Google Will Eat Itself (2005)
gwei.org
gwei.org
I was the Ads emissary to the Owned and Operated Properties (like Maps and YouTube) in 2010. I managed to increase the RPM by a small but noticeable amount. They used to have ads on the bottom of the screen, which was the revenue source I was optimizing. Then later I was actually IN Maps when Marissa Mayer was nominally in charge. We were trying to develop "maps for business." That all came to naught when they decided it wasn't worth the bother.
Maps is fabulous PR for Google. I can't count the times someone outside of Google said to me, "Oh, I love Google Maps!" But it's a gigantic money loser and always will be.
"What about imputed revenue?" you ask? They don't want to measure that, because then every patent litigant would use it against them, and Maps attracts a LOT of patent lawsuits.
Granted, that's a pretty difficult metric to track (if you even can).
I am learning this as I am reading the book Stolen Focus. The author goes in-depth on how tech companies are turning us into Pavlov's proverbial Dogs. We are lab hamsters who, when taught to respond correctly to stimuli, give them money.
Kinda wonder if this is in part because of: "this way we've found we can make users use GPS more often and be more precisely tracked/monetized" by degrading uses where you can easily orient and navigate yourself without turning on GPS.
Google was technologically a few years ahead of everybody - they had vector map tiles in late 2010 while Mapbox released their version only in 2014. HERE also used vector tiles at best from 2013 (app release date, so a lower bound, not sure what tech they started with)
She had a pretty short tenure, and was mainly focused on "Google Local" (remember that? didn't think so) and not Maps. Giving her serious credit for the Maps UX is seriously wrong.
She also acquired Zagat, and in fact that was the only time I actually spoke to her.
I used to search for tradespeople in this way, but then I realised there's a big industry of while-labelled SEO-friendly companies which register 100s or 1000s of names like "<location> plumber" or "<location> roofer" each with a pin on the map at <location>. When you contact them you go to a call centre 100s or 1000s of miles away who know nothing about your area, they outsource the actual work to gig workers, and when they start getting negative reviews that instance just disappears.
Advertised businesses in Maps appear at a higher zoom level with a square icon, and up higher in results. An example in Paris: https://i.postimg.cc/26dGZCkX/09169-E16-6-CFB-44-BA-9189-693...
That's not the right metric to use. Google has a long history of using software and services as a weapon to prevent competitors from entering a market, or to control a market even if it's not immediately/directly profitable.
Once it's no more useful it's suddenly dropped, e.g. Google Reader.
Oh, hello golang!
You're right, but in every patent infringement case against geo, the plaintiff's "damages expert" makes up a theory about this, so they can go after the AdWords money pot. Because there's no revenue in geo.
If Google endorsed one such theory, that would be bad, very bad, no good at all.
Google Will Eat Itself (2005) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24008297 - July 2020 (85 comments)
Google Will Eat Itself (2005) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19784400 - April 2019 (65 comments)
Google Will Eat Itself - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7410732 - March 2014 (126 comments)
GWEI: Plot to make Google eat itself - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2628328 - June 2011 (21 comments)
GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=273337 - Aug 2008 (13 comments)
Presumably loosely related?
The short description from the page itself is:
"We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on a network of hidden Websites. With this money we automatically buy Google shares. We buy Google via their own advertisment! Google eats itself - but in the end "we" own it!"
There isn't a single google product I'd recommend to anyone.
They seem pathologically incapable of innovation. A trick pony hasn't come out of the barn in a decade, they've killed off or left to stagnate numerous products, and they're driving youtube into the ground.
Their core user-facing feature, search, is arguably the worst it's ever been. Garbage results thanks to over-thesaurus-ing your search terms and "quick cards" that are laughably terrible accuracy-wise.
The risks of relying on Google for anything are enormous. Even if you're a 1,000 seat organization using their products, stories abound about how they don't care what happens to you. Even at 10,000 seats they still don't seem to care.
