A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi • Hacker News Board

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#91

Post by obtu » Fri, May 04, 2012, 9:25 AM UTC

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…

To be fair, faster answers + the ability to undo a do-what-I-mean guess lets me correct Google's assumptions pretty fast. The tools at the left allow for some quick refining as well; that's pretty useful when I need particularly fresh results, or a time window from when some news was breaking. And the fast completion is useful to refine a query before it returns results (though occasionally annoying when it erases quotes and the like).

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#92

Post by jahewson » Fri, May 04, 2012, 9:36 AM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #58

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…

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?

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#93

Post by drucken » Fri, May 04, 2012, 9:49 AM UTC

Think I would qualify his key takeaway somewhat:

"Are there any lessons to be learned from this? For one, if you work at a company where everyone wants to use a competitor's product instead of its own, be very worried."

This is because companies sometimes (maybe often?) ban the use of competitor products to their detriment.

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#94

Post by simonh » Fri, May 04, 2012, 10:10 AM UTC

davidjohnstone wrote: post #84

goochtek wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 we're not there yet. For me.

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#95

Post by buster » Fri, May 04, 2012, 11:14 AM UTC

Sounds much more like Inktomi killed Inktomi.

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#96

Post by poub » Fri, May 04, 2012, 11:18 AM UTC

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #41

jaryd wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=The+Big+Bang+Theory

Weird - I was totally blind to the top box - I ignored it because it was too banner like and kept scanning the results. Note to DDG - put the cool useful bit Under the place we all expect ads to be.

I miss very often the top box too. I have learned the relevancy of this top box, but I still miss it very often. My eyes usually go right to the link with "Official site" tag. I've heard the effect is called banner blindness.

However I use adblock on every browser. Therefore I have less training than others to ignore ads. When I see one, it just hit me stronger (it's a side effect of adblock).

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#97

Post by Zakharov » Fri, May 04, 2012, 11:26 AM UTC

ricardobeat wrote: post #81

bitops wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate a bit more on this? I think I understand your point but a few more details would be great. Thanks!

Most people don't look farther than the first 3 results, so what comes after that isn't very high priority. Might be the reason some more specific/obscure queries on google return terrible results :)

More specifically, if people find what they're looking for in the first result, they ignore the rest.

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#98

Post by dpacmittal » Fri, May 04, 2012, 12:39 PM UTC

From the article, it's clear that more than Google, inktomi killed itself.

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#99

Post by boyter » Fri, May 04, 2012, 1:07 PM UTC

wickedchicken wrote: post #21

michh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initially the no. 1 reason for me was peer pressure. It was simply unacceptable to use something other than Google in tech circles at some point. It was like having an @aol.com email address. If your users are that passionate, you're doing something right. After I gave it a go for a while, the other reasons you list made me stay.

> 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

Re: A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi

#100

Post by anamax » Fri, May 04, 2012, 1:11 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #48

aswanson wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that would have affected their prospects for success?

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.