The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture
codinghorror.com
codinghorror.com
How come Jeff is always grumbling about Apple's "Monopoly" on music and now Google's "Monopoly" on search but he never grumbles about Microsoft's actual monopoly on desktop operating systems and office back ends?
In this post he even calls out the people who grumble about Miscosoft and asks them to grumble about Google. But somehow, he never makes the connection that perhaps people who grumble about Apple and Google might want to do a little grumbling about Microsoft?
> I find that talent is far less important than enthusiasm.
--Jeff Atwood
Solid gold, thank you. Putting Jeff aside, I prefer blogs that have a healthy amount of bias. Writing that tries to be judicious, dispassionate and balanced often ends up being dry and comes off with a pseudo-academic tone.
A little bias adds passion and fire. As long as they aren't totally wrong, that's a good thing. A while back all the big companies were "diversifying" so that their stock would become immune to the vagaries of any one market or business unit.
This was almost always a failure, because professional managers want to achieve diversification through their portfolio selection, where they can pursue their own mix and make changes by trading in the market, not through having business managers engage in lengthy and expensive M&A activity.
Blogs are a little like that: If I want a balanced read I'd rather read several different posts about the same subject than try to find one person who tries to present the centrist view.
In the mean time, the rest of us have to pray that our site is considered "relevant" in Google's eyes.
I've seen studies where the researchers show Yahoo results on Google's template, and vice-versa, and people still thought that Google had better results.
Google is a brand nowadays (and a verb ;). The tech will become secondary in a near future. It's like Coke vs. Pepsi, they taste 99% alike and blind tests show costumers have no preference on one over another.
I am not saying they don't have an edge on quality these days, but in the future, just relevant links on the page that appears after you type your search terms will not be enough.
"It's like Coke vs. Pepsi, they taste 99% alike and blind tests show costumers have no preference on one over another."
Sorry, but that's completely wrong. Pepsi is far sweeter. It wins on taste tests, whilst Coke wins in some tests where people drink an entire can.
I guess I let out my own personal taste and bias and some faulty memory...
You can tell even by the smell. Perhaps you think I'm lying, but when served a brown fizzy drink in a cup, I can tell with 100% accuracy wether it is Coke, Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, or Pepsi Max.
Just to clarify, I suppose you mean people thought the Google site with the Yahoo results was better than the Yahoo site with the Google results?
Google is a brand. Some people automatically think it's better.
All sets of top ten results were from nytimes.com. The layout was almost the same, in fact it looked like Google and Yahoo were based on the same template. The speeds for yahoo and google were basically the same. Microsoft seemed a tiny bit slower, but they didn't mention the actual speed of the search, so I don't know for sure. The number of results were different. Microsoft had 1.8million, Google had 32million, and Yahoo had 59 million. Google had a mini search bar under the first result, nytimes.com, that let you search in the site. That feature is nice. Even though the sites are almost identical, I still preferred Google's results. The other sites seemed ugly.
I'm not sure why that is. It could be that I have used Google for awhile, and just gotten used to their format. Or, it could be that Google does more effective research on how users interact with the site.
For example, I remember seeing the video from Google tracking eye movements while searching. The eye movements were mainly focused on the top left corner of the search result. Yahoo's site design interfered with that eye movement. They have a giant red Yahoo in the top right corner. It stands out, and I think it is annoying and distracting.
But yet I switched back. Why? I was hosting the Silicon Valley Rails meetup, and our speaker Emmett Shear (of Justin.tv) had forgotten to bring his laptop, and had to borrow mine. I was so uncomfortable at the idea of my home page---Yahoo!, of all things, and not Google!---being broadcast to a room of Rails hackers that I changed it back to the Canonical Choice. And now inertia has returned, and I'm back in the warm bosom of mother Google.
I'm pretty sure that Yahoo! Search and Live Search are basically as good as Google nowadays. When it debuted, Google was qualitatively better than any other search engine, but today Google's lead is based mainly on branding.
