GOOGL - Google

[Liberty]

More patents:

 

http://www.frontsidebus.net/2011/09/14/google-buys-1000-patents-from-ibm-to-defend-android/

[Guest valueInv]

 

The value of users for search is the number of searches they do, what those searches are, and how often they click on ads.

 

Casual users who always search for the same 5 sites (facebook, new york times, hotmail, ESPN, whatever) are basically worthless, while power users who do 30 search a day for all kinds of things and do a lot of their shopping and product research online (including for keywords that trigger ads worth many dollars per click, because each keyword is worth something different based on a real-time auction, and some very specific keywords like 'mesothelioma' can be worth $50 per click or whatever) are worth the most. This is of course also a function of the ad inventory. The more variety you have, the more of the long tail you can monetize.

 

So to answer your original question, yeah, I know a few things about those.

 

The cost of the user is related to the number of searches that the user does, not the value.

The value to Google is based on the number of ads they click on and the rate of those ads. Let's be clear.

 

So what are the average CTRs for Google and Bing? AFAIK, this is internal information that they don't divulge to their publishers. So how do you know their CTRs?

[Liberty]

The cost of the user is related to the number of searches that the user does, not the value.

The value to Google is based on the number of ads they click on and the rate of those ads. Let's be clear.

 

So what are the average CTRs for Google and Bing? AFAIK, this is internal information that they don't divulge to their publishers. So how do you know their CTRs?

 

Are you playing a game of gotcha? I said I knew how ad CTR worked, not that I knew secret internal numbers for those two companies (and it wasn't clear in the first place that this was what you were asking).

[VAL9000]

Well, welcome to my world... A lot of what is written around here is negative about Google, probably because there are so many MSFT shareholders, so most of what I've been writing has been to provide counter-points to those too-enthusiastic posts ("OMG, Bing is totally kicking Google's ass, Microsoft is so great!" to paraphrase with tongue just slightly in cheek). Heh.

That's life with opinions.  For what it's worth, I reviewed all of the Bing posts and couldn't find anything that even closely matches the enthusiasm you're suggesting here.  As for the MSFT shareholder theories you like to bring up, very few of the participants on the MSFT or GOOG threads have declared themselves shareholders.  You must know something I don't.

 

I suspect that when you do research, you read lots of different sources, and you filter out or mentally adjust some parts because they don't pass through your BS detector or because you know the bias of the source, but you keep other parts which seem reliable, and over time, it all adds up to an ever more precise picture of whatever you're studying, right? Well, you're not the only one who does that, so don't assume that I'm some dummy who gets snowed by the first book that comes along  ;)

Hey dude, I gave fair play to your claim that the search share stats are incorrect, even though you won't offer solid data to back it up.  In return, I gave you concrete examples of bias from Levy's book.  The least you could do is acknowledge my concerns and opinion as being noteworthy rather than trying to trivialize my observations.

 

[Guest valueInv]

The cost of the user is related to the number of searches that the user does, not the value.

The value to Google is based on the number of ads they click on and the rate of those ads. Let's be clear.

 

So what are the average CTRs for Google and Bing? AFAIK, this is internal information that they don't divulge to their publishers. So how do you know their CTRs?

 

Are you playing a game of gotcha? I said I knew how ad CTR worked, not that I knew secret internal numbers for those two companies (and it wasn't clear in the first place that this was what you were asking).

 

Given you statement "The value of users for search is the number of searches they do", it was not clear you understood how CTR meant. Again, value => CTR, cost => no of searches, not the other way round.

 

BTW, I wasn't being unclear about whether CTR related to searches or ads. When people in the industry talk about CTR, they generally mean ads, not searches:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click-through_rate

 

 

[Liberty]

That's life with opinions.  For what it's worth, I reviewed all of the Bing posts and couldn't find anything that even closely matches the enthusiasm you're suggesting here.  As for the MSFT shareholder theories you like to bring up, very few of the participants on the MSFT or GOOG threads have declared themselves shareholders.  You must know something I don't.

 

Well, you're a better man than I, because I won't go through the archives to find examples of what I meant. This discussion is way past being constructive.

 

Hey dude, I gave fair play to your claim that the search share stats are incorrect, even though you won't offer solid data to back it up.  In return, I gave you concrete examples of bias from Levy's book.  The least you could do is acknowledge my concerns and opinion as being noteworthy rather than trying to trivialize my observations.

