Eric Schmidt: “Our competitor is Bing”
liveside.net
liveside.net
Let me give you an example:
http://www.google.com/search?q=how+I+won+the+waer
http://www.bing.com/search?q=how+I+won+the+waer
I meant to type "how I won the war" and only Google picks up on this.
"waer" alone into google instant will bring up water (country), but with the context of my search phrase it gives me something far more accurate.
(Although lately, I find it too aggressive. When googling obscure error messages, it usually "do you mean"-s it into a less obscure error message that I already understand. Sigh.)
Which makes sense, as "water" is not a German word...
Bing is a win for Microsoft either way. If it gets about 30% market share, then Bing makes Microsoft money and forces Google to invest more in search. If even the largest software company after investing billions can't stop Google's growth in search, then Microsoft and others will claim that that Google is a monopoly. So it should be subject to anti-trust laws.
In the old days, when General Motors completely dominated the car industry, they made sure to keep their market share under 25%. They believed, probably correctly, that a higher share would bring anti-trust sanctions.
The government thought this was an abuse of the monopoly, but the charges didn't stick.
What Google's doing is nothing close to that, though. Nobody uses other search engines because they suck. The results are irrelevant and the ads are irrelevant. That's not anti-competitive action, that's competitive action -- they make a good product that people like. Seems legal to me.
For example, lets assume you have a somewhat successful product, getting pretty good search results for your category, and one day your site throws some errors, or it goes down, or something of that nature, your site is now no longer showing for your category. They don't tell you anything, not even if you use their Webmaster tools, all you know is that according to their search query result performance that all of a sudden you stop showing up for any other term than your name. Previously you were showing up for many terms. After you correct these issues, which you can only really guess at, you submit a re-consideration request describing the issue, your solution, and why you think whatever thing you think is the problem should be corrected. Now you wait. Not for some response, but just an automated reply saying that your response has been dealt with, not whether they did anything, or if in fact you had an issue. This will come 2-3 weeks later, your business may already be dead. But if it's not, and magically you show up for Google results again, and webmaster tools shows you that your previous search terms have relevance, you will most definitely not be in your previous position. Time to get out there again, get fresh in-links, and re-build your business.
This is the current status quo. This is very very scary. Even Credit Cards have to tell you why you were rejected, not enough credit history or something like that, you can even get one free credit report in response that will explain things. Not Google. I would sleep much better at night knowing that there was some process that would tell you if there's a problem, and if possible what the reasons were, in general terms. Once you correct them you should be able to submit that you did, and hopefully that would address the situation in some reasonable amount of time.
It's crazy that most of us are ok with a search engine dominating 70% or so of search, without any ability to resolve conflicts, ask questions, or anything. We can only click buttons and hope that after enough times the great Google will listen.
Honestly, Google is not that big of a company. I checked out the Fortune 500 list, and Google is not even in the top 50. Amazon.com, Bank of America, and CVS Carkemark know a lot more about you than Google. And they don't care -- you come to them, and they sell you their product, and it's often a good deal for both sides. Google is just like this, except smaller.
In the IT industry, we like to think that Google is important. We see their logo a lot, we hear how nice it is to work there... but they are really small potatoes. Advertising is nothing. Giving people money, giving people drugs, selling gasoline, shipping books to your house overnight, and making light bulbs and jet engines is a lot more profitable than sending clicks to your website. Sorry, that's the reality... there is a lot more evil to be done in the world than Google is capable of. (Look at the number of Fortune 500 companies that are primarily military contractors. Their corporate mandate is to cause people to die as efficiently as possible -- Google manages your RSS feeds and cat pictures! Sorry, not evil.)
(Why isn't Google as heavily regulated as banks? Because they really don't matter that much. Yeah, you can search for your name on Google and see content that you put up on the web under your name. But the banks collect information about you, to make business decisions, without you ever even knowing. Right now, their computers are deciding whether or not you are a credit risk, and if they decide you are, they are canceling your credit card. That vacation you wanted? Gone. That house you wanted? Never. That's power that Google simply doesn't even come close to having!)
I'm just saying their current status quo coupled with the power they have is scary. They should, like the banks, communicate with you. Even if it's not that detailed, a little bit of interaction goes a long way. They already have humans reading your reconsideration requests, they should allow them to issue a response, instead of just an automated reply. It shouldn't be this guessing game that we play. It's not OK that something that controls almost all of search is that inaccessible to communication, follow-up, and resolution.
The fact is their current policy is in all likelihood the one that allows them to serve relevant results to the greatest number of people for the lowest cost. If they start giving it the personal touch as you say then the cost will go way up it won't bed just you and the occasional accidental delisted site owner but will be every spammer, con artist, and fly by night SEO expert. The support costs would be astronomical. And your hoped for solution is to have a government entity step in and mandate they spend that money in a hopeless attempt to let you talk to someone in person? In short you want the government to force Google to reduce its profits, potentially drastically, for your own personal benefit.