I really love my Google smart home speaker and it's been extremely useful day to day.
Being able to just say "Google set an apartment in my calendar to meet John for coffee next week at 3pm" is infinitely more convenient than opening my phone or laptop and clicking through the UI to do so. Or "Google remind me to cancel my subscription in 10 days" or "Set a timer for 10 minutes" etc etc.
Likewise Firebase has made it infinitely easier and smoother to deploy a web app. Google Domains is probably the most seamless way to purchase and register a domain.
Waymo is innovating like crazy and possesses the most advanced autonomous driver agent.
Wing is innovating drone delivery in rural and suburban areas.
They are innovating to the highest degree and anyone who claims otherwise is deluding themselves.
(I'm not affiliated with Google in any way, but I do hold stock)
That doesn't sound like a lot.
Google had an XMPP compatible chat client, that they killed of and revived with a new product every few years, so from gtalk, to wave, duo, alo, meet, chat, or whatever else it was called.
Youtube stopped promoting independent producers, and is basically just a frontend to legacy media.
Google apps was a great free tool for your own domain, but nope, not free anymore.
Google maps started featuring ads everywhere and is a pain to try to find thing X with lidl logos everywhere.
Google reader, great product, dead.
Google cardboard... great, cheap VR "for the masses"... dead.
Google fusion tables.. dead.
Google search results are 50% pinterest, 50% unrelated.
Google inbox, dead.
The audio only chromecast.. dead.
Google mytracks, great tool, killed by google (luckily an opensource replacement exists).
Picasa.
Google+ was a great idea... create bubbles, share stuff to only specific groups... too much forced integration everywhere, people hated it, dead.
Google nexus/pixel phones were great in the nexus 4/5/5x era.. now they're expesive and "meh".
Android privacy features are broken... no way to change unique ids, and most of the permissions are not granular enough, and people have been complaining for years about that.
The only thing google is really great at, is taking a chat service, making a new one and killing the old one... everything else is building nice prototypes and killing them.
FWIW I'm with you. People just don't seem to like the things I like so they die and I don't have things I like. But I don't find that google's fault or lack of their innovation. They seem to go more crazy than vast majority of companies to try crazy things - and you missed out on as many dead innovative things (Google goggles etc) as you listed :)
Or, in cases like Picasa buying a product, only to shut it down and force existing users onto a new platform (Photos in that case) with no feature parity.
If that's innovation, it's a rather sad kind. Google could do with less of that.
And as a xoogler: Google is long past trying crazy things. New things — sure, crazy — nope. Crazy won't fly in a project proposal.
FWIW most of the things mentioned in the parent comment (Waymo, Wing, etc) are not Google.
Yes, they're owned by the same holding group. But if you work at Google, you don't have access to projects, employees, and spaces.
It seems like Google still attempts crazy things now and then but the crazy things don't succeed like they used to. Maybe there's just not as much blue ocean for crazy things in tech to succeed like there used to and the crazy things are crazy for a reason and no one's trying it.
For example, balancing a bowling ball on the tip of a pencil is technically very challenging, but accomplishing that isn't exactly what people would call "crazy" - more like "OK, but why would you do that".
The problem that Google faces now is that the fun and crazy things that could be done with the wealth of personal data that it collects are increasingly seen as creepy by the people providing that data, immoral by the journalists, and illegal by legislatures.
Saying this as someone who would have absolute loved to do some of the crazier things while working there. It's for the better that it was not an option, at least at the time.
Google has a lot of power now, and with great power comes great responsibility. And responsible behavior tends to lean away from "crazy".
Is it new? No. Streaming games has been done for a good while now.
Is it exciting? Games on subscription? Already done.
Even exclusive games were done. And done better by Epic store.
Works with existing collection? Nope.
Working on any device? So does GFNow but works with current Steam collection (unless publishers is greedy).