 

Right back at you. I heard your arguments and nothing you've said has convinced me that Google has anything else other than a great moat and solid dominance of the search market, and I've already explained why your examples of bias in Levy's book don't have anything to do with my arguments because I'm just as capable as you to detect that bias and I'm not basing my positions on Levy's view of Page as a superhero or whatever. And btw, I provided numbers in the past and pointed you to them.

[Guest valueInv]

Well, welcome to my world... A lot of what is written around here is negative about Google, probably because there are so many MSFT shareholders, so most of what I've been writing has been to provide counter-points to those too-enthusiastic posts ("OMG, Bing is totally kicking Google's ass, Microsoft is so great!" to paraphrase with tongue just slightly in cheek). Heh.

 

Ironically, thats the same reason I started posting on this threads. Because every time a positive article or a positive piece of news came out about Google, it was posted here. But none of the downside or negative articles were posted. So I decided to balance it out with counterpoints to your posts ;D ;D ;D

 

 

[Liberty]

Given you statement "The value of users for search is the number of searches they do", it was not clear you understood how CTR meant. Again, value => CTR, cost => no of searches, not the other way round.

 

I was explaining the variables important to valuing a search user, not what CTR is. You can measure things in absolute numbers, or in relative numbers, and when doing the latter, search volume matters.

 

BTW, I wasn't being unclear about whether CTR related to searches or ads. When people in the industry talk about CTR, they generally mean ads, not searches:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click-through_rate

 

In the context of talking about search engines and bing vs google, I thought you were talking about some of the articles that came out about how bing users had a higher CTR than google. CTR is used one way in the advertising industry, but it is also a generic term that can apply to many other things. It was ambiguous.

[Liberty]

Well, welcome to my world... A lot of what is written around here is negative about Google, probably because there are so many MSFT shareholders, so most of what I've been writing has been to provide counter-points to those too-enthusiastic posts ("OMG, Bing is totally kicking Google's ass, Microsoft is so great!" to paraphrase with tongue just slightly in cheek). Heh.

 

Ironically, thats the same reason I started posting on this threads. Because every time a positive article or a positive piece of news came out about Google, it was posted here. But none of the downside or negative articles were posted. So I decided to balance it out with counterpoints to your posts ;D ;D ;D

 

Well, ain't we all dogs chasing their tail.  :)

[Guest misterstockwell]

More patents:

 

http://www.frontsidebus.net/2011/09/14/google-buys-1000-patents-from-ibm-to-defend-android/

 

More unflattering pieces about Google and patents

 

http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/

[Liberty]

I think it's very probable that Google infringes on that patent, and many others. In fact, the software patent system is so fucked up that if the law was 100% enforced by some omniscient deity, the whole software industry would entirely shut down, and writing a "hello world" program would take years because you'd have to go through tens of thousands of patents written in incomprehensible legalese covering all kinds of broad and obvious things to make sure you aren't infringing anything. And every time you go to court it's a dice roll because the courts aren't exactly equipped to understand the fine points of software engineering, and even when you win, the delays and legal fees can still make it a huge business loss...

 

It reminds me of something someone wrote on a forum for startup programmers iirc (I'm paraphrasing from memory):

 

So it's a small startup just starting to make some money, and one day they get visited by 2 guys in suits coming from IBM, and they say "you are infringing on 7 our of our patents. We'll license them to you for 6 million." So the startup guys take this very seriously and they examine the patents carefully. They come back and say: "6 of those have nothing to do with what we're doing and the last one seems bogus and wouldn't hold in court". The guys in suit yawn and go: "We have 20,000 patents. Do you really want us to go back to headquarters and find 7 other patents that you infringe? Or do you want to go to court and fight our legal department? Make out the check to..."

 

Basically extortion. Google is much more vulnerable because they are a lot younger than most other big tech companies their size, and because they haven't put their engineers on the patent-generating treadmill like some other firms (some firms expressly tell employees that every time they come up with a patentable idea, they have to call the patent lawyers, and they give out big bonuses for patents, etc. I've heard from people who have software patents and they say that their own patents are bogus). But with the recent patent acquisitions, they should soon have a big enough stockpile for mutually-assured destruction, and a new equilibrium should be reached with other big tech firms.

 

There was a great episode of This American Life about it.

