Posts filed under 'google'
One of the more, most?, irritating aspects of today’s search engines is that for all of their bullshit about "content neutrality", they obviously prefer to redirect you to their sites.
So look for an image on Yahoo and you get a whole bunch of flickr pages.
Look for the same image on Google, and flickr doesn’t even exist.
Don’t believe me? Look at a search in yahoo images for Tony
And what happens when I look for Tony on Google images?
No flickr!
A pox on both of their houses!
August 17th, 2008
Google presents itself as a technology company. However, in reality they are an advertiser exchange board. Vendor A creates good or service. Customer B wishes to purchase good or service. Google makes it possible for Vendor A to be found by Customer B. Vendor A is willing to pay Google some money for that service.
The problem, and here’s the nut that needs to be understood, is to create that switchboard Google has to expend vast amounts of cash to maintain its vast server farms. In effect, Google’s server farms provide the medium through which Vendor A is found by Customer B.
Why is this important?
Google makes money from trades. They don’t manufacture the content. To be the preferred location for the trades they need to invest huge amounts of capital to create the best platform for making the trades. As long as the trading exceeds the capital cost things are going well. If the trading were to drop all of a sudden, the capital costs remain and things start getting very interesting.
Let me try this differently.
Once you bring a data center online, if the trading revenue does not match the cost of running the data center, the capital cost remains. Given that trading revenue can disappear overnight, the danger is that overnight the total revenue that Google has can collapse. In that case Google would have vast operational liabilities with no revenue stream. The net effect would be complete collapse.
That of course is an absurdly negative belief, but it is interesting to observe that Google’s vast resources are being deployed into vast capital expenses,and that the vast resources are dependent on trading and that if the trading were to stop, then the capital expenses would remain creating all sorts of interesting pressure on their bottom line.
March 23rd, 2008
This is an interesting story about how Google’s AdSense program was perverted by folks who understood the nature of arbitrage.
http://www.financialpost.com/magazine/story.html?id=324817
The real gem of the story is the following:
In 2003, Google made another huge leap forward on the advertising side, with the launch of its AdSense program. Essentially, this application allowed people to put keyword-targeted ad links, served by Google, on their own websites, with them and Google splitting revenue tied to the volume of user click-throughs. As its popularity grew, a cottage industry began to develop called “search arbitrage.” Essentially, search arbitrage involves an individual or company buying Internet traffic through the acquisition of keywords from Google, then sending viewers who click on the ad links to a site (”landing page” in Google terminology) that appears to have content, but is actually just full of online advertising linked to the original search term. Anyone clicking an ad link there makes money for the keyword holder. For example, a company might bid for the Google rights to the phrase “small town car sales” and send traffic to a website it controls, filled with more car advertisements, called “Alltheautomotive.com.” The keyword cost only 20¢, while a click on the advertising on the website might yield $1.50 return. According to Niki Scevak, an analyst at Jupiter Research in New York, the majority of those initially involved in search arbitrage were small players. “These were guys running search arbitrage out of their basements, making maybe $20,000 a month,” he says.
Essentially you buy “cheap” words, and populate the web page with expensive words and make a killing on the difference!
And this is legal…
March 19th, 2008
One of the enduring mysteries is out of what budget does Google fund the 20% time it’s engineers are supposed to be working on their own special projects. A simple plain text reading of the statement would suggest that Google is overstaffed by 20% or said differently: they have 20% more people than they need for their current projects. A negative spin on this would be that in a down turn they could lay off 20% of the company to meet expenses without impacting current deliverables. If this was true, I was even more envious of the Google business model than I already am. But I was mistaken.
In an interview in Wired, Eric Schmidt explained:
How do people actually do 20 percent time? How do people actually figure out a way to actually get 20 percent of their time for that without working on weekends?
They work on weekends.
Do you compensate them in a way that encourages them to come up with these projects?
Yeah, but remember the kind of people who we hire are not here for the compensation, they’re here for the impact. And there’s essentially an internal draft system, that helps redistribute talent which is complicated and quite clever.
Do you actually have to declare what your 20 percent project is going to be?
People are encouraged to do so as part of the snippets.
Okay. That’s the incentive.
But it’s encouraged, not required. Again, there’s things you measure and require and there’s things that you encourage. The 20 percent is a cultural thing.
So you’re encouraged to come up with an independent project, and if you’re an engineer it’s part of being able to sit at the lunch table with your peers and be respected?
That’s right. Your peers all have one, so what’s yours?
At last the mystery explained: it comes out of the personal budget of the engineers.
Fasinating.
Updated: June 16 2007, fixed some errors in the HTML encoding. Foolishly assumed that the thin client POC that I was using worked as well as MS Word did.
June 10th, 2007
One the endearing traits about Google employees that went to Google straight out of school is that they have a distorted idea of what the rest of the world is like.
Recently a friend of mine told the following tale:
Because of the solar panels in the main parking lot, a couple of days ago I had to park far away and took the shuttle to get to my building. While I was in the shuttle I overheard the following conversation:
Google Employee 1: Back when SGI had these buildings there was a lot more parking space so you didn’t have to park so far out.
Google Employee 2: Wow, the valets must have been really bored.
Good Lord, what will these people do when they leave this bubble?
February 3rd, 2007
After talking about how Google page creator was lame, I decided to try the grand-daddy of this technology: geocities.
Now I am even more disappointed.
Geocities is not half bad. They have a reasonable set of default templates, the ability to host your own domain, and a wizard set up that makes creating a simple web page very very easy.
Check out my geocities page. You’ll notice that there is substantially more content than the Google page. And I spent about the same amount of time on both.
April 23rd, 2006
sarcasm/
I’ve become one of the blessed. I too can now create web pages using Google’s Web 2.0 Web Page Generator! And yes the product is the coolest, spiffiest, most innovative piece of technology out there! It breaks new exciting ground!
/sarcasm
I don’t actually intend to do much with that page other than to experiment with the technology. The Google folks sometimes have interesting UI ideas.
Google pages, however, at first blush is a disappointmnet.
Google Maps redefined what we expected from web based map products.
Google Pages is just another web page editor that is integrated with web publishing software. My blog software is as sophisticated and easy to use as the Google product.
We’ll see …
April 23rd, 2006
One of the reasons I set up my own blog was to explore the capabilities etc of Google Adwords.
What’s interesting is how piss poor it really is.
The ad’s key off of random phrases in my blog that have absolutely nothing to do with the actual content of my blog.
I do movie reviews, some coffee reviews and some occasional random topic. Because I do movie reviews, my blog tends to have key words that are all over the place.
You would think that Google’s brain trust would key off the categories and have things related to movies, but no. I have ads for Mormon’s, Islam and my all-time favorite a lesbian Christian.
I was thinking Google’s AdWords would generate revenue.
They don’t.
But they do generate humor.
April 11th, 2006