Does it solve any interesting issues? No. But adds non-repairable console. Basic issue can't be fixed easily - Network congestion, speed of light.
On launch it was universally panned by hardware reviewers like Gamers Nexus, and others.
It's not like Google graveyard was a secret at that point.
Our definitions of "tried" and "crazy" clearly differ.
>They killed it before it got to consumer
By that definition, I "tried" building a spaceship yesterday. I just killed it before it got to the launch. Crazy, huh?
>Maybe there's just not as much blue ocean for crazy things in tech to succeed like there used to
Or maybe a company abandoned by its founders that ditched its "Don't Be Evil" motto for something incomprehensible ("Respect the opportunity", pardon me? Should I also "Be nice to profits" and "Revere stock value"?) isn't the shining paragon of innovation it used to be.
There is plenty of space for crazy things, more than ever before. And both Alphabet and Meta are doing crazy things. Just not as a part of their main businesses (Google/Facebook, respectively).
Here maps from nokia for a commercial solution
Sadly, the only complete business listing I've found is Google Maps... So I use it just for that, with all permissions revoked.
Lately, I've started to add my favorite places in OSM, directly through OSMAnd. So my personal experience has gotten better
That’s how it should work, anyway.
Disclaimer: I work for HERE Technologies.
It makes me wonder who at BP, Shell, McDonalds, Aldi, Lidl thinks that obscuring the map with their obscene logo is a good idea. They do it everywhere - Garmin devices, Google Maps, other providers. The moment you have maps, there is a queue of sales and marketing people from these companies with invitations for "conferences". Then PM/PO/manager after coming back creates turd tickets for "premium POIs".
Stay away from Google. AWS has its issues but not with that level of hubris and indifference.
I heard they have some of the best support for developers, despite not having the name cachet around HN that the bigger players have.
Here's an example. We have an issue, find other people on their forums that have also had it, but no solution is visible. We file a ticket. They say it's a known problem with a known workaround and tell us the workaround. Why isn't it shared? Because they wouldn't share the solution unless you're paying for support.
Some of their systems are a mess too. There are multiple ways of getting logs out of function apps, and only the most pain in the ass way that requires the most configuration is going to contain all the logs. Other viewers and ways of reading the logs will be partial.
Resource groups are a great idea though.
I thought it made way more sense.
I kind of wonder if this is a case of what-I-already-know bias for both of us.
I have heard though, that it makes more sense for people coming out of sysadmining Windows Server networks.
There's lots of uncertainties on my life, but the fact I don't want a "Google smart home speaker" isn't one of them.
In fact, I just had a realization. If you have to say something is "smart", then it's shit. Then reason is, when a product is useful you don't need to call it smart to sell it.
People clearly get something out of these and they've been around for a while.
It's great for things like setting alarms, kitchen timers (don't have to touch anything with your hands, just talk), checking the weather, and controlling the other smart devices like lights, with just your voice.
- item they are at parity with on Amazon (Alexa)
- worse cloud product struggling to compete
- a registrar without any up-sell. Literally no innovation, just a sales funnel into google @ work
- waymo is innovating, this may be one of the only spots, but they seem to be behind cruise as far as difficult scenarios
- how is wing innovating? I’ve heard no news here
Google is a bloated beast that has grown headcount by 90% in the last 5-10 years and it wasn’t by suddenly finding a trove of people that met the bar set when Gmail was a 20% and search was useful.
Almost none of the other things you mention are likely long-term significant. Firebase is going to continue at low popularity until it vanishes. Waymo can't make much progress when the current zeitgeist is that everyone can produce self-driving cars. Drone delivery keeps getting tried by lots of companies and never delivers. Google Home is copying Amazon's (Alexa) success just as Android was copying Apple's (iPhone).
AI is the lone exception in what you mention - the sheer size and scope of their AI projects has been impressive. As with Google Translate, though, the output is now polluting the very data sources that they use, making future efforts harder.
