The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001224.html

by ajbatac • 17 years ago

85 56 17 years ago

bdfh42• 17 years ago

My brother has a site that has just gone dark on Google. This is a site that uses no SEO "techniques" - it's just a plain site with content and a form to buy a product (not software) that actually uses Google's own "Checkout". Oddly, it turns up OK on Google's image search but never makes it into the regular key word search results.

Obviously, investigations are on-going but it is a worrying that a site supporting a legitimate commercial venture should just disappear from Google and thus (in effect) from the Internet.

jacquesm• 17 years ago

Maybe that's googles' subtle way of telling your brother to buy some advertising with them ?

andreyf• 17 years ago

This happens randomly. My Rutgers site (one page, edu domain), was de-listed for a couple of weeks (didn't exist, even when I specified "site:rutgers.edu"), then just re-appeared. I also noticed this with Oliver Steele's functional.js page - I was used to typing "functional js" into Google to find it, and at one point, it disappeared for a week or two from ranking alltogether, only to mysterious re-appear again.

Maybe it's some clever way to check whether or not people track their SEO? De-list sites, and watch if the person reverts to an earlier version of the page, or submits it for Google to crawl?

lionhearted2• 17 years ago

The single worst business decision I ever made was migrating a site on a .net extension over to the .com once the company bought it without making damn sure not to lose rankings in Google. I had heard that permanent redirects preserved pagerank/googleness, but dropped from top 5 on some important terms to outside the front page. This single poor decision/poor execution cost me and the company tens of thousands of dollars, which is orders of magnitude higher than the additional credibility the .com would've brought.

I suppose I had to learn that lesson sooner or later, so I'll go glass-half-full and be grateful that it was on tens of thousands early in life, instead of more later. But that was a pretty expensive lesson.

apollo• 17 years ago

I was also under the impression that permanent redirects preserve pagerank... how are you supposed to execute a domain change like this properly?

Jasber• 17 years ago

301 redirects are the suggested method for permanently redirecting pages for search engines.

This will preserve pagerank, but not immediately. This means for a while (1 week-3 months), many of your pages will be dropped from their current rankings.

They will be returned, eventually. But Google has to update their entire index before you'll start to see any improvements.

prakash• 17 years ago

can't you do a CNAME change? wouldn't that preserve google rankings?

arohner• 17 years ago

Naive question: Why is the immediate switchover necessary? Can't you run the same site on foo.net and foo.com, and turn on redirecting from .net to .com AFTER google updates its index?

twopoint7182• 17 years ago

I also have a naive question, does a .com really have "additional credibility" over something else? Why? How about independent of what other websites are doing?

snprbob86• 17 years ago

I assume there is some credibility to it. More importantly, it is the default extension tried/searched by browsers when the user doesn't specify a TLD.

froo2• 17 years ago

Its more due to the brand association people have with the .com domain.

When you're telling friends about sites "I found this great site, its called facebook" - for those people not in the know, the natural thing people do is to use the .com extension.

It's also why the .com domains command a higher premium on the domain name aftermarket.

lionhearted2• 17 years ago

In response to people suggesting alternative ways of doing it - yeah, hindsight is 20/20. Used 301 permanent redirects on every page, and yet, still meltdown.

As for .com's having more credibility - I reckon they have a bit more, plus you'll lose some traffic when they mistake the .net/.com. There's a few sites I visit that are .net's, and when I'm not on my own computer with browser history, sometimes I accidentally go to the .com. We paid around $1500 for the .com in... 2004 maybe? This made a ton of sense, because with our margins/gross/net, it would have made a ton of sense for a competitor to buy the .com - they'd have been paid back on it if they could've got it to top 5 in google for us. (To all the people who might say that we could then sue them, the answer is that you're 100% technically right, but that's ugly and you don't want to waste time/lawyer fees in court except as a last resort). Anyway, even if it increased our conversions or preserved lost traffic by a small amount, it would have been a good business move... ignoring the loss of search rankings, which wasn't planned on and hurt.

bradtgmurray• 17 years ago

I'm not sure if Jeff knows what a monopoly is.

raganwald4• 17 years ago

Google is effectively a monopoly, however the issue here is that they do not appear to be misusing their monopoly. Microsoft has been convicted of using illegal tactics to build and maintain their monopoly like licensing agreements that effectively shut competitors out of the OEM operating system business. Apple has been accused of abusing their monopoly by leveraging their position in music players into dominance in online music sales and then enchaining the two the way Microsoft enchained Office and Windows dominance.

What, exactly, have Google done to shut competitors out of the search business? What agreements have they forced on advertisers to discourage them from advertising with anyone else?