The technology is getting closer and closer to the end user, both in terms of breadth of knowledge and depth of knowledge. Ease of access. IBM's were big computers in corporations, Microsoft were pcs in the early adopter homes, dell in the mainstream homes, Google on the Internet.
What's next? Mobile? Wireless? Cloud Computing?
It's one hurdle after the next in both directions. Hardware footprint minimization, proliferation, and ease of use. Longevity. Functionality.
People are going to get left behind. They're just not going to want to keep up. They'll reject the new way. The rational way. The more efficient way. The faster, more productive way. The enabling way. The way toward free will.
Same thing happened with IBM, there weren't computers in corporations before them. There weren't computers in homes before Microsoft. There wasn't a computer in /every/ home before Dell.
Now there are several blue ocean opportunities being created. Cloud Computing is bringing scalability to the masses. Essentially we are looking at what Microsoft and Dell did for PC proliferation, cloud computing could do for web based information management. Mom and pops can use the same quality software that the Fortune 500 use. They can be efficient. We are going to see a rising and thriving of small businesses because now they to can have the same tools that the big companies have. Big companies spend millions and millions of dollars on software every year and throw it away. When small businesses can spend $50/mo for the same functionality, a new playing field will open.
The mobile market could reach every human alive via wireless. We have netbooks selling like crazy. The workforce is becoming more mobile as well.
Things are changing very quickly and there are lots of opportunities for the next google. The Google of the era when consumers become willing to pay for content and services on the web. We see great things in offerings in the SaaS market for example that consumers are willing to pay for.
Google makes money on tiny fractions of huge volume. There are huge markets out there where each click, each page view, each morsel of information is much more valuable to the customer.
Think about it this way, Google gets its money from advertisers, not consumers. So Google profits indirectly through the attraction of customers to the advertisers sites.
Today, there are more sites that are able to make money directly from the consumer, so the numbers are way way less than google's and the google model is getting gamed. It's not free to do SEO compatibility and keep content fresh and all that. Adwords aren't so great anymore. Too expensive and no one clicks... Just like social sites are great in the beginning, those who mastered SEO in the beginning won, but it's not so great anymore for newcomers. Their algorithms like old sites that have been around for a while, so newcomers are looking for other ways to build organic traffic.
There's a lot of room for another google and I suspect that as time continues, the rate at which new google's appear will become more frequent as technology become ubiquitous, smaller, and easier to use.
Companies are going to make a lot of money doing things we can't even imagine right now.
Shoot, this is the first president that uses email... We can live and work anywhere. We can hire anyone anywhere. Borders are coming down. I could move to Eastern Europe, Asia, Australia, South or Central America, or any number of places and have a way more fantastic life than I could afford in the U.S. and work entirely on the internet. Why wouldn't I do that?
There are plenty of Twenty and Thirty somethings that would do just that, gladly and in a heart beat and they will.
If you boil it down, Google isn't an internet company. They don't have scale because everyone at google still goes into the office. They don't work on their own schedule. They are bureaucratic. They are becoming a code shop.
The Google model is dead. The please the investors model is dead. The focus on the customer is alive and thriving and prospering.
There are countless companies out there who are making way more money in revenues than it costs to run their businesses. Google isn't one of those businesses and the way they make money... I don't know how long it can live.
For companies to survive, they have to have something their users are willing to pay for. I highly doubt any of google's users would pay for google. Live search is fine, Cuil is good. Yahoo isn't half bad, in fact I like what a lot of Google's competition is doing in search, maps, images, etc.
If Google topples, so will an entire ecosystem of consultants, programmers, designers, and startups that make money there. They'll be looking for something new and something new will be created to satisfy them and those who follow them to new oceans of opportunity.
Sure, businesses depend on Google but Google was the first search that could be depended on. Google was the first search entity of any sort that allowed the web to be effectively monetized. They are that "???" in the three step plan "1. Get attention, 2.??? 3. Profit". Google did not create the web but they certainly "grew" it and thus they are currently the "good" kind of monopoly, one which aims to sell as much as possible, rather than the bad kind of monopoly which aims to extract the most rent possible from selling the same amount of stuff year-in, year-out (the model for a bad monopoly would be an unregulated electric company. Microsoft only partly fits this model but MS is still clearly closer to being a rent-extractor than Google).
