GOOGL - Google

[VAL9000]

Yes, I'm sure the consistent rise in search share that Bing has seen over the past two years has been the result of ever more users lobbing typos into IE. :)

 

It's pretty hard to slice up quality of searches that way.  You could just as easily point to super users clicking on ads less often while searching, therefore being less desirable users.  Who knows, maybe Bing is capturing the best possible market: users with low expectations who readily click on ads and have low search volume.  Genius.

 

Note that "big websites" might not be the best source of information.  Search's killer app is instant access to the long tail of information, not just as a short cut to Wikipedia.

 

I can't find a better set of metrics than search share to measure relative performance.  Do you have anything handy that might be better?

 

[Shane]

I think it's fairly typical of Google to lose search share in the summer and regain it during the school year.  I can't remember where I came across this search seasonality (maybe it was here).  The explanation seemed plausible enough; Google is used more for research by students and therefore tapers off in the academic off-season.

 

 

 

As a college student I don't really see this as solid reasoning.  Even if younger people are using google there are no switching costs to going over to Bing.  I find the two search engines equivalent & alternate between the two now.

 

I just can't see any real competitive advantage other than user preference, and that can change rapidly.

[Liberty]

Oh boy, I probably shouldn't have written anything. Every time I make any comment about Google people challenge me to a duel in front of the saloon, nobody ever agrees with anything I write :D

 

Yes, I'm sure the consistent rise in search share that Bing has seen over the past two years has been the result of ever more users lobbing typos into IE. :)

 

It's entirely possible for Bing to grow while having a larger % of 'low quality' users than Google. These are not mutually exclusive.

 

It's pretty hard to slice up quality of searches that way.  You could just as easily point to super users clicking on ads less often while searching, therefore being less desirable users.  Who knows, maybe Bing is capturing the best possible market: users with low expectations who readily click on ads and have low search volume.  Genius.

 

When search ads are well targeted, they are actually useful, so the paradigm of stupid newbie users mistakenly clicking on ads leading to higher revenue doesn't quite apply as well (that was more a banner ad thing - but now even banners are more targeted and relevant). If I search for a standing desk or a pizza place and the top result looks relevant and it happens to be an ads, I won't mind clicking on it even if I'm a savvy power-user.

 

Because Google's ad inventory is so freakingly much bigger than Bing's, they have many more relevant ads to show for a much longer tail of searches, thus monetizing their searches much better.

 

Note that "big websites" might not be the best source of information.  Search's killer app is instant access to the long tail of information, not just as a short cut to Wikipedia.

 

I can't find a better set of metrics than search share to measure relative performance.  Do you have anything handy that might be better?

 

Through my work I have access to stats from all kinds of sites, from thousands of visits a month to tens of millions. It covers a pretty nice range and should be pretty representative. I'm not asking you to trust me or change your metrics, do whatever you want. I'm just saying that I take the usual marketshare numbers with a big bucket of salt, and I've explained many times in multiple discussion threads why that is. I don't really have anything to add on this.

[jeffmori7]

Details about the Motorola deal. It seems that it was at first a patent deal, and the the first offer by Google was like 25% less than the final offer.

 

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/how-the-google-motorola-deal-went-down/?partner=yahoofinance

 

 

I'm still not sure about this takeover, because as some of you pointed out, Google has never demonstrate its ability to develop clearly profitable business apart for search. At least, we can not say they are not trying!

[VAL9000]

It's entirely possible for Bing to grow while having a larger % of 'low quality' users than Google. These are not mutually exclusive.

Yes, but it's highly improbable that Bing grows solely on the basis of "low quality" users.  I think it's fair to say that neither of us really know what the user mix looks like with Google, Bing or others.  We don't know the mix, nor do we know what makes a user desirable or undesirable.  We can guess that Bing is gaining market share by capturing the low quality end of the market, but I think that speculating such a thing would be a bit stupid, especially if you're thinking of investing in Google.  I would much rather look at Google's product and say "Once upon a time Google's search results were untouchable and now that is no longer true.  How does this change things?"

 

It pays to examine the environment wherein Google came to be the search leader.  Search was a wasteland for the longest time.  It was nearly useless until Google came along.  Google blew away the competition for years and eventually paired it with an incredible business model.  But every good business ultimately attracts competitors, and that's where we're at today.  Maybe today we will discount the quality of their users and the dearth of advertising inventory, but I remember a time when iPhone was king and the same things were said of Android's low-market users and lack of app selection.

