Google Spending Millions to Find the Next Google | Hacker News Reader

Google Spending Millions to Find the Next Google

nytimes.com

88 pointsekm26 comments

Google can do this because they have too much cash on their balance sheet and the market demands a return on that cash. They need novel areas to invest for them to grow. But there is an alternative. I would prefer to see Google return cash to shareholders via a stock buyback and focus on their core: organizing the world's information.

This is not because I hold GOOG stock, just because I believe in that mission, think they still have a long way to go, and don't yet have the resources to tackle that problem myself.

I think as a smaller company revenue-wise and, ideally, as a private one they could have more long-term focus.

Google says the algorithms have taught it valuable lessons...(start-ups located far from the venture capitalist’s office are more likely to be successful, probably because the firm has to go out of its way to finance the start-up.)

Disagree.

Try this: Google's analysis of the venture capital industry shows that companies do better when it's difficult for their investors to meddle in their business on a day to day basis.

Taking a look at Google's data set would sure settle a lot of arguments:

1. Does age matter?

2. How important it is to be in Silicon Valley?

3. Are biz devs really important?

4. Are cofounders really important?

It would settle the question for past companies in established markets, not new companies in new markets. Would evaluations of US Steel and Standard Oil apply to (early 2000s)Google and (early 1980s)Microsoft, in terms of your proposed arguments?

That's the problem with basing all future predictions on past data; Mr. Rachleff also questioned Google’s reliance on its algorithms. “There’s no analysis to be done when you’re evaluating a company that’s creating a new market, because there’s no market to analyze,” he said. “You have to apply judgment.”

The next Google is an outlier, you can't infer them from rules that give you few winners.

I wonder about this. Was Google itself an outlier? I don't think so. Indeed I'd say you probably could have discovered Google using similar metrics the article claims they are using, such as scholarly trends (but possibly not founder history).

Google was not an outlier, they were from Stanford, etc, etc. But it doesn't imply anything about the possibility to catch outliers, they can't catch them with those rules.

Even for non outliers, how can you catch Microsoft in front of casual opportunities (DOS) that gives them an amazing opportunity. Chance and Rules collides.

Google Ventures, like 500 Startups, is one of those funds that you have to be invited to pitch for?

I don't think you have to be invited. Though it's probably hard to get a meeting, just like it is with any VC.

Google Ventures is fairly similar to traditional venture capital, but with more support provided to portfolio companies. Andreessen-Horowitz is another VC that follows this model. Besides providing traditional VC help (money, intros, executive recruiting, advice), GV and A16Z have operating folks on staff that can help portfolio companies with things like HR, Bizdev, engineering recruiting, UX, etc.

Aren't all funds, in a sense, like that?

You typically get much further from an invitation or an introduction than anything else.

It's mostly a journalistic device, but the notion of the next ______ (Google, Scorcese, insert popular thing) is flawed. There won't be a next ______, and that is okay.

spend millions to save billions.. sounds about right

the problem isn't finding "next" Google per.se. The main problem for a corporation at the life stage Google is at is to not allow the "old" (very successful, thus having a lot of clout, inertia and generally looking back instead of forward) Google to kill the "next" one when it is brought in.

Not surprising that Google would be on the hunt for the next hit among startups. We've seen them do it within their own products, ala GMail, Google Maps, Google Voice, etc. Tech companies don't tend to stick around unless they move with the times, and of all companies I'd bet Google knows it.

The next Google is "IBM's Watson" patched in through your smart phone so someone can punch in a natural language question and get back a reasonable natural language response from a simulated person with IQ of 5000.

If you can build even a primitive version of this deployed well, it would be the Google-killer. Have it answer everything from 'how do you make a for loop in php' to 'what cinemas near 32807 are playing Cars 2'? I don't want pages of links, I want concise understandable objective correct answers.

I agree with you, but Watson has some pretty hefty hardware requirements:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/what-makes-ibms-watson...

Bringing Watson to a large audience would be an immense technical undertaking. The real "next Googles" will probably be the hardware companies that make the mass deployment of a Watson-type system possible.

Edit: Formatting

There's no need to mass deploy it for it to work for the public. It can just query requests over network like maeon3 suggests.

"It can just query requests over network like maeon3 suggests."

Of course, you do realize that requests over a network need a server to reply to them? Millions of people making such requests would need quite a fews servers indeed. That is where the mass deployment would come in.

Still, I wonder... If someone was crazy enough, they could probably accomplish quite a bit with data scrapers, regular expression matching, and some distributed computing fairy dust.

Yes the hardware requirements are ridiculous and the business model even more so. There would be tricks to lessen the load, reverse proxies so that when a question is answered it doesn't have to be re-answered until the question requires a re-evaluation. Redevelop IBM's Watson to run on armies of cloud servers and computers. Make the service free, every human gets a key and can consume X minutes of Watson a day. Have a high-priced "premium service" where you can buy more of Watson's time and get real time re-evaluations to questions.

Yes it would be a more massive undertaking than Larry and Sergey took for google, maxing out their credit cards on hardware. But you would get your name written in the sands of time as mass deploying the first army of semi sentient machines to service the masses. This project brings us a step closer to a type II civilization.

Did you mean Wolfram Alpha?

PowerSet.

Which got bought by Bing...

Wolfram Alpha took the natural language query "list of cinemas playing cars 2 near 32807" and responded with:

"Binary form: 1000000000100111_2"

'A' for effort, but this is not a Google killer until I am provided a list of cinemas with addresses arranged in table format.

Yeah, I kind of got excited about WA after using it for a few things, but I run across results like yours enough that I now use WA only for new variations of things I've successfully searched for before. It rocks when it rocks, but the rest of the time the coffee cup sounds well before TDC.

I mostly use WA to compare weather in areas and compare land mass. They had some interesting demos, but based on the hype I expected a better answer to "how many ping pong balls to fill a VW Bug"

At Google's revenue aren't losses kinda a good thing? (tax right off) I mean as good as losses can be. Does this give them an advantage against other VC's? and if so any idea on how much?

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