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After reading the "Tale" it appears that Inktomi killed itself. It is a good example of what happens if top dog companies fail to innovate in face of sudden superior competition. RIM is another example, but would be wrong to say that Apple is killing them. Apple is just making and selling superior products.
Agreed. If I had a nickel for every time my Blackberry crashed since I upgraded the OS a year ago, I'd buy some Apple stock.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd say: The Google CEO's have the point of view from an end user. The Inktomi managers had the point of view of a generic MBA. Everything followed from that difference of view.
Did Google actually have revenue at that point in time? They bought Applied Semantics (for adsense / adwords) in what, 2003? (edit: mlinksva points out that they introduced adwords at the end of 2000) Inktomi management would probably have had to raise capital on a risky pivot whilst at the same time dropping all of their existing revenue streams in order to compete head to head with Google who at that point didn't e…
I remember why I switched to Google: 1. speed, 2. simplicity. Relevance, meh. Never noticed much difference there. This led me to believe that PageRank was more about marketing (brilliant marketing) than technical edge.
I think Google's high quality search results were less due to PageRank than the fact they AND'd search terms instead of OR'ing them.
The google spam that actually works (or at least, worked a few years ago, before panda) requires setting up lots of sites, lots of independent IP blocks. That was much harder when PageRank appeared - hosting was damn expensive, VPSes were nowhere to be found.
PageRank was a huge thing. I used "and" queries in altavista at the time. It was no match.
I had no idea that that Diego worked on Inktomi. Although it makes sense why IndexTank worked fantastically. If I had to pick one reason why Google triumphed (and you can only pick one), I think it would be their Page Rank algorithm. It added that extra bit of awesome-sauce to and already tasty stew.
I'd say: The Google CEO's have the point of view from an end user. The Inktomi managers had the point of view of a generic MBA. Everything followed from that difference of view.
>The Google CEO's have the point of view of an engineer.
And, more generally:
>The Google CEO's have the point of view of the people doing the actual work.
The lesson to take away from this is that one shouldn't try to manage what one can't do themself. The disconnect between the manager and the problem domain becomes too great and they end up making ridiculous decisions since they are acting on the wrong information.
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…
The better abstracts is the reason I use DuckDuckGo at home. If I just want to know when the next episode of Big Bang Theory is out or what the weather is today I rarely need to even click on a result. For more obscure technical searches at work, Google still finds more answers. But remember - the barrier to change for a search engine's customers is very very low
Why I switched to google. A) it was fast, it loaded fast. B) it was not filled with ads and pop ups. Only one of those is still true.
Easy test: are you using Bing now? (with their new clean results pages)
In the next year and a half the stock went down by 99.9%. In the end, Inktomi was acquired by Yahoo for 250M. This is unrelated to the main point, but does anyone know if Yahoo re-used a significant amount of Inktomi tech acquired for that $250M? Or was it spoiled?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The better abstracts is the reason I use DuckDuckGo at home. If I just want to know when the next episode of Big Bang Theory is out or what the weather is today I rarely need to even click on a result. For more obscure technical searches at work, Google still finds more answers. But remember - the barrier to change for a search engine's customers is very very low
What search query tells you about the next scheduled episode of a TV show?
I remember why I switched to Google: 1. speed, 2. simplicity. Relevance, meh. Never noticed much difference there. This led me to believe that PageRank was more about marketing (brilliant marketing) than technical edge.
Are you kidding? I was using Altavista, IIRC, and would routinely have to page down to the second or third page to find any kind of relevant link. When I switched to Google, I almost immediately stopped looking at more than the first page of results.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd say: The Google CEO's have the point of view from an end user. The Inktomi managers had the point of view of a generic MBA. Everything followed from that difference of view.
I would modify that to read (since this article even stated that the engineers there found this to be obvious): >The Google CEO's have the point of view of an engineer. And, more generally: >The Google CEO's have the point of view of the people doing the actual work. The lesson to take away from this is that one shouldn't try to manage what one can't do themself. The disconnect between the manager and the problem dom…
First, engineers very often build crappy products when left to their own devices. The ones that they do the best at are ones where they are also the users and are more or less representative of the target audience. Google's a great example, and so is Firefox. So I think Google execs' perspective as a user was much more important. Consider as contrast Google Plus, which definitely was not built because was an avid but dissatisfied Facebook and Twitter user.
I think your second point is almost right. You should never try to control things you don't understand. It's ok to manage things you don't understand, because good management in that case is not directing the people who understand, but supporting them in achieving common goals.
As a non-tech example, few hospital administrators can perform brain surgery. But that's fine as long as they ask the brain surgeons what they need rather than telling them how to work.