(emphasis mine)
Was this what you meant or did you just get a taste of what Google has been doing to me for over a decade, autocorrect words to something ridiculous without telling me?
And they have some other products in areas that won't see the light of day for years.
Cool.
Of course products such as yt and search are far from being perfect, but they are still in a commendable state.
My thesis is that YouTube and Google Search are in an almost perfectly optimized position, where ±5% product quality would not make anyone switch to another service (this is why DDG isn't taking over, for example), but ±10% (or higher, in the + case) is probably around an order of magnitude more difficult to achieve. In other words, no one other than Google can make a better Google.
For reasons I don't understand, almost no one except Google can reliably stream video. It's dumb. I remember streaming postage-stamp sized video on a 200MHz Pentium.
You'd think that would work reliably in 2022.
I can think of a half-dozen other sites which work okay, and many (including very well-resourced ones) which just fail a lot of the time.
Scale. YouTube (Google) can encode an uploaded video into a number of codecs and store those encoded bitstreams all over the world in data centers. All the backhaul goes over their private backbones. Hot videos will stream from edge caches topologically close to clients.
Because YouTube infrastructure is Google infrastructure it gets the same scale as the rest of Google. Other video hosts have similar technical architecture/topology but at vastly smaller scale than Google.
> For reasons I don't understand, almost no one except Google can reliably stream video.
I can think of a market with say 6 or so major players that all stream video in HD and even 4K very well across the world.
I suppose that market is lucrative enough that they've never been tempted to spin off a mainstream version. Else they'd absolutely be the front-runners to beat Google at that game, I'd think.
Come to think of it, they should also have a pretty good corpus (ha, ha) to launch a variety of machine-learning products that might well outdo Google in certain areas.
What does that mean?
"Google text advertisements"
Advertisements for Google.com? Advertisements on Google ads?
"hidden websites"
Authenticated websites? Websites that ban listing by google crawler? Websites that ban google crawler IPs?
Can someone please explain how this makes money?
The phrasing text advertisement comes from the fact that this is quite an old initiative. Back then ads were a lot of really flashy blinking gifs or flash animations with sound. Google, in the don't be evil days, was promoting sober ads, just text basically.
Edit: by hidden I think they mean that those are secret
Note that The Register deemed them a hoax (although they did not elaborate). Made by this artist (who insists it is real): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubermorgen.
An interview with the artist: https://culturejamming.realvinylz.net/interviewIe.html
> 202.345.117 Years until GWEI fully owns Google.
Oh well. It's a funny idea though.
https://www.w3.org/TR/coga-usable/#distractions-user-story
Userstyle to remove it:
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[1] https://www.thedesignersrepublic.com/pop-will-eat-itself
A majority of the voting shares are owned by the founders, who are not obliged to sell at any price. It is functionally impossible to do a hostile takeover of Google without causing one of them to defect.
By establishing this autocannibalistic model we deconstruct the new global advertisment mechanisms by rendering them into a surreal click-based economic model.
Get with the program.
Perhaps it increases the liquidity of their options market though.
JPM and their clown gang has been screaming "buy the dip" non stop since Jan.
here is motley fool and seeking alpha screaming to buy shopify at $1300. https://www.fool.ca/2022/01/15/shopify-tsxshop-why-i-finally...
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4478545-shopify-shop-bastio...
Shopify is around $300 now and on the way to around $100
Well... long-term (=20-30 years) "buying the dip" is the one true way to make outlandish profits (other than gambling with options), the thing is you have to be financially able and psychologically strong enough to not sell on the inevitable downturns - and you need to spread your purchases.
Retail investors should stay the fuck out of single stocks or narrow-scope indices, at least with money they cannot afford to lose.
There is the saying "don't catch a falling knife" for a reason. It's illogical to plough money into stock market when QT has hit, inflation is soaring and a recession is all but guaranteed.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080814021128/http://www.gwei.o...
Clever.