 

[Liberty]

I'm still not sure about this takeover, because as some of you pointed out, Google has never demonstrate its ability to develop clearly profitable business apart for search.

 

The text and banner ads on the adsense/Doubleclick network are separate from search, as is GMail, as is Android, as is the nascent G+. These aren't as profitable as search - and it's probable that nothing ever will be, as search is the holy grail product of the internet, and so it makes sense to develop complementary products that augment search rather than totally separate ones - but if they were standalone tech companies they would be worth a nice sum, especially the ad network.

[Liberty]

Yes, but it's highly improbable that Bing grows solely on the basis of "low quality" users.

 

Which isn't what I'm saying. F.ex. If Google has a ration of X 'low quality users' and Bing has  a 'more than X' ratio, it's possible for Bing to grow both high and low quality users in a roughly proportional manner such that the 'more than X' ratio stays pretty much intact, viz. higher than Google's.

 

  I think it's fair to say that neither of us really know what the user mix looks like with Google, Bing or others.  We don't know the mix, nor do we know what makes a user desirable or undesirable.  We can guess that Bing is gaining market share by capturing the low quality end of the market, but I think that speculating such a thing would be a bit stupid, especially if you're thinking of investing in Google.  I would much rather look at Google's product and say "Once upon a time Google's search results were untouchable and now that is no longer true.  How does this change things?"

 

It pays to examine the environment wherein Google came to be the search leader.  Search was a wasteland for the longest time.  It was nearly useless until Google came along.  Google blew away the competition for years and eventually paired it with an incredible business model.  But every good business ultimately attracts competitors, and that's where we're at today.  Maybe today we will discount the quality of their users and the dearth of advertising inventory, but I remember a time when iPhone was king and the same things were said of Android's low-market users and lack of app selection.

 

You are basically pushing my own argument farther than I am pushing it and then saying that I'm going too far. All I was saying was that marketshare numbers aren't all that to me, and that I use other sources of data to form my judgement on Google and Bing's respective competitive positions. I'm not saying they can't change, I'm not saying that Bing isn't making a better effort than past competitors (though Bing itself is just a continuation of Microsoft's past search efforts that have been around since the 90s, despite the rebranding and increased marketing). You can use the metrics and data you want, but please don't say that what I'm doing is stupid when you don't know what I'm doing.

[jeffmori7]

Ok Liberty, you're right :)

 

I know all of these, as I am a long-time shareholder, I just wrote a too simple sentence to summarize my thinking..and it didn't work out well :) 

Google is all about search and in a broader view about organizing all kind of data. Ads is the way to monetize this. All else is being build to reinforce search, to increase its efficiency and improve user experience. Motorola is to gain more traction in the mobile world, to boost Android, but at what price? Did they really need this?

 

Anyway, for me Motorola is different than all other Google products, at first just because it includes hardware and I'm still not sure about it!

[Liberty]

No worries, sometimes I just have this compulsion to state the obvious :)

 

About Motorola: I'm not sure what to think about it. I suspect there's a behind the curtain story that explains it, like they couldn't get InterDigital or another patent holding shell, so they had to spend for a whole company.

 

I would prefer for Google to stick more to the software business, but if the patents help reinforce the moat around Google's other businesses (mobile will be a bigger part of search over the next decade, so defending it will become more and more core), they might pay for themselves + the rest of Moto over time (though probably not in the short-term). Problem is: It's always harder to value the absence of an event than the presence of one (ie. no lawsuit happens, but you might never know that in an alternate history it would have happened).

[Rabbitisrich]

Google continues to lose search marketshare to Bing:

 

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9219975/Google_slips_to_lowest_search_share_in_2_years

 

It's a bit of a misleading article as Comscore adjusted their rankings to tease out contextual searches. Using the non-explicit core search figures, Google dipped below 64% last year.

[VAL9000]

Which isn't what I'm saying. F.ex. If Google has a ration of X 'low quality users' and Bing has  a 'more than X' ratio, it's possible for Bing to grow both high and low quality users in a roughly proportional manner such that the 'more than X' ratio stays pretty much intact, viz. higher than Google's.

Right, and getting back to the original point, Google is losing market share to Bing.  Since you agree that it's not solely low quality users, we can more specifically agree that Google is losing high quality users to Bing.  This, in my opinion, is a problem for Google.