 

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/when-patents-attack

[Guest valueInv]

I think it's very probable that Google infringes on that patent, and many others. In fact, the software patent system is so fucked up that if the law was 100% enforced by some omniscient deity, the whole software industry would entirely shut down, and writing a "hello world" program would take years because you'd have to go through tens of thousands of patents written in incomprehensible legalese covering all kinds of broad and obvious things to make sure you aren't infringing anything. And every time you go to court it's a dice roll because the courts aren't exactly equipped to understand the fine points of software engineering, and even when you win, the delays and legal fees can still make it a huge business loss...

 

It reminds me of something someone wrote on a forum for startup programmers iirc (I'm paraphrasing from memory):

 

So it's a small startup just starting to make some money, and one day they get visited by 2 guys in suits coming from IBM, and they say "you are infringing on 7 our of our patents. We'll license them to you for 6 million." So the startup guys take this very seriously and they examine the patents carefully. They come back and say: "6 of those have nothing to do with what we're doing and the last one seems bogus and wouldn't hold in court". The guys in suit yawn and go: "We have 20,000 patents. Do you really want us to go back to headquarters and find 7 other patents that you infringe? Or do you want to go to court and fight our legal department? Make out the check to..."

 

Basically extortion. Google is much more vulnerable because they are a lot younger than most other big tech companies their size, and because they haven't put their engineers on the patent-generating treadmill like some other firms (some firms expressly tell employees that every time they come up with a patentable idea, they have to call the patent lawyers, and they give out big bonuses for patents, etc. I've heard from people who have software patents and they say that their own patents are bogus). But with the recent patent acquisitions, they should soon have a big enough stockpile for mutually-assured destruction, and a new equilibrium should be reached with other big tech firms.

 

There was a great episode of This American Life about it.

 

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/when-patents-attack

 

I have little sympathy for Google being sued. Check out the Android phones:

 

http://random.andrewwarner.com/what-googles-android-looked-like-before-and-after-the-launch-of-iphone/

 

The first one was shown when RIM was the reigning king of smartphones. If Apple hadn't entered the smartphone industry, it would have been RIM suing Google.

[Guest valueInv]

Given you statement "The value of users for search is the number of searches they do", it was not clear you understood how CTR meant. Again, value => CTR, cost => no of searches, not the other way round.

 

I was explaining the variables important to valuing a search user, not what CTR is. You can measure things in absolute numbers, or in relative numbers, and when doing the latter, search volume matters.

 

BTW, I wasn't being unclear about whether CTR related to searches or ads. When people in the industry talk about CTR, they generally mean ads, not searches:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click-through_rate

 

In the context of talking about search engines and bing vs google, I thought you were talking about some of the articles that came out about how bing users had a higher CTR than google. CTR is used one way in the advertising industry, but it is also a generic term that can apply to many other things. It was ambiguous.

 

Just so you know, search engines are measured using precision and recall, not CTRs:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_(information_retrieval)

 

[Liberty]

I have little sympathy for Google being sued. Check out the Android phones:

 

http://random.andrewwarner.com/what-googles-android-looked-like-before-and-after-the-launch-of-iphone/

 

The first one was shown when RIM was the reigning king of smartphones. If Apple hadn't entered the smartphone industry, it would have been RIM suing Google.

 

And Windows stole from the Mac OS which stole from Xerox, and all TVs and tablets and a million other things look alike. Good ideas spread. I'll admit that I think that some of the Samsung UIs built on top of Android are too close to iOS for my taste (and iOS has stolen a few things back from Android, like notifications and such), but having phones that are mostly big touchscreens with icons and clocks and whatever is pretty much a given at this point, just like most DSLR cameras are very similar or whatever.

[Liberty]

Just so you know, search engines are measured using precision and recall, not CTRs:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_(information_retrieval)

 

Just so you know, this is a different thing from what I was talking about.

[Guest valueInv]

I have little sympathy for Google being sued. Check out the Android phones:

 

http://random.andrewwarner.com/what-googles-android-looked-like-before-and-after-the-launch-of-iphone/

 

The first one was shown when RIM was the reigning king of smartphones. If Apple hadn't entered the smartphone industry, it would have been RIM suing Google.

