What Scares Google
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
There.
That line.
That's why Google will eventually be dethroned.
Google sees the world through the lens of search -- through the lens of querying. With a little adjusting you could massage the above into Microsoft's strategy in a different era.
It's not entirely clear what it will be, but someday we're not going to access all of the world's information starting with short query strings that we type into a search bar. When that happens, Google's worldview won't be able to make the jump, just like Microsoft and IBM did not in the past. They're a search company.
Right now Google is a search company. If history is any indicator, they will behave just like their predecessors and remain a search company even when the rest of the world has moved on from search.
However, there is always the chance that Google will defy the odds and transform themselves as their users transform.
As long as they keep a close eye on what people need, instead of on what their search engine needs, they still have a chance.
I don't know whether Google will continue to be successful or not. One good bet, though, is that people not want to get stuff using a more verbose interface. So if you can think of a way to get the information they want to people using fewer keystrokes than or less effort than they use now with a Google search, you'll have the next big thing.
Google can also be dethroned if someone else figures out how to do search outside the the search box.
Search and inference may be fundamental, but the search box is not.
They're an advertising company, which happens to own a search engine.
(30% of their revenues come from advertising on sites not owned by Google. By way of comparison, that is ten times what Google makes from every revenue source other than advertising. See their 2008 Annual Report if you don't trust my math.)
Noam Chomsky points out we know English automatically, not through having been taught rules.
Similarly, I don't know have any references and artificial intelligence nor do I know exactly how does their search system works (well, I know page rank but I know they've done lots of work beyond it). But I can tell they're semi-intelligent by experiencing the semi-intelligence of their searching system. So they are an artificial intelligence company whether they say it or not, whether they know it or not, simply by the fact that what they create operates semi-intelligently to me.
Very well put. Also, wondering why no is mentioning SemanticWeb. Is this already written off as a non-starter?
Does anyone else, after having read this article, find that it isn't really about what the title suggests? There's no direct admission or direct quote from anyone at Google about what scares them.
The closest this article comes to telling us what scares Google is extrapolating that Google's slightly different method of developing products (fail fast, fail often) is a sign that they're scared. It's quite a stretch.
The Atlantic may be a venerable publication, but the title on this one sure looks like linkbait to me.
I really like Norvig's attitude. When big companies start worrying about how powerful they're going to be in 10 years it's a bad thing. It leads to fear and paranoia, which makes it harder to not be evil.
http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/07/lets-all-take-deep-breath-a...
For example, from this Atlantic article:
"Microsoft never got its collective head into competing against the simple and free stuff available on the Web."
Fake Steve:
"They're starting to look like the new Scott McNealy. Remember him? Ran a company called Sun, which had a great little business going until McNealy became obsessed with Gates and started doing things like paying millions of dollars to buy StarOffice so he could get into that booming free software business."
Microsoft has started brand new billion dollar businesses (TFS, SharePoint) recently --- Google, so far, hasn't shown they can do anything except sell ads.
So, yes, IBM is doing well, but it's no longer playing the same game in the same market that it once was.
When did IBM stop making System/Z (the mainframes)?
"What do people think of X?" "What's happening in _country_" etc.
Google determines quality based on variables which take time to shake out, in part because that's harder to fake.
Twitter can be gamed, but on the whole it seems to give a decent picture, perhaps because in effect you see many results on the page in front of you, rather than links to the results.
Many huge companies have diversified revenue streams, within a broad industry - like Nestle, General Electric, Proctor and Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive.
Google has diversified products, but it doesn't have diversified revenues.
That said, information comprehension is like science in that the more you look, the more there is. Google's mission may have a lot of runway left in it.
Specifically, those ads you can have on your webpage.