 

You are basically pushing my own argument farther than I am pushing it and then saying that I'm going too far. All I was saying was that marketshare numbers aren't all that to me, and that I use other sources of data to form my judgement on Google and Bing's respective competitive positions. I'm not saying they can't change, I'm not saying that Bing isn't making a better effort than past competitors (though Bing itself is just a continuation of Microsoft's past search efforts that have been around since the 90s, despite the rebranding and increased marketing). You can use the metrics and data you want, but please don't say that what I'm doing is stupid when you don't know what I'm doing.

I didn't mean to imply that you were doing something stupid.  All I meant was that anyone who is investing in Google is doing themselves a disservice by assuming that Bing is only capturing the users  that Google would least want to retain.  It's safer to assume that Google is losing an average basket of users to Bing.

 

Since you have access to more data, would you mind sharing your answer to this question?  According to your methods, is Bing's share of search queries increasing or decreasing over a one year trend?

 

[Liberty]

Right, and getting back to the original point, Google is losing market share to Bing.  Since you agree that it's not solely low quality users, we can more specifically agree that Google is losing high quality users to Bing.  This, in my opinion, is a problem for Google.

 

It is. I just don't think it's nearly as bad as some people think.

 

Frankly, I wrote many long posts about this in the past and I don't really want to rehash them. Maybe it was when you had left the board? Some of it is in this thread, some is in the MSFT thread, and possibly some in the RIM thread, if you're interested.

 

Since you have access to more data, would you mind sharing your answer to this question?  According to your methods, is Bing's share of search queries increasing or decreasing over a one year trend?

 

I've shared some of it, I'm sure you can find it. I don't want to go into too much detail there because that's not data I want to share too much for a variety of reasons.

 

Let's just say that when I look at the numbers for many big US sites (where Bing is stronger than internationally), sites that cover very mainstream topics and/or brands that everybody knows (where Google doesn't have an advantage over Bing), and see that Google often represents over 80% of search referrals and that some international Google sites (.ca, .co.uk) send more traffic than Bing.com, it makes me wonder where all the Bing users are linking off to after their searches...

 

There's also a nice phenomenon that I'm sure Munger would find interesting: The only place where I see much enthusiasm for Bing is on investing forums, mostly from people who have bought MSFT stock :) I don't know a single person who 'bings' stuff when they have a question they want answered... I know they exist, I've just yet to meet them (I suppose this is the cue for people here to tell my how their whole families have been converted to Bing and they love it and such... But I'm still waiting to meet Bing users by accident, without this kind of sample bias).

[VAL9000]

It is. I just don't think it's nearly as bad as some people think.

 

Frankly, I wrote many long posts about this in the past and I don't really want to rehash them. Maybe it was when you had left the board? Some of it is in this thread, some is in the MSFT thread, and possibly some in the RIM thread, if you're interested.

I stayed up to date, but remain unconvinced.

 

I think that anybody investing in MSFT thinking that Bing is going to be a significant business is delusional.  I have defended Bing's existence as a pure strategy play for MSFT to keep GOOG busy (you can read my posts on that).  There's a really good chance that it won't be anything more than a distraction for both companies.  I also think that people investing in GOOG thinking that their moat is so significant are in denial, because the evidence (however marginalized by arguments on user quality or lack of international presence) still strongly suggests that Google can be beat and has been beat by at least a few significant measures.

 

[Liberty]

I think that anybody investing in MSFT thinking that Bing is going to be a significant business is delusional.  I have defended Bing's existence as a pure strategy play for MSFT to keep GOOG busy (you can read my posts on that).  There's a really good chance that it won't be anything more than a distraction for both companies.  I also think that people investing in GOOG thinking that their moat is so significant are in denial, because the evidence (however marginalized by arguments on user quality or lack of international presence) still strongly suggests that Google can be beat and has been beat by at least a few significant measures.

 

So if Bing will remain marginal (if even profitable), who's going to beat Google? You realize that to offer something comparable to them will require billions and billions of capital investments and thousands of top engineers with expertise in search/artificial intelligence/data mining/large scale hardware deployments? And even if you have all that, the size of the user data-set that you can to play with matters (Google optimizes results in part by analyzing user behavior - the more users you have, the more accurate your results can be). And they're the low cost producer of computing hardware in the world as far as anyone knows (they actually assemble more servers than HP and Dell, according to Steven Levy who had inside access), own tons of strategic fiber that they bought for cents on the dollar after the dotcom bust, etc. Their ad exchanges benefit tremendously from a network effect and have great pricing power.  And I won't even mention how powerful the brand is (it's a verb!) and how users are becoming stickier by the year (6 years ago people mostly  just searched, but now they have a GMail account, use google maps, read google news, use google docs, G+, Android, chrome, google translate, they just launched Google Flights (http://www.google.com/flights/), etc, making them less likely to go away).

