an ode to google

so what's the deal with google? a lot actually. over the years i've looked at google from a number of different perspectives and i'll chalk some out here. i work in a related space so i've had some time to think about this.

a lot of people made money by building information portals in the last decade. to make money off a portal you need give people a reason to keep coming back. you either do this by providing content or by providing services. the companies that focus on content are making money, but not a whole lot. the average guy still prefers cable to internet explorer. there are reams of articles about how the internet revolutionized b2b, b2c, c2c etc. for the average internet user that means zilch - it just means you can buy stuff over the internet. the real value-add is the ability to find and share information. to find information you need an index and that's why search technology will be the hottest thing around for a long time.

google has great technology. they invested time and smart minds on algorithmic search and nothing else till they got it mostly right. a lot of players offered lexical search (basically looking for certain words in a document) that worked pretty well but got distracted with building sexier portals. google's technology which was initially roughly based on kleinberg's hubs and authorities idea combined with the ideas they described in their 'anatomy of a search engine' paper has definitely evolved, but the basic ideas are brilliant and still work. i had to review this paper for a graduate course in data mining. i had a funny slide on appendix a which was titled 'advertising and mixed motives' which decried advertising tied up with search engine results. i guess these guys are decrying all the way to the bank now :).

i'm still in awe of the number of technologies that google works on. the basic search is just the tip of the iceberg. they have invested time in a number of cool ideas that have huge potential - blogging, price-comparison, email, multi-lingual language support, image search ... it goes on.

in the midst of all of that they have the time to champion causes like the fight against deceptive software and maintain the google blog (which gives you a good feel for what the work-ethic is like...)

before you start thinking it - no, i don't work for google. far from it. but i respect the company and the direction they're taking. i respect the fact that all the heady hype and hoopla is written up by technologists who're peeking in from the outside at the outer layers of what they're working on. i respect the fact that they don't have vp's making statements about how cool their technology is. or how they're garnering market-share. or how they're trying to bump the stock price up by inane statements.


i need more caffeine. and yeah, that slartibartfast guy is a poser.