[Lilug] The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture
Kenneth Downs
ken at secdat.com
Tue Feb 10 07:06:03 PST 2009
Flying way off on a tangent here, the Sci Fi writer Stephen Baxter
conjectures that if we are ever going to have artificial intelligences
like in the movies, they would evolve out of the search engines.
"Computer, please tell me about ancient Rome"
"I have thousands of documents available, would you like to begin with a
general summary?"
"Yes please"
"This history of ancient Rome is divided roughly into the periods of the
kingdom, the republic, and the empire - "
"Computer, stop, what sources do we have for the kingdom?"
"Our sources are limited to the Roman history Livius, who wrote about
the kingdom in the reign of Augustus. He was writing of a period
between 500 and 750 years prior to his own birth..."
you get the idea. The friendly useful computer is really just a talking
search engine. It only becomes HAL when you give it control of life
support.
Robert Wilkens wrote:
>
> I personally wonder who will be the first to volunteer to stop using
> Google. In my experience, it’s the only search engine that finds
> exactly what I’m looking for almost every time. I often wind up using
> something like Live Search first because it’s the default in my
> browser, but too often I find the first page of results is either
> mostly spam, or completely unrelated to what I’m looking for. As long
> as Google is one of the few engines that is as up-to-date with search
> results and reliably finds what I’m looking for, I feel it will in my
> book always remain my first choice.
>
>
>
> I’m not saying a better search tool will never come along, but for
> today there are few truly good generic alternatives.
>
>
>
> Rob
>
>
>
> *From:* lilug-bounces at lilug.org [mailto:lilug-bounces at lilug.org] *On
> Behalf Of *Justin Dearing
> *Sent:* Monday, February 09, 2009 5:21 PM
> *To:* LILUG Mailing List
> *Subject:* [Lilug] The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture
>
>
>
> Some interesting points. Although, I think eventually google will
> collapse under its own weight like most monopolies do if left to their
> own devices. Rome fell to the barbarians. Ironically, the barbarians
> eventually called themselves the Holy Roman empire even though they
> were neither very Roman nor very Holy.
>
> Eventually google will fat and lazy that we will all run a completely
> decentralized search engine running through freenet on virtualbox
> instances of the hurd or something else no one else could have predicted.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Sent to you by Justin Dearing via Google Reader:
>
>
>
>
>
>
> The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture
> <http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001224.html>
>
> via Coding Horror <http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/> by Jeff Atwood
> on 2/9/09
>
>
>
> I was browsing the sessions at an upcoming Search Conference
> <http://en.oreilly.com/found>, which describes itself thusly:
>
> The way to online success is through being easily found in search
> engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search. While
> developers have historically thought of search as a marketing
> activity, technical architecture has now become critical for
> search success.
>
> Anyone else see the *elephant in the room*, there? No?
>
> Image removed by sender. Banksy: elephant in room
>
> Just two weeks after we launched Stack Overflow, I mentioned that
> search engines already made up 50% of our traffic
> <http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001174.html>. Well, not so
> much search engine*_s_* as search engin*_e_*:
>
> I try to be politically correct in discussing web search, avoiding
> the g-word whenever possible, desperately attempting to preserve
> the illusion that web search is actually a competitive market. But
> it's becoming a transparent and cruel joke at this point. *When we
> say "web search" we mean one thing, and one thing only: Google*.
> Rich Skrenta explains
> <http://www.skrenta.com/2006/12/googles_true_search_market_sha.html>:
>
> I'm not a professional analyst, and my approach here is pretty
> back-of-the-napkin. Still, it confirms what those of us in the
> search industry have known for a long time.
>
> The New York Times, for instance, gets nearly 6 times as much
> traffic from Google as it does from Yahoo. Tripadvisor gets 8
> times as much traffic from Google vs. Yahoo.
>
> Even Yahoo's own sites are no different. While it receives a
> greater fraction of Yahoo search traffic than average, Yahoo's own
> flickr service gets 2.4 times as much traffic from Google as it
> does from Yahoo.
>
> My favorite example: According to Hitwise, [ex] Yahoo blogger
> Jeremy Zawodny gets 92% of his inbound search traffic from Google,
> and only 2.7% from Yahoo.
>
> That was written almost two years ago. Guess which way those numbers
> have gone since then?
>
> Now that Stack Overflow <http://stackoverflow.com/> has been chugging
> right along for almost six months, allow me to share the last month of
> our own data. *Currently, 83% of our total traffic is from search
> engines*, or rather, one /particular/ search engine:
>
> Search Engine
>
>
>
> Visits
>
> Google
>
>
>
> 3,417,919
>
> Yahoo
>
>
>
> 9,779
>
> Live
>
>
>
> 5,638
>
> Search
>
>
>
> 2,961
>
> AOL
>
>
>
> 1,274
>
> Ask
>
>
>
> 1,186
>
> MSN
>
>
>
> 1,177
>
> Altavista
>
>
>
> 202
>
> Yandex
>
>
>
> 191
>
> Seznam
>
>
>
> 103
>
> Those 6x and 8x numbers that Rich quoted two years ago seem awfully
> quaint now. Google delivers *350x* the traffic to Stack Overflow that
> the next best so-called "search engine" does. /Three hundred and fifty
> times!/
>
> Now, I don't claim that Stack Overflow is representative of every site
> on the internet -- obviously it isn't. It's a site for programmers.
> And let me be absolutely crystal clear that I have no problem at all
> with Google. That said, I find it profoundly disturbing that *if every
> other search engine in the world shut down /tomorrow/, our website's
> traffic would be effectively unchanged*. That's downright /scary/.
>
> Yes, I like Google. Yes, Google works great and has been my homepage
> for about eight years now. Google nailed search, and they deserve the
> leadership position they've earned. But where's the healthy
> competition? Where's the incentive for Google to improve? All I see is
> a large and growing monoculture that acts as the start page for the
> internet
> <http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_google_and_the_t.html>.
>
> I'm a little surprised all the people who were so up in arms about the
> Microsoft "monopoly" ten years ago
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft> aren't out
> in the streets today lighting torches and sharpening their pitchforks
> to go after Google. Does the fact that Google's products are mostly
> free and ad-supported somehow exempt it from the same scrutiny? Isn't
> anyone else concerned that Google, even with the best of "don't be
> evil" intentions, has become more master than servant
> <http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2008/03/mr-googles-guid.html>?
>
> Calling the current state of search engine competition a horse race is
> an insult to horse races. No, what we have here is a one horse race
> where all the other horses were shipped off to glue factories years
> ago. *Forget "search conference", you should be throwing a "Google
> conference", because there's no difference.*
>
> I don't know. Maybe that's OK. But it does mean that if Google, for
> whatever reason, decided to remove you from its search results, your
> website no longer exists
> <http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000767.html>. At least not
> as a viable business, anyway.
>
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>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
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--
Kenneth Downs
Secure Data Software, Inc.
www.secdat.com www.andromeda-project.org
631-689-7200 Fax: 631-689-0527
cell: 631-379-0010
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