 

Basically, Google's out of reach for startups (most aim to be acquired by Google anyway), and of the big companies with the resources, I don't see any who have the ability to beat it, and it's not because they haven't tried (MSFT likes to pretend Bing is a few years old, but it's just a rebranding of what they've been doing unprofitably for over a decade). Anyone who makes their living on the internet, either as an advertiser or a publisher, knows very well that Bing is a marginal player at best. They're not nothing, but like Yahoo, if they disappeared tomorrow, you would probably notice the bump in traffic, while if Google disappeared, you'd go out of business (doubly so if you ran their ads on your site on top of getting most of your traffic from them). In fact, a change in Google's ranking algorithm can have a bigger impact on a site's traffic than the whole existence of Google's competitors.

 

As an aside, I think it's also a sign of Google's moat that Bing was caught copying Google results (Google made up fake search results for random unique non-words like "hhhhshhdfiidsfjfkfkfffsdffffftss" and these later showed up in Bing linking to the very same fake results -- Bing responded that they didn't copy anything ever, but their explanation for the results was unconvincing). It's like finding out that Washington Post articles that you thought were independently reported, and were advertised as such, were actually plagiarized from the New York Times. Kind of a sign they're having trouble compete, IMO.

 

I'd be curious to ask Sanjeev if around 35% of visitors to this site who come from search referral come from Bing sources (and if that's the case, I'll be very surprised)...

[Guest valueInv]

Marketshare isn't everything. The quality of users matter. As I've previously written about here, Bing seems to have a large number of users that end up doing a search because they made a typo in IE or something like that. If you look at the traffic statistics of many big websites, you see that Google actually has a much higher share than 60-70% (and even moreso internationally). This is important because random typo users aren't worth much, while people actively searching for something specific are worth a lot to advertisers, as these are the people clicking on ads and doing multiple searches. It also matters that Google's ad system is the best in the world and squeezes much more money out of users and advertisers.

 

In any case, I sold my GOOG shares when the markets melted because I wanted to buy something that I felt was more undervalued and has more upside (size is an anchor - I ended up buying stock in a company that is less than 1% Google's size).

 

I still made over 20% profit in a little over a month, and I could have made 30% if I had sold a bit earlier, so I can't say I'm disappointed. Despite having sold, I still believe they are a very attractive business and if bought cheaply enough they should provide attractive returns over the next decade. I'd look at them and Apple before MSFT, HPQ, DELL, etc.

 

- What makes you think Google has better quality of users?

- Do you know the demographics of the users coming to these sites?

  -Do you know the average click thru rate of a Bing user vs a Google user?

  - How do you know that the Bing referees are from typos in the browser? How much of Googles users are from typos in Chrome given that Chrome is increasing marketshare?

[Liberty]

Allow me to reply in the same way that you did :)

 

- What makes you think Google has better quality of users?

 

-A wide range of data points.

 

- Do you know the demographics of the users coming to these sites?

 

-I do. They cover a wide range.

 

-Do you know the average click thru rate of a Bing user vs a Google user?

 

I've seen that in the past, and like the comscore data, I think it is misleading, and I think many people draw the wrong conclusions from it. For example, consider that Google's snippets are extremely relevant and many people find the answer they're looking for from them without clicking, or use Google as a spellchecker or calculator.  At first glance this makes it sound like low quality users, yet despite that Google still sends massively more traffic than its comscore share would make you think. It makes me think that CTR rates are a flawed metric; f.ex., if you mispell 'facebook' in your IE URL bar and then click on the Facebook result, that's considered a successful hit, while if you search for Galileo's birth date and see it in the snippet without clicking, that considered a failed search. Also, power-users (or even just above-casual users) will tend to do tons of searches and refine them over iterations of many keywords (mostly because they're looking for harder-to-find things) while casual users usually just try one thing. Does this lower CTR from power users mean that results are of lower quality? CTR doesn't mean what most people think it means...

 

  - How do you know that the Bing referees are from typos in the browser? How much of Googles users are from typos in Chrome given that Chrome is increasing marketshare?

 

I'm sure Chrome also sends a bunch. But IE is the most popular browser in the world, and it can have a disproportionate effect on a search engine with a smaller market share, as opposed to the impact of one of the browsers with a smaller marketshare on the search engine with the biggest market share (in the abstract: a big thing can have a bigger impact on a small thing than a small thing on a big thing).