And, quite frankly, their continuous defiance and misconduct does not help its image of a serious company.
I monitor search term locations in several search engines and notice the numbers of results returned for relatively new terms will sky rocket on Google, then fall dramatically back, while the others would remain relatively stable.
Why would that happen? I'm still trying to figure that out.
Jeff missed a major point here.
What is ACTUALLY a disturbing thought is that if Google decided for any reason to de-list stackoverflow.com they would lose 83% of their traffic. Like that, in an instant.
Worse, they would be left with little or no recourse. Joel is probably enough of a big-wig that he could place a few calls in to Google or raise hell about it on his blog, but otherwise there is no one to talk to at Google or nothing to be done. I've read horror stories about this kind of thing here and there, and it's terrifying.
The comparisons to Micrsoft miss the mark, because Google is a different kind of monopoly and poses a different set of problems to a different group of people.
I suppose I had to learn that lesson sooner or later, so I'll go glass-half-full and be grateful that it was on tens of thousands early in life, instead of more later. But that was a pretty expensive lesson.
This will preserve pagerank, but not immediately. This means for a while (1 week-3 months), many of your pages will be dropped from their current rankings.
They will be returned, eventually. But Google has to update their entire index before you'll start to see any improvements.
When you're telling friends about sites "I found this great site, its called facebook" - for those people not in the know, the natural thing people do is to use the .com extension.
It's also why the .com domains command a higher premium on the domain name aftermarket.
As for .com's having more credibility - I reckon they have a bit more, plus you'll lose some traffic when they mistake the .net/.com. There's a few sites I visit that are .net's, and when I'm not on my own computer with browser history, sometimes I accidentally go to the .com. We paid around $1500 for the .com in... 2004 maybe? This made a ton of sense, because with our margins/gross/net, it would have made a ton of sense for a competitor to buy the .com - they'd have been paid back on it if they could've got it to top 5 in google for us. (To all the people who might say that we could then sue them, the answer is that you're 100% technically right, but that's ugly and you don't want to waste time/lawyer fees in court except as a last resort). Anyway, even if it increased our conversions or preserved lost traffic by a small amount, it would have been a good business move... ignoring the loss of search rankings, which wasn't planned on and hurt.
Whimsley Hall is now strewn, like Miss Haversham's house, with cobwebs and dust. Most visitors no longer come in by the front door to take a tour. Instead, Mr. Google (a travel agent who doubles as our butler) directs them straight down to the basement where the family archives are kept and tells them to look at one particular historical document called The Netflix Prize: 300 Days Later. They read this and then they walk right out.
Obviously, investigations are on-going but it is a worrying that a site supporting a legitimate commercial venture should just disappear from Google and thus (in effect) from the Internet.
Maybe it's some clever way to check whether or not people track their SEO? De-list sites, and watch if the person reverts to an earlier version of the page, or submits it for Google to crawl?
What, exactly, have Google done to shut competitors out of the search business? What agreements have they forced on advertisers to discourage them from advertising with anyone else?
And while they ship other products that leverage their competence in search, they do not appear to enchain them. For example, they dominate in online search and have a strong position in online mail. And yes, they can leverage scale to sell advertising on both properties. However, their does not appear to be a link between the two products. For example, when I perform a web search it does not appear to use my mail inbox to influence the relevance rankings of online search.
So far, Google appears to be following a different strategic path than Microsoft did.
They also distribute a free mobile phone operating system that is heavily integrated with Google services.
You might have something there, that is very similar to some of the things Microsoft and Apple both do.
Also, I'm not worried about "incentive to improve". Google is constantly improving and tweaking their search results. That's the only way they will be able to maintain their monopoly. Because, unlike a platform like Microsoft, there's very little inertia in switching over to a different search engine.