And while they ship other products that leverage their competence in search, they do not appear to enchain them. For example, they dominate in online search and have a strong position in online mail. And yes, they can leverage scale to sell advertising on both properties. However, their does not appear to be a link between the two products. For example, when I perform a web search it does not appear to use my mail inbox to influence the relevance rankings of online search.

So far, Google appears to be following a different strategic path than Microsoft did.

jcl• 17 years ago

On the other hand, they effectively pay Mozilla to make Google search the Firefox default homepage. They also distribute a free mobile phone operating system that is heavily integrated with Google services. And they make a web browser (advertised on the main Google page of other web browsers) that incorporates features important to widespread adoption of Google applications (Gears, high performance layout and Javascript engines, robust process model).

statictype• 17 years ago

True. Google's monopoly comes from making an excellent product, not from using underhanded shenanigans.

Also, I'm not worried about "incentive to improve". Google is constantly improving and tweaking their search results. That's the only way they will be able to maintain their monopoly. Because, unlike a platform like Microsoft, there's very little inertia in switching over to a different search engine.

alexandros• 17 years ago

Google may not be a monopoly, but they are certainly a single point of failure for many businesses. As such, these businesses should not be happy that their continued survival depends on some algorithm not flagging them a 'false positive'. Monopoly or not, I can't help but think that this is not a healthy situation.

coglethorpe• 17 years ago

It's not a healthy situation, but that's largely due to the poor results other search engines provide. I tried using Yahoo! and Live for a while instead of Google. I had forgotten how awful the results were. It wasn't the formatting or the speed, but the lack of relevance the results had to my query. It's no wonder people don't use Google's competitors.

In the mean time, the rest of us have to pray that our site is considered "relevant" in Google's eyes.

inerte3• 17 years ago

It's not even the results for some people, but Google itself.

I've seen studies where the researchers show Yahoo results on Google's template, and vice-versa, and people still thought that Google had better results.

Google is a brand nowadays (and a verb ;). The tech will become secondary in a near future. It's like Coke vs. Pepsi, they taste 99% alike and blind tests show costumers have no preference on one over another.

I am not saying they don't have an edge on quality these days, but in the future, just relevant links on the page that appears after you type your search terms will not be enough.

aneesh• 17 years ago

Try again now. Both Yahoo! and Live are pretty close to Google right now in terms of relevance. Branding is another story, but the results aren't bad.

mhartl• 17 years ago

A few months ago I switched to Yahoo! Search as an experiment. I'm quite confident that, if you'd replaced the Yahoo! branding with Google's, I would never have known the difference.

But yet I switched back. Why? I was hosting the Silicon Valley Rails meetup, and our speaker Emmett Shear (of Justin.tv) had forgotten to bring his laptop, and had to borrow mine. I was so uncomfortable at the idea of my home page---Yahoo!, of all things, and not Google!---being broadcast to a room of Rails hackers that I changed it back to the Canonical Choice. And now inertia has returned, and I'm back in the warm bosom of mother Google.

I'm pretty sure that Yahoo! Search and Live Search are basically as good as Google nowadays. When it debuted, Google was qualitatively better than any other search engine, but today Google's lead is based mainly on branding.

mechanical_fish• 17 years ago

Yes, I think it's important not to get dragged into a semantic debate over exactly how the word monopoly fails to describe this situation. Google's position may well be unique in human history, so it's not surprising that our existing laws and metaphors are inadequate to describe it precisely.

pj3• 17 years ago

I think the change in the frequency of occurences of incidents of companies like google is a measure of something. It was the IBM era companies, then the Microsoft era, the Dell era, Google, then what is next?

The technology is getting closer and closer to the end user, both in terms of breadth of knowledge and depth of knowledge. Ease of access. IBM's were big computers in corporations, Microsoft were pcs in the early adopter homes, dell in the mainstream homes, Google on the Internet.

What's next? Mobile? Wireless? Cloud Computing?

It's one hurdle after the next in both directions. Hardware footprint minimization, proliferation, and ease of use. Longevity. Functionality.

People are going to get left behind. They're just not going to want to keep up. They'll reject the new way. The rational way. The more efficient way. The faster, more productive way. The enabling way. The way toward free will.

yters• 17 years ago

It can be considered a natural monopoly

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

joe_the_user• 17 years ago

The thing about Google is that rather than seizing a market, they created it and their continued growth involves them improving their product so that they are used even more.