[VAL9000]

So if Bing will remain marginal (if even profitable), who's going to beat Google? You realize that to offer something comparable to them will require billions and billions of capital investments and thousands of top engineers with expertise in search/artificial intelligence/data mining/large scale hardware deployments? And even if you have all that, the size of the user data-set that you can to play with matters (Google optimizes results in part by analyzing user behavior - the more users you have, the more accurate your results can be). And they're the low cost producer of computing hardware in the world as far as anyone knows (they actually assemble more servers than HP and Dell, according to Steven Levy who had inside access), own tons of strategic fiber that they bought for cents on the dollar after the dotcom bust, etc. Their ad exchanges benefit tremendously from a network effect and have great pricing power.  And I won't even mention how powerful the brand is (it's a verb!) and how users are becoming stickier by the year (6 years ago people mostly  just searched, but now they have a GMail account, use google maps, read google news, use google docs, G+, Android, chrome, google translate, they just launched Google Flights (http://www.google.com/flights/), etc, making them less likely to go away).

If I could answer that question with absolute confidence, I wouldn't be here right now :)  I think there's a healthy dose of competition out there, including Bing, Bai Du, and DuckDuckGo.  I've used Bing and DDG extensively and they're both worthy.  DDG is interesting because they are a tiny start-up but still manage to provide very high quality results.  On top of that, they don't filter your results based on user data, which can reinforce bias.  Here's some information on search bubbles: http://dontbubble.us/ -- I think that they are an excellent counter example to the idea that a start-up can't compete with Google.

 

At least you could admit that the thing that put Google in the lead, remarkably better search results, is no longer a trait unique to Google.  All of the additional services and products that you mentioned are essential to Google retaining its users, but in the end the effectiveness of these attempts will be measured by one simple metric: search share.  Search share is at best stagnating and possibly declining even as products like maps, gmail, translate, android, and chrome are widely being adopted.  Doesn't this search share data combined with the massive investment in user retention indicate something isn't working as expected in Mountain View?

 

These arguments really only cover the search / AdWords business.  The display business is a completely different animal and has its own set of ambitious competitors.  I think Facebook and possibly Twitter have the best shot at unseating Google in this arena.  If Google's kingdom is Troy, those  "like this" and "tweet this" buttons are Trojan horses.

 

Also, for what it's worth, I found Steven Levy's book In The Plex to be unnecessarily sycophantic.  I recommend reserving some of your search stat salt bucket for digesting his opinions :) (It wasn't always like that with Levy..  His book Hackers was awesome - balanced and informative.)

 

[Liberty]

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/processors/2011/09/14/intel-and-google-join-hands-on-android-development-40093922/

[Liberty]

I like DDG. I've had a few conversations with Gabriel Weinberg, its creator, and I've used it as my main search engine for a few months to test it out. I expect them to be successful as a niche player mostly because they'll keep costs low (1-2 employees) and so will do well even with very little revenue, but I don't expect them to be a competitor for Google (or even Bing, who's API they use exclusively now that Yahoo's API is offline - DDG isn't really an independent player, it's more like an App built on top of Bing). Sadly, a lot of what DDG does wouldn't scale very well (like hand filtering lots of spam - when you're a big source of traffic, that stuff becomes extremely contentious in borderline cases).

 

I don't expect Twitter to do much in display. Their firehose is valuable, and they should do well with it, but it's still just one of many things (and I say this as a guy who has 7k followers on Twitter).

 

Facebook will no doubt make mountains of money with display, but their offerings are limited. They're only selling ads on Facebook, and when people are on facebook they are generally in a certain mindset, just like when people are in their email. Adsense ads on third party sites have a higher chance of catching people when they are in a mindset that is more valuable to advertisers. F.ex. you Google something about cars, end up on a NYT article about cars and there's an adsense ad about cars. The page that you are reading (something about cars) is a signal of your intent, you aren't thinking about diner with your grandma on sunday or funny cat pics like on social networks.

 

Please provide examples of what you didn't like in Levy's book. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I'm curious to know what you didn't like.

