spiderman123
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Tweets Alain de Botton, philosopher, author, and now online aphorist:
The logical conclusion of our relationship to computers: expectantly to type what is the meaning of my life into Google.
You can do this, of course. Type what is th and faster than you can find the e Google is sending choices back at you: what is the cloud? what is the mean? what is the american dream? what is the illuminati? Google is trying to read your mind. Only its not your mind. Its the World Brain. And whatever that is, we know that a twelve-year-old company based in Mountain View, California, is wired into it like no one else.
Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing. Nowadays you cant have a long dinner-table argument about who won the Oscar for that Neil Simon movie where she plays an actress who doesnt win an Oscar; at any moment someone will pull out a pocket device and Google it. If you need the art-history meaning of picturesque, you could find it in The Book of Answers, compiled two decades ago by the New York Public Librarys reference desk, but you wont. Part of Googles mission is to make the books of answers redundant (and the reference librarians, too). A hamadryad is a wood-nymph, also a poisonous snake in India, and an Abyssinian baboon, says the narrator of John Banvilles 2009 novel, The Infinities. It takes a god to know a thing like that. Not anymore.
The business of finding facts has been an important gear in the workings of human knowledge, and the technology has just been upgraded from rubber band to nuclear reactor. No wonder theres some confusion about Googles exact role in thatalong with increasing fear about its power and its intentions.
Most of the time Google does not actually have the answers. When people say, I looked it up on Google, they are committing a solecism. When they try to erase their embarrassing personal histories on Google, they are barking up the wrong tree. It is seldom right to say that anything is true according to Google. Google is the oracle of redirection. Go there for hamadryad, and it points you to Wikipedia. Or the Free Online Dictionary. Or the Official Hamadryad Web Site (its a rock band, too, wouldnt you know). Google defines its mission as to organize the worlds information, not to possess it or accumulate it. Then again, a substantial portion of the worlds printed books have now been copied onto the companys servers, where they share space with millions of hours of video and detailed multilevel imagery of the entire globe, from satellites and from its squadrons of roving street-level cameras. Not to mention the great and growing trove of information Google possesses regarding the interests and behavior of, approximately, everyone.
When I say Google possesses all this information, thats not the same as owning it. What it means to own information is very much in flux.
In barely a decade Google has made itself a global brand bigger than Coca-Cola or GE; it has created more wealth faster than any company in history; it dominates the information economy. How did that happen? It happened more or less in plain sight. Google has many secrets but the main ingredients of its success have not been secret at all, and the business story has already provided grist for dozens of books. Steven Levys new account, In the Plex, is the most authoritative to date and in many ways the most entertaining. Levy has covered personal computing for almost thirty years, for Newsweek and Wired and in six previous books, and has visited Googles headquarters periodically since 1999, talking with its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and, as much as has been possible for a journalist, observing the company from the inside. He has been able to record some provocative, if slightly self-conscious, conversations like this one in 2004 about their hopes for Google:
It will be included in peoples brains, said Page. When you think about something and dont really know much about it, you will automatically get information.
Thats true, said Brin. Ultimately I view Google as a way to augment your brain with the knowledge of the world. Right now you go into your computer and type a phrase, but you can imagine that it could be easier in the future, that you can have just devices you talk into, or you can have computers that pay attention to whats going on around them .
Page said, Eventually youll have the implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer.
In 2004, Google was still a private company, five years old, already worth $25 billion, and handling about 85 percent of Internet searches. Its single greatest innovation was the algorithm called PageRank, developed by Page and Brin when they were Stanford graduate students running their research project from a computer in a dorm room. The problem was that most Internet searches produced useless lists of low-quality results. The solution was a simple idea: to harvest the implicit knowledge already embodied in the architecture of the World Wide Web, organically evolving.
The essence of the Web is the linking of individual pages on websites, one to another. Every link represents a recommendationa vote of interest, if not quality. So the algorithm assigns every page a rank, depending on how many other pages link to it. Furthermore, all links are not valued equally. A recommendation is worth more when it comes from a page that has a high rank itself. The math isnt trivialPageRank is a probability distribution, and the calculation is recursive, each pages rank depending on the ranks of pages that depend and so on. Page and Brin patented PageRank and published the details even before starting the company they called Google.
Most people have already forgotten how dark and unsignposted the Internet once was. A user in 1996, when the Web comprised hundreds of thousands of sites with millions of pages, did not expect to be able to search for Olympics and automatically find the official site of the Atlanta games. That was too hard a problem. And what was a search supposed to produce for a word like university? AltaVista, then the leading search engine, offered up a seemingly unordered list of academic institutions, topped by the Oregon Center for Optics.
Levy recounts a conversation between Page and an AltaVista engineer, who explained that the scoring system would rank a page higher if university appeared multiple times in the headline. AltaVista seemed untroubled that the Oregon center did not qualify as a major university. A conventional way to rank universities would be to consult experts and assess measures of quality: graduate rates, retention rates, test scores. The Google approach was to trust the Web and its numerous links, for better and for worse.
