Posted: 10/27/2004 2:32:30 PM EDT
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Don't get me wrong, I've been using it for a while now and it's been great, but I feel like it's starting to go downhill. It seems like all search engines start out lean and mean, but after while you pull up some much crap that it makes searches unbearable. I used to use several other search engines (can't even remember the names any more) that I got sick of. They started out good, but after a while, any given search would pull up 10000 pages of vendor websites with a couple useful sites mixed in. I don't know anything about how search engines work, so I don't know if this is because of selling out to the vendors, or the vendors exploiting the engine to get their website on the top of the search lists. Hell, maybe it just has to do with the ever expanding internet. Or maybe it's just me, but I haven't gotten any good search results off google in a long time. And yes, I do know how to search... |
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Fade?? THey JUST had their IPO, making the founders near-Billionaires. We're STUCK with them forever. Their search results ARE being manipulated, there is demonstrable bias in their chosen sources for 'news' providers, they are anti-gun... Use them, but realize their shortcomings and work around them. |
Hey, I wouldn't mind being a founder, but I sure as hell wouldn't buy their stock as a long term investment. Many .coms have come and gone over the last 10 years, Google will be around for a while, but I doubt anyone will remember them in the long run. Do you remember the name of the search engine you used before Google? I don't. |
I don't know, I'm not very 'net savvy. Ask me 3 years ago (or whenever the hell Google became a household name) and I would have been using a different search engine. Yahoo, excite maybe? Can't remember which ones I used and when. Just seems to me that Google searches are bloated with crap. Doesn't mean there is any better solution right now, but I bet there will be. |
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Search engine is only a portion of Google. They should be around awhile unlike the demise of Altavista that used to be the king many years ago. Software, hardware, services, relationships, and top brand identity will keep it in the Yahoo territory for awhile. I find more junk searching as always but it comes with the growth of the internet. Google still has the best logic however and if you use advanced searching methods correctly, you can find almost anything. Been in the internet business for 11 years now and its a good company but I wouldnt touch that IPO :) |
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2 years, 3 max. They'll start by adding more and more features. More searches, more desktop apps. And more ads. Their search capability will degrade as time goes on. When you google a product name, you'll find only ads and links to shady stores to buy it from for the first few pages. This already happens, but not that extent. They'll either ally with, aquire, or start their own archive.org. And then, everyone will just get fed up with their bad search quality and so on, and use something else. Their stock will plummet and all the investors are screwed. |
They had a contest that gave away a pretty good sum of money ($10,000 and a job afterwards, IIRC) for somebody to write a faster/better indexing algorithm. They came up with an excellent one that actually reads "what you are looking for, really", and it is a standalone algorithm. Combine that with a cache of all current websites, and bingo, you have the most comprehensive and fastest search around. Background aside, they made a LOT of money selling this search algorithm to company intranets and online sites that wanted their own "search" feature, without putting all of their content on the open internet. Then they added "Sponsored Links" about 2 years ago that show up in yellow background on the right for certain keywords (this is the area where they will not accept a firearms distrubutor to advertise, even if somebody is searching for "Bushmaster"), that gave them more money. It was a well run small shop with a ton of hardware and computational power, no staff really needed, just bandwidth, storage, and programmers. In short, they started out with a good fast text indexing/searching system, then made it "excellent" and sold the system itself. Now they are expanding into mail and the other areas. gmail starting out invite only so they can fix problems and grow at the rate they want, making sure every product is PERFECT before launching a new one, instead of launching a giant product with search/mail/web/news/etc all at once, with all of them having bugs and none of them working "best". For an idea of search speeds they have attained, compare a search for a topic on google, note # of results and time taken. Now (if you are a Team Member), go to search on ARF and search topic title for 3 words, in past 3 months, on all forums. This is not a bash/slam on His Goatness, but it gives you an idea of how difficult a search can be (not to mention memory and processor intensive). Adding a "googlesearch" for ar15.com would cause an outcry, as they say "search engine provided by google" at the bottom of the results, but it would be very fast (and you could search text of all the posts). |
Selling ads. Google will be around for as long as they innovate. When someone comes along with a better way to serach, they'll take over. That's how it works, and how it's continued to work since the first search engines popped up. Remember the Alamo, and God Bless Texas... |
Apples and oranges. Google (as I recall, from like 5+ years ago) was using massive Sun E10k's (I'm sure they've upgraded now) with at least 64+procs in them. That's a HUGE chunk of computational power, pretty much specifically designed for database usage. Combine that with exceedingly fast Netapps (faster than most local disk on any PC today), and you have yourself one hell of a fast data search and retreival hardware platform...before you even touch the logic end of it. I doubt this site has that kind of money and disk invested in it. We're talking several million just for hardware. As I said...apples and oranges. |