[VAL9000]

I like DDG. I've had a few conversations with Gabriel Weinberg, its creator, and I've used it as my main search engine for a few months to test it out. I expect them to be successful as a niche player mostly because they'll keep costs low (1-2 employees) and so will do well even with very little revenue, but I don't expect them to be a competitor for Google (or even Bing, who's API they use exclusively now that Yahoo's API is offline - DDG isn't really an independent player, it's more like an App built on top of Bing). Sadly, a lot of what DDG does wouldn't scale very well (like hand filtering lots of spam - when you're a big source of traffic, that stuff becomes extremely contentious in borderline cases).

They also have their own crawler, so it's not like this is a completely dependent solution, either.  It's remarkable what they have been able to accomplish with so little.  Blekko is another venture-backed search engine.  This isn't about DDG toppling Google, I'm just debunking the idea that nobody can do it on the cheap and that nobody is close.

 

What about the question regarding results?

 

I don't expect Twitter to do much in display. Their firehose is valuable, and they should do well with it, but it's still just one of many things (and I say this as a guy who has 7k followers on Twitter).

 

Facebook will no doubt make mountains of money with display, but their offerings are limited. They're only selling ads on Facebook, and when people are on facebook they are generally in a certain mindset, just like when people are in their email. Adsense ads on third party sites have a higher chance of catching people when they are in a mindset that is more valuable to advertisers. F.ex. you Google something about cars, end up on a NYT article about cars and there's an adsense ad about cars. The page that you are reading (something about cars) is a signal of your intent, you aren't thinking about diner with your grandma on sunday or funny cat pics like on social networks.

Inside today, outside tomorrow.  Google+ is going to attempt the same thing, but they already have AdSense.  Facebook has much better demographic data, but no ad network.  Twitter can do something similar, although they would have to use more implied demography from their firehose.  It's a better starting point than what AdSense has today (unlike search, display can't easily infer a user's intention from the content on the page).

 

Please provide examples of what you didn't like in Levy's book. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I'm curious to know what you didn't like.

 

Sure.  On toxic emission tests:

“It was, like, .0001 parts per billion,” says Salah of the report he handed to Page. “Larry looked at it, handed it back and said, ‘Can we get this to zero?’” Google wound up building superpowerful fans to power a high-end filtration system. It made for a higher electric bill, but the air quality met Sergey and Larry’s standards. “They’re two very sensitive people,” says Salah. “They smell things most of us don’t smell.”

 

Sorry what? Page can smell toxic emissions to .0001 parts per billion?  What is he, superman?  Sure this is an attributed quote, but what value does it add to the reader or the story?  This falsely aggrandizes Page for something completely irrelevant.  Google is the search company, not the smell company.

 

Well there's more of that:

On meeting Andy Rubin regarding an Android partnership:

Page had an idea: what if Google bought Android? It was a classic Larry Page moment: ask him to consider a toothpick, and right away, he was thinking about a forest.

 

Classic Page!  Partnership is to acquisition as toothpick is to forest.  This is laughable, especially in Silicon Valley where deals are on every entrepreneur's mind all the time.  This leap in vision is made every day by every winner and loser in California.

 

And here's another one on Page's ability to measure load times on web pages:

Page himself considered it unexceptional to be able to detect lags of 200 milliseconds, generally thought of as the limit of human perception.

 

That's because it is unexceptional.  Anybody who has played a video game knows that 200ms is an eternity.  Another example is film, which traditionally runs at 30 fps.  Why use 30fps if the limit of human perception is 5fps?  This assertion by the author is clearly false, and again serves to falsely build up Page's image rather than add actual value to the reader.

 

Levy paints this picture of Page being superhuman, and it really bleeds out in these examples.  How can you take the rest of the book seriously with the backdrop of this nonstop mancrush?  It's not a balanced review of Google, it's greatly influenced by one person's fawning over another.

 

The other issue I take is that In The Plex doesn't do any of Google's many failures any justice.  Only Book Search and Buzz get any play..  Everything else is sidestepped.  It's such a biased review that doesn't critique but often compliments.  I would expect more journalism from a guy who's a journalist.  Bring your salt bucket is what I'm saying.

 

[Liberty]

They also have their own crawler, so it's not like this is a completely dependent solution, either.  It's remarkable what they have been able to accomplish with so little.  Blekko is another venture-backed search engine.  This isn't about DDG toppling Google, I'm just debunking the idea that nobody can do it on the cheap and that nobody is close.

 

Indeed, but remove the Bing API and the billions that MSFT put into it and I suspect that things would be quite different. Still, I have only respect for DDG. I'm less impressed by Blekko.

 

One that does (did?) all its own crawling is GigaBlast, but it's about on par with Google circa 1998-1999.

 

What about the question regarding results?