Nobody else likes other search engines and can't find your site? Tough shit. That's not Google's concern and it's not the government's concern, which makes you responsible for dealing with it.
All I'm saying is that Google should set up some processes so that issues that can be major, such as an accidental delisting, or similar be addressed with some level of human interaction, whether it's an actual response, or an automated response letting you know the issues, nothing more.
In my opinion, and hopefully sometime in the near future the US Congress will agree, that it's not OK for something to have that much sway over the web and not be accountable or have any reasonable processes in place for corrections. It's just not.
Your point would be a lot clearer if you had said, "I wish" instead of "obligation". I wish a human at Google would reply to my email when they accidentally delist my site. I wish someone would spend $100 of Google's time to research my problem and talk to me. I wish Google would mail me ice cream and ponies once a week.
If you actually read what I've been saying, which I know is very hard, because we have a tendency to skim and let our biases let our emotions get the best of us, I'm not saying anything crazy.
If your sentences focused on one topic, and didn't diverge to psychoanalyze me, which I know is very hard, because we have a tendency to let our emotions get the best of us, causing a run on sentence, where the word obligation is used a lot, and holy shit this sort of thing is hard to read, emotions or not, and what was I saying? Oh yeah, your points would be easier to follow.
Anyway, Google's philosophy is to make decisions in general rather than in bulk and then they let the computers do the real work. It's the only sane thing they can do; there are billions of websites, and if they had to research every delisting case, they'd be out of business. It's no loss to Google or its users if your site doesn't show up in search results.
You just aren't all that important to Google or the rest of the world. Nor is anyone else.
You say you're not trolling but you just think this way, I'm sorry but I can't have any meaningful exchange with someone that's grasping at things that just aren't there.
BofA, Amazon, etc. are all companies that we deal with directly in a customer<->vendor relationship. Amazon puts up products for sale, people buy them. BofA gives people a place to put their money, in return for the ability to lend that money to others.
But your average Internet user isn't Google's customer. They're Google's product, and are "sold" to advertisers. People interact with Google every day, and in return, Google gets to collect, store, and mine our information in ways that we don't really know about or understand, and sell the results of that analysis to others.
So I think some of the Google-fear is based more on that than raw revenue generation. Being sold to advertisers on a massive scale is just kinda creepy.
Google is significantly more dominant than Walmart, they're the only channel to your product for many, which isn't true with Walmart.
We shouldn't be ok with a company controlling almost all of search and not having any way to check them. There's a reason certain industries are now regulated, and why there are anti-competitive laws. Google and the web in general is still too new to have such regulation, but hopefully we're not too far away from it.
Again, I'd feel much better at night knowing there's a standard procedure with actual follow-up to explain and investigate search related issues, including delistings.
No, it's not a fact at all. Use Yahoo or Bing, as long as there are functional alternatives you can't claim there's a monopoly. Google dominates search, that's not the same thing as a monopoly. Google does not have a monopoly.
> As such, there needs to be some standards and processes to for conflict resolution.
No, there doesn't, you haven't established that they are a monopoly, or that they're promoting anti-competitive practices, or that search is even a vital service like electricity that should be regulated.
> There's a reason certain industries are now regulated, and why there are anti-competitive laws.
Yes, there are, for good reasons, no such reason exists to regulate search.
> Google and the web in general is still too new to have such regulation, but hopefully we're not too far away from it.
Hopefully we're very far away from it because it's absolutely not necessary and shouldn't happen.
> Again, I'd feel much better at night knowing there's a standard procedure with actual follow-up to explain and investigate search related issues, including delistings.
Then don't use Google, no one is forcing you to, you can get traffic from other places if you put effort into it. The fact is, you use Google because their product is superior and they bring you more traffic; that doesn't mean other options aren't available, just that they don't work as well as Google does. And for having a superior product, you want to punish them with regulation. That's seriously fucked up thinking.
They didn't force anybody. One of the first things I would do with a fresh install of Windows back in latter 90s was open IE to download Netscape. Having IE on there made it enabled me to easily learn about and get different browsers. I don't understand how that is so bad. Where was the antitrust on Winsock? What? Forced to use their TCP/IP stack?! Consumer-based OSes should have certain software by default.
Wasn't this more a bit of prescience on Microsoft's part? I mean, now we have Google developing a "browser" OS. Can't get much more coupled then that. What if that becomes the monopoly OS in 5-10 years?
Shipping the browser wasn't the problem. The problem was that they stopped system vendors installing Netscape and/or making it the default browser.