 

And Windows stole from the Mac OS which stole from Xerox, and all TVs and tablets and a million other things look alike. Good ideas spread. I'll admit that I think that some of the Samsung UIs built on top of Android are too close to iOS for my taste (and iOS has stolen a few things back from Android, like notifications and such), but having phones that are mostly big touchscreens with icons and clocks and whatever is pretty much a given at this point, just like most DSLR cameras are very similar or whatever.

 

Google is not some small startup being bullied by big companies through patents like you paint it to be. In fact, its quite the opposite: 

 

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-flipboard-2011-9?op=1

 

And there's more:

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/15/us-oracle-google-idUSTRE78E71320110915

 

There's a reason why Google spent $12B, it has a real reason to be worried.

 

[Liberty]

I never said that google was a small company being bullied, I was just illustrating how these patents are often used and I didn't happen to have a big company example, but the principle is the same. Size doesn't mean that Google can't be attacked using the patent system, and it doesn't mean that the current software patent system makes sense and is a productive part of our legal system.

 

The worst of the worst are patent holding shells that don't actually have any products, they just have patents and they sue (and because they don't produce anything, they can't be counter-sued).

 

But there's little doubt that if Google had had tens of thousands of patents in the recent past, they wouldn't have been sued even if they had infringed on the very same patents that they are being accused of infringing right now. This isn't a game of what is right and who owns what, it's a game of who has the biggest stick and the most legal resources (Oracle is almost a law firm by now). All the other big tech firms could sue each other, because if they looked, they could find patents that others infringe. Why don't they sue each other? Because they'll be counter-sued and it wouldn't be productive. But Google only had a few hundred patents and so it was vulnerable...

 

Google has thousands of very talented engineers, and if they wanted to they could start producing tons of patents and eventually sue everybody, but so far they seem to mostly just want to defend themselves rather than attack. We'll see if that changes over time.

 

As for competing with Flipboard and Groupon and Facebook and Twitter and Expedia and whatever, I hope you realize that business models are not patentable, and that the world would be a lot worse for everybody if companies could say "nobody can do what I do!" and there was just one source of everything. Most of those companies built on what came before, and there will be others building on what they do. What you're accusing Google of doing is something that Microsoft has done quite a lot, and not always as nicely.

[Guest valueInv]

But if you are hitting on google for not being open enough, you should be hitting much harder on Apple and Microsoft and RIM...

 

Should I?

 

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/16/google_html5_effort_stinks/

[Liberty]

But if you are hitting on google for not being open enough, you should be hitting much harder on Apple and Microsoft and RIM...

 

Should I?

 

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/16/google_html5_effort_stinks/

 

I'm *this* close to filing you under 'troll' and just stopping caring... Honestly.

[maxprogram]

business models are not patentable, and that the world would be a lot worse for everybody if companies could say "nobody can do what I do!" and there was just one source of everything. Most of those companies built on what came before, and there will be others building on what they do. What you're accusing Google of doing is something that Microsoft has done quite a lot, and not always as nicely.

 

Anybody questioning this or just interested in the topic needs to watch this series:

 

http://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/

 

(If you're pressed for time Part III focuses more on inventions/business models)

[Liberty]

Google Wallet news:

 

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/launching-google-wallet-on-sprint-and.html

[Liberty]

G+ opens to public, adds new features:

 

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/google-92-93-94-95-96-97-98-99-100.html

[Myth465]

This is a huge uphill battle. I am slight techie and will not join until others do so. Its rough because social media is really about connectors and interactions. Even if most early adapters join, it wont gain traction until some critical mass is obtained, and millions wont go until critical mass is obtained. Not sure how you beat that network effect.

[Liberty]

This is a huge uphill battle. I am slight techie and will not join until others do so. Its rough because social media is really about connectors and interactions. Even if most early adapters join, it wont gain traction until some critical mass is obtained, and millions wont go until critical mass is obtained. Not sure how you beat that network effect.

 

Agreed. Google's best chance is to be a strong #2 and be around if people ever decide to leave Facebook for whatever reason (see what happened to MySpace, though facebook is a much better company than MySpace ever was - but still, in the social world, there are trends that are impossible to predict until they rapidly turn into a tidal wave).

 

But if they're truly in this for the long-term, they can still get value that they wouldn't otherwise get even if they aren't #1, and they can influence Facebook by forcing them to match certain features and policies.

[Myth465]

I agree, Facebook will stumble sooner or later at some point and the number 2 will gain traction at that point. I also agree on the features, Facebook has made several key updates to compete with Google and so far customers are winning.