 

DDG is my second favorite search engine after Google, so that should tell you that I think they are overall pretty good. There's still a significant gap, though.

 

Inside today, outside tomorrow.  Google+ is going to attempt the same thing, but they already have AdSense.  Facebook has much better demographic data, but no ad network.  Twitter can do something similar, although they would have to use more implied demography from their firehose.  It's a better starting point than what AdSense has today (unlike search, display can't easily infer a user's intention from the content on the page).

 

We'll see how that works out. Adsense isn't as easy to build as it might seem, and replicating or stealing Google's hundreds of thousands of third party publishers won't be easy.

 

Also, Google's core competencies map much better on this than Facebook's ie. indexing vast quantities of data rapidly, analyzing it in real time to extract meaning and matching it to relevant queries/ads (a large number of which are unique, so you can't just cache it all) that are provided in real time in a search box/ad exchange... a lot of skills and infrastructure translates well from one to the other, and I'm afraid it'll be harder for Facebook. They could pull it off, though.

 

 

Sure.  On toxic emission tests:

“It was, like, .0001 parts per billion,” says Salah of the report he handed to Page. “Larry looked at it, handed it back and said, ‘Can we get this to zero?’” Google wound up building superpowerful fans to power a high-end filtration system. It made for a higher electric bill, but the air quality met Sergey and Larry’s standards. “They’re two very sensitive people,” says Salah. “They smell things most of us don’t smell.”

 

Sorry what? Page can smell toxic emissions to .0001 parts per billion?  What is he, superman?  Sure this is an attributed quote, but what value does it add to the reader or the story?  This falsely aggrandizes Page for something completely irrelevant.  Google is the search company, not the smell company.

 

Well there's more of that:

On meeting Andy Rubin regarding an Android partnership:

Page had an idea: what if Google bought Android? It was a classic Larry Page moment: ask him to consider a toothpick, and right away, he was thinking about a forest.

 

Classic Page!  Partnership is to acquisition as toothpick is to forest.  This is laughable, especially in Silicon Valley where deals are on every entrepreneur's mind all the time.  This leap in vision is made every day by every winner and loser in California.

 

And here's another one on Page's ability to measure load times on web pages:

Page himself considered it unexceptional to be able to detect lags of 200 milliseconds, generally thought of as the limit of human perception.

 

That's because it is unexceptional.  Anybody who has played a video game knows that 200ms is an eternity.  Another example is film, which traditionally runs at 30 fps.  Why use 30fps if the limit of human perception is 5fps?  This assertion by the author is clearly false, and again serves to falsely build up Page's image rather than add actual value to the reader.

 

Levy paints this picture of Page being superhuman, and it really bleeds out in these examples.  How can you take the rest of the book seriously with the backdrop of this nonstop mancrush?  It's not a balanced review of Google, it's greatly influenced by one person's fawning over another.

 

The other issue I take is that In The Plex doesn't do any of Google's many failures any justice.  Only Book Search and Buzz get any play..  Everything else is sidestepped.  It's such a biased review that doesn't critique but often compliments.  I would expect more journalism from a guy who's a journalist.  Bring your salt bucket is what I'm saying.

 

If those are your criticisms, then fine. I thought it was going to be things that mattered or at least were more blatant and not the kinds of complaints that you can make - if you search for them - about just about any book about any individual or company. I'll bet you I open my biography of Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson at any chapter and I can find the same kinds of complaints. I guess it would matter if I didn't have any judgement and took everything literally, but I'm just as capable as you to take some things with a grain of salt -- it doesn't mean that there's isn't a lot of very insightful stuff in Levy's book, much of it is corroborated in other books and articles written by other people.

 

btw, if I remember correctly, your last quote about lag says something slightly different in context.  Page had trained himself to estimate sub-second lag to a fairly accurate degree (not just notice that there's lag, which is unexceptional), which isn't something that everybody does and certainly something that could impress a journalist if performed out of the blue. It's not material to Google's prospects, but it certainly gives us color on Larry Page and his engineering mindset.

[Guest valueInv]

Allow me to reply in the same way that you did :)

 

-Do you know the average click thru rate of a Bing user vs a Google user?