Doing that is fine if you are in a competitive market, but if you are a monopoly then it's anti-competitive and abuse of market power.
I never understood why people think they are positioned against FB.. Google and FB don't solve very many of the same problems.
They don't, but they share one common goal: Get money from advertisers, who are targeting people looking for some thing.
This "some thing" is obvious on Google, its users are in buying mode even before entering the query term.
Now, if (and that's a big if), FB can connect advertisers and buyers, it'll slow down Google, because people will have spent their money with FB advertisers.
Google and FB customers are their advertisers. They might do completely different things but their revenue source is similar.
I personally don't believe in this. Facebook doesn't share the same easiness of monetization as Google, and it has some huge issues of making its visitors enter buying mode.
But there you go... even if I disagree, that's why some people think of a FB vs. Google fight. Follow the money :)
Google search ads EXCEL in "Demand Fulfillment" - say you want need a plumber now since your toilet is overflowing. I don't think Facebook will ever beat Google here. Google sort of created this niche where they were better than any competitor that had ever existed.
Facebook, on the other hand, is better at demand generation. Consider advertisers who want to reach teenagers who would want to buy videogames - a new game is coming out, and they want you to know about it. Before, you'd have to find the TV shows that they would watch, or billboards that they would see, or queries that gaming-teens would search for, and advertise there. These are all competitive and difficult proxies for the audience you want to reach. Facebook is a much better place for that than Google.
In fact, you can imagine synergy between FB ads and Google ads. FB tells people, "you should listen to this band that you haven't heard of", and when you Google that band name, you see ads for places to buy tickets and albums.
Google has money in abundance, they're putting millions on social projects, hoping to have some of FB's thunder (and data). While I don't know if Google will ever succeed, every social feature added by Google is a point of conflict with FB, thus feeding the "there's a war going on" opinion of some people.
But not quite, because of one thing: ROI.
On the web, you can easily measure the return of your investment. Match your spent money with the server visitor logs, and you know instantly if your campaign is profitable. With "brand" advertisements, the game is different, you can't see immediately that 1 dollar spent on ad generated 2 in sales. But it's a tried and proven method of advertisement, basically all we had until the internet.
Enter the web, you can reach a precisely targeted audience, and easily measure the return.
If you know Google delivers more ROI than Facebook, you're going to spend your money on AdWords. This is specially true for the long tail of ad money, businesses with smaller budget for ads. Google has this market locked tight, anyone can start an AdWords campaign, and the truth is that everybody does.
Don't get me wrong, Facebook makes money from advertisement, but they will never (in its current incarnation) match Google's offers: AdWords, Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Optimizer, etc.
What Facebook has to do to connect advertisers and consumers is so much more complicated than Google. Build a "social graph", find their preferences, match with their friends, plus putting their users into buying mode. BUT, if delivered, it's way more powerful, because the product has been proven with your circle of friends and with stuff that you have actually said you like (Facebook knows a lot about everyone).
The secret of ad dollars is that not all visitors are equal. People who use google search are already looking for something, often something to buy, such users are the most susceptible to ads because the ads can actually be helpful. In contrast, ads inserted into the UI of a social networking site are far less valuable. In order for facebook to compete with google they'd have to reinvent themselves substantially.
The halo effect.
I don't think it really plays out because who searches in Facebook, and your browser search box is always present.
If I want to look at drunken pictures of my friends, though, then I will definitely use Facebook. I use each tool for what it's good for, and I think most other people do the same because it comes naturally.
(I hate structured socialization, though, so I don't use Facebook. But I can accept that I'm abnormal in that respect.)
Bing IS a threat also because Microsoft has a large stake in Facebook and could ostensibly find itself with preferential rights to Facebook's social graph. If Bing could integrate the graph into results first it could give them huge search advantages. Traffic from Bing also costs about half of what it does from Google.
Did you notice how, instead of asking Schmidt questions, he posed contentious statements? "CERTAINLY Google must be scared of Facebook!" He did that with everything. Look how Mr Schmidt scrunches his face at about 2:00 when the interviewer tells him how he must be feeling.
I don't think FB can keep their soc graph to themselves for much longer .. if as ES says people will just give the data to google ... just as they probably do for FB now. (You can tell FB to crawl your gmail contacts and link up.)
So by that argument I can buy ES's "FB is not our prime competitor" statement. Apple is somewhat obviously not a competitor since google can also push ads to iOS devices and pull data like location.
That leaves Bing .. which makes me scratch my head. The only reason I can think of for google considering Bing to be their main competitor is to avoid antitrust suits by not looking like a search monopoly.
Side note: FB's ads are pretty funny actually. I keep getting "Download Chrome, a fast browser" ads on my FB page despite the fact that I'm viewing the page in Chrome.