Sure, businesses depend on Google but Google was the first search that could be depended on. Google was the first search entity of any sort that allowed the web to be effectively monetized. They are that "???" in the three step plan "1. Get attention, 2.??? 3. Profit". Google did not create the web but they certainly "grew" it and thus they are currently the "good" kind of monopoly, one which aims to sell as much as possible, rather than the bad kind of monopoly which aims to extract the most rent possible from selling the same amount of stuff year-in, year-out (the model for a bad monopoly would be an unregulated electric company. Microsoft only partly fits this model but MS is still clearly closer to being a rent-extractor than Google).

c00p3r• 17 years ago

Google is a brand with good karma, like Nokia or Apple. That's not enough to stay alive, but no idea works standalone. Google did many smart steps to attract the geeks, and it is how they probably will win the battle for SMB market.

raganwald4• 17 years ago

On Paul's disagreement scale this comment is right down in the sewer, but please pardon me while I vent:

How come Jeff is always grumbling about Apple's "Monopoly" on music and now Google's "Monopoly" on search but he never grumbles about Microsoft's actual monopoly on desktop operating systems and office back ends?

In this post he even calls out the people who grumble about Miscosoft and asks them to grumble about Google. But somehow, he never makes the connection that perhaps people who grumble about Apple and Google might want to do a little grumbling about Microsoft?

> I find that talent is far less important than enthusiasm.

--Jeff Atwood

prospero2• 17 years ago

I think his stance is that there's (more than?) sufficient grumbling about Microsoft, and insufficient grumbling about Apple and Google. There's an obvious bias to his writing, inasmuch as he just takes this as a given and moves on, but that doesn't mean he's totally wrong.

raganwald4• 17 years ago

There's an obvious bias to his writing, inasmuch as he just takes this as a given and moves on, but that doesn't mean he's totally wrong.

Solid gold, thank you. Putting Jeff aside, I prefer blogs that have a healthy amount of bias. Writing that tries to be judicious, dispassionate and balanced often ends up being dry and comes off with a pseudo-academic tone.

A little bias adds passion and fire. As long as they aren't totally wrong, that's a good thing. A while back all the big companies were "diversifying" so that their stock would become immune to the vagaries of any one market or business unit.

This was almost always a failure, because professional managers want to achieve diversification through their portfolio selection, where they can pursue their own mix and make changes by trading in the market, not through having business managers engage in lengthy and expensive M&A activity.

Blogs are a little like that: If I want a balanced read I'd rather read several different posts about the same subject than try to find one person who tries to present the centrist view.

rbanffy3• 17 years ago

The fact Microsoft can still get away with their abuse of monopoly is sufficient proof there is not nearly enough grumbling about Microsoft.

jhawk28• 17 years ago

Wait till he complains that StackOverFlow has the monopoly on question/answer sites. Based on the numbers that they are seeing, they are well on their way.

KaiP• 17 years ago

The reason people find Google less objectionable than Microsoft is that it is far easier for the average consumer to switch search engines than it is for them to switch operating systems. So while Microsoft could force out better competitors, there's no way for Google to stop people from using another search engine. There just needs to be one that is worth switching to.

peregrine• 17 years ago

And there isn't even a company close to Google in search quality. Nor one with even a plan yet alone the budget.

rbanffy3• 17 years ago

Google also has not yet been convicted on monopoly abuse charges. Microsoft has. More than once.

And, quite frankly, their continuous defiance and misconduct does not help its image of a serious company.

pj3• 17 years ago

There are a lot worth switching to. Cuil is nice. There are more to search results than speed of delivery.

I monitor search term locations in several search engines and notice the numbers of results returned for relatively new terms will sky rocket on Google, then fall dramatically back, while the others would remain relatively stable.

Why would that happen? I'm still trying to figure that out.

kleevr• 17 years ago

Any thoughts on how google-integrated tools like HNSearch (webmynd) will play a role in the present-future of the post-google-"search monopoly"?

jsdalton• 17 years ago

> 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.

Jeff missed a major point here.

What is ACTUALLY a disturbing thought is that if Google decided for any reason to de-list stackoverflow.com they would lose 83% of their traffic. Like that, in an instant.

Worse, they would be left with little or no recourse. Joel is probably enough of a big-wig that he could place a few calls in to Google or raise hell about it on his blog, but otherwise there is no one to talk to at Google or nothing to be done. I've read horror stories about this kind of thing here and there, and it's terrifying.

The comparisons to Micrsoft miss the mark, because Google is a different kind of monopoly and poses a different set of problems to a different group of people.

bo• 17 years ago

Have there existed good alternatives or proposals for alternatives to google that people haven't heard about possibly because google doesn't return them?

dmoney• 17 years ago

This page, linked from the article, is also a nice read: http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2008/03/mr-googles-guid...

Whimsley Hall is now strewn, like Miss Haversham's house, with cobwebs and dust. Most visitors no longer come in by the front door to take a tour. Instead, Mr. Google (a travel agent who doubles as our butler) directs them straight down to the basement where the family archives are kept and tells them to look at one particular historical document called The Netflix Prize: 300 Days Later. They read this and then they walk right out.

The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture

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