 

I've seen that in the past, and like the comscore data, I think it is misleading, and I think many people draw the wrong conclusions from it. For example, consider that Google's snippets are extremely relevant and many people find the answer they're looking for from them without clicking, or use Google as a spellchecker or calculator.  At first glance this makes it sound like low quality users, yet despite that Google still sends massively more traffic than its comscore share would make you think. It makes me think that CTR rates are a flawed metric; f.ex., if you mispell 'facebook' in your IE URL bar and then click on the Facebook result, that's considered a successful hit, while if you search for Galileo's birth date and see it in the snippet without clicking, that considered a failed search. Also, power-users (or even just above-casual users) will tend to do tons of searches and refine them over iterations of many keywords (mostly because they're looking for harder-to-find things) while casual users usually just try one thing. Does this lower CTR from power users mean that results are of lower quality? CTR doesn't mean what most people think it means...

 

 

 

I am talking about CTR for ads, not searches.

Search advertisers make money when users click on ads. When you have a user clicking a lot of ads, he is "high quality" from a search business point of view. A person who performs a lot of searches but does not click on ads adds to costs but does not bring in revenue. Hence, CTR is extremely relevant for a search business.

 

A phd from Harvard with an annual income of $250K who does not click on ads is not a "high quality" user while a guy working for hourly wage of $5 clicking lots of search ads is.

[VAL9000]

Well at least we can agree that somehow, someway there's real competition brewing for Google (the size and scope is still in contention).  It only took 36 hours and lots of text but by golly we did it.  We should replace the US government. :)

 

If those are your criticisms, then fine. I thought it was going to be things that mattered or at least were more blatant and not the kinds of complaints that you can make - if you search for them - about just about any book about any individual or company. I'll bet you I open my biography of Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson at any chapter and I can find the same kinds of complaints. I guess it would matter if I didn't have any judgement and took everything literally, but I'm just as capable as you to take some things with a grain of salt -- it doesn't mean that there's isn't a lot of very insightful stuff in Levy's book, much of it is corroborated in other books and articles written by other people.

I wasn't really searching for them.  They jumped out at me and eventually I concluded that the book was a kiss ass bromance novel rather than an objective review of Google's development.  Really I'm trying to add balance to the discussion..  both in terms of that book and the discussion here.  Something else that jumped at out me is that things have gotten a little too Google positive (Google+ ?) around here.  I'm doing what I can to bring us into less exuberant territory.

 

btw, if I remember correctly, your last quote about lag says something slightly different in context.  Page had trained himself to estimate sub-second lag to a fairly accurate degree (not just notice that there's lag, which is unexceptional), which isn't something that everybody does and certainly something that could impress a journalist if performed out of the blue. It's not material to Google's prospects, but it certainly gives us color on Larry Page and his engineering mindset.

My criticism has never been about Page.  It's about Levy and how he talks up Page every chance he gets.  I think Page has real engineering talent and deserves merit for all kinds of things that Google has done (there is no mention of these praises in my critique of Levy).  I also think that Page deserves criticism for the misguided actions that he's taken and these criticisms are nowhere to be found in In The Plex.  The facts that are present are well researched and are interesting, but using In The Plex as a field guide for understanding Google's business and capabilities is probably not a good idea.

 

[Liberty]

I am talking about CTR for ads, not searches.

 

Sorry about the misunderstanding. It's bound to happen if you only write ambiguous short questions, though.

 

Search advertisers make money when users click on ads. When you have a user clicking a lot of ads, he is "high quality" from a search business point of view. A person who performs a lot of searches but does not click on ads adds to costs but does not bring in revenue. Hence, CTR is extremely relevant for a search business.

 

A phd from Harvard with an annual income of $250K who does not click on ads is not a "high quality" user while a guy working for hourly wage of $5 clicking lots of search ads is.

 

I'm very well aware of that, I know a lot more about ad CTR than about search CTR.

 

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.

[Liberty]

Well at least we can agree that somehow, someway there's real competition brewing for Google (the size and scope is still in contention).  It only took 36 hours and lots of text but by golly we did it.  We should replace the US government. :)

 

I've agreed with that from the start. I just think we disagree on how solid/fragile Google's competitive position is.

 

I wasn't really searching for them.  They jumped out at me and eventually I concluded that the book was a kiss ass bromance novel rather than an objective review of Google's development.  Really I'm trying to add balance to the discussion..  both in terms of that book and the discussion here.  Something else that jumped at out me is that things have gotten a little too Google positive (Google+ ?) around here.  I'm doing what I can to bring us into less exuberant territory.

 

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.

 

The facts that are present are well researched and are interesting, but using In The Plex as a field guide for understanding Google's business and capabilities is probably not a good idea.

 

Agreed. Who suggested that?

 

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  ;)