
refulgentis wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nit: Android was purchased long before Apple entered the market. Doesn't change your argument, no one was expecting vendors to rush to a new OS because of the iPhone revolution.

But Google was already aware of the iPhone the time they purchased Android. This has been their strategy for competition.

No - they bought Android 2 years before the iPhone was announced, and 6-12 months before rumors about it appeared.

You're thinking of the apocryphal story that Google completely pivoted Android when Eric Schmidt heard about the iPhone at the last Apple board meeting before the iPhone announcement

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