Can anybody explain to me this: Why there aren't too many Google out there ?

[New York]

Hello my fellow Canadians,

As we all know, Google stock skyrocketed after being on the market.
I know there are a couple of other search companies out there, but none is as successful as Google.

Why there aren't too many Google out there ?

What is so difficult about searching on the web ?

If nobody can explain satisfactorily to me, I am going to start a search company with all the bells and whistles: text, audio, video, the whole works.

 

[dirtierasigetolder]

Why do you think there aren't a lot of Google like companies out there? There are at least 30-50 different search engine companies. And each country has at least 2-3 regional search engines.

Technology:

Google uses what is called an inverted search index, it's what makes searching really fast. Basically it associates words to documents instead of documents to words. This technology has been around for a long time (over 10 years). So it's not difficult to develop and googles crawler is no rocket science either (the tool that fetches the sites and indexes them). When the web started to have some mass (700K to 900K sites) Yahoo was the leader. Problem is, is that Yahoo was never a really good technology firm. They used a document to word association algorithm. That made searching the web painful. At that point Google was a stanford project that seemed to work for internal use and they decided to commercialise it. The search speed result is what won the search war. That is why when you do a search you get the search time, it was like rubbing it into Yahoos face.

So now to your question, it's all about traffic. You can have the worlds greatest search engine, if nobody uses it then it's useless. Look at MS's live search engine. The technology behind it is impressive. The relevancy on it will definetly be better then Google but we've all been trained to search on google. Nobody does one search anymore, you refine searches.

So no traffic, no money from advertising. No money from advertising and no company.

Also the technical deployment of a Google is not trivial and requires lots of funds. That said, it's not as impressive as Walmarts technical infrastructure. Now that's technology

 

[Esco!]

Why there aren't too many Google out there ?

There are, yahoo search is almost as good as google

http://search.yahoo.com/

 

[California Surfer]

Beyond the technology

Although I do agree with Dirtier, there is more to the search algorithm of Goggle than document referentiation and speed.

The referencing is done not only by a word algorithm and matching the written querry (basically std in all search engines) but also by relevance of the content and popularity of the response, so as a doucument or link is picked up by more and more people looking for a particular subject this link or document gains status on the google result matrix assuring that the more pertinent results to the serach (at least based on the number of hits done on a page after a query is responded) are posted first.

In theory that makes it so that when you querry on Goggle the pertienent informaiton you are looking for is most of the time in the first pages of the reply. Remember I said in Theory!

 

[dirtierasigetolder]

Well if you want to get into the gritty part of a search engine then I'll be glad too...with out revealing too much about myself, I've been in the search business for a very long time. Biggest one I worked on used a neural engine for relevancy. I would say it's 100 times more relevant then google except can't handle 1/1000000 of the data Google handles. Googles algorithm sucks, people have just figured out how to get what they need from it. Trust me there is stuff coming out of universities that are 10 times better then what google does. Google itself probably has a better search engine.

You see problem with google is it's based on an algorithm built for speed not intelligence. I mean how much intelligence can you pack in to 3/10th of a second. Google recently bought an algorithm from a guy in Israel that will help them with the next big challenge. Search relevance in the notion of human being not web page. This basically looks at the content of the page and analyzes it, doesn't just index it and look a linkbacks and all the other hooplah. Hopefully stopping SOE's from skewing the algorithm.

Anyway, trust me when I tell you search engines are boring after a while and that Google is anything but impressive. That said, I have friends that work for them and they tell me it's the greatest company to work for

 

[MontrealAsian]

Anyway, trust me when I tell you search engines are boring after a while and that Google is anything but impressive. That said, I have friends that work for them and they tell me it's the greatest company to work for

off topic, but from what i heard, google employees are probably some of the happiest employees in the world... treated great, great pay, great facilities etc... would be nice to be working for google... and imagine the wealth some of these employees got if they purchased stocks when it first came out also...

 

[montreal_monk01]

New York,
I recall a survey -- somewhere on the Net, at the beginning of the googlemania --- where ppl
were pin-pointing at two elements that impressed them with google:
(1)Very light web interface.
It's a search engine, and should not come out with all the visual bells&whistles you found
at on rival Yahoo.com
(2)Very fast searches that seemed to also deliver the more accurate results.
So right there, Google emerged as a hard-to-beat competitor.
But to me, the magic stands in their marketting genious:
Google constantly keep you under their lights by constantly finding new ways
to improve their searching techniques and throwing all kind of services to you (google earth,
video.google and so on...). They seem to know when and what to shoot at!

 

[CaptRenault]

...If nobody can explain satisfactorily to me, I am going to start a search company with all the bells and whistles: text, audio, video, the whole works.

While you're at it, why don't you design a new operating system to replace Windows. That should be pretty easy too.

 

[jacep]

off topic, but from what i heard, google employees are probably some of the happiest employees in the world... treated great, great pay, great facilities etc... would be nice to be working for google... and imagine the wealth some of these employees got if they purchased stocks when it first came out also...

Yes, they are some of the happiest employees in the world. According to a news story (I think that it was on 60 minutes), employees not only get their basic pay and raises/bonuses and stock options, they also get a very good medical insurance plan. Besides this, they get all the food that they can eat for free. Everything in their in-company cafeteria is free from soft drinks, juices, coffees, to regular meals. The idea behind this is that the company wants employees to stay within the company during lunch.

 

[dirtierasigetolder]

Yes, they are some of the happiest employees in the world. According to a news story (I think that it was on 60 minutes), employees not only get their basic pay and raises/bonuses and stock options, they also get a very good medical insurance plan. Besides this, they get all the food that they can eat for free. Everything in their in-company cafeteria is free from soft drinks, juices, coffees, to regular meals. The idea behind this is that the company wants employees to stay within the company during lunch.

Also, it's standard Google logic that every employee should suggest ideas and if the idea is accepted, it's up to him/her/team to build the first prototype by taking 1 day a week to work on it.

Google is just simply brilliant. Granted being richer then GOD helps

 

[dirtierasigetolder]

While you're at it, why don't you design a new operating system to replace Windows. That should be pretty easy too.

Oh and if you finish ahead of schedule, why don't you just go and build a new office sweet

 

[bond_james_bond]

The monopolies have figured out that the nicer they are, the longer they stay in power.

You gotta be crazy to start your own general purpose store if there are Wal-Marts in your town.

Which is just about every town.

 

[varia]

There is no publicity on google's first level pages (except for themselves in the little links). Lately they put a "layered info" suggesting me to add the google toolbar. That really distracted me as I don't remember seeing anything else like that on that level.

No junk please because that's a thing I really like about Google. It's to the point and nice "services" ( google maps for example). If that changes, if the search engine becomes too much of a support for publicity instead of a tool for users, I might look for another search engine giving me the same satisfactory results. They already are sliding dangerously toward the dirty side of publicity and marketing strategies. They might be living lage now, but they can slide as everything else has in the past.

Varia