PageRank is one of those ideas that seem obvious after the fact. But the business of Internet search, young as it was, had fallen into some rigid orthodoxies. The main task of a search engine seemed to be the compiling of an index. People naturally thought of existing technologies for organizing the worlds information, and these were found in encyclopedias and dictionaries. They could see that alphabetical order was about to become less important, but they were slow to appreciate how dynamic and ungraspable their target, the Internet, really was. Even after Page and Brin flipped on the light switch, most companies continued to wear blindfolds.
The Internet had entered its first explosive phase, boom and then bust for many ambitious startups, and one thing everyone knew was that the way to make money was to attract and retain users. The buzzword was portalthe users point of entry, like Excite, Go.com, and Yahooand portals could not make money by rushing customers into the rest of the Internet. Stickiness, as Levy says, was the most desired metric in websites at the time. Portals did not want their search functions to be too good. That sounds stupid, but then again how did Google intend to make money when it charged users nothing? Its user interface at first was plain, minimalist, and emphatically free of advertisingnothing but a box for the user to type a query, followed by two buttons, one to produce a list of results and one with the famously brash tag Im feeling lucky.
The Google founders, Larry and Sergey, did everything their own way. Even in the unbuttoned culture of Silicon Valley they stood out from the start as originals, Montessori kids (per Levy), unconcerned with standards and proprieties, favoring big red gym balls over office chairs, deprecating organization charts and formal titles, showing up for business meetings in roller-blade gear. It is clear from all these books that they believed their own hype; they believed with moral fervor in the primacy and power of information. (Sergey and Larry did not invent the companys famous mottoDont be evilbut they embraced it, and now they may as well own it.)
As they saw it from the first, their mission encompassed not just the Internet but all the worlds books and images, too. When Google created a free e-mail serviceGmailits competitors were Microsoft, which offered users two megabytes of storage of their past and current e-mail, and Yahoo, which offered four megabytes. Google could have trumped that with six or eight; instead it provided 1,000a gigabyte. It doubled that a year later and promised to keep giving people more space forever.
They have been relentless in driving computer science forward. Google Translate has achieved more in machine translation than the rest of the worlds artificial intelligence experts combined. Googles new mind-reading type-ahead feature, Google Instant, has to date (boasts the 2010 annual report) saved our users over 100 billion keystrokes and counting. (If you are seeking information about the Gobi Desert, for example, you receive results well before you type the word desert.)
Somewhere along the line they gave people the impression that they didnt care for advertisingthat they scarcely had a business plan at all. In fact its clear that advertising was fundamental to their plan all along. They did scorn conventional marketing, however; their attitude seemed to be that Google would market itself. As, indeed, it did. Google was a verb and a meme. The media seized on Google as a marker of a new form of behavior, writes Levy.
Endless articles rhapsodized about how people would Google their blind dates to get an advance dossier or how they would type in ingredients on hand to Google a recipe or use a telephone number to Google a reverse lookup. Columnists shared their self-deprecating tales of Googling themselves . A contestant on the TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? arranged with his brother to tap Google during the Phone-a-Friend lifeline .And a fifty-two-year-old man suffering chest pains Googled heart attack symptoms and confirmed that he was suffering a coronary thrombosis.
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Googles first marketing hire lasted a matter of months in 1999; his experience included Miller Beer and Tropicana and his proposal involved focus groups and television commercials. When Doug Edwards interviewed for a job as marketing manager later that year, he understood that the key word was viral. Edwards lasted quite a bit longer, and now hes the first Google insider to have published his memoir of the experience. He was, as he says proudly in his subtitle to Im Feeling Lucky, Google employee number 59. He provides two other indicators of how early that was: so early that he nabbed the e-mail address doug@google.com; and so early that Googles entire server hardware lived in a rented cage.
Less than six hundred square feet, it felt like a shotgun shack blighting a neighborhood of gated mansions. Every square inch was crammed with racks bristling with stripped-down CPUs [central processing units]. There were twenty-one racks and more than fifteen hundred machines, each sprouting cables like Play-Doh pushed through a spaghetti press. Where other cages were right-angled and inorganic, Googles swarmed with life, a giant termite mound dense with frenetic activity and intersecting curves.
Levy got a glimpse of Googles data storage a bit later and remarked, If you could imagine a male college freshman made of gigabytes, this would be his dorm.
Not anymore. Google owns and operates a constellation of giant server farms spread around the globehuge windowless structures, resembling aircraft hangars or power plants, some with cooling towers. The server farms stockpile the exabytes of information and operate an array of staggeringly clever technology. This is Googles share of the cloud (that notional place where our data live) and it is the lions share.
How thoroughly and how radically Google has already transformed the information economy has not been well understood. The merchandise of the information economy is not information; it is attention. These commodities have an inverse relationship. When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive. Attention is what we, the users, give to Google, and our attention is what Google sellsconcentrated, focused, and crystallized.
Googles business is not search but advertising. More than 96 percent of its $29 billion in revenue last year came directly from advertising, and most of the rest came from advertising-related services. Google makes more from advertising than all the nations newspapers combined. Its worth understanding precisely how this works. Levy chronicles the development of the advertising engine: a fantastic achievement in building a money machine from the virtual smoke and mirrors of the Internet. In The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry), a book that can be read as a sober and admonitory companion, Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media scholar at the University of Virginia, puts it this way: We are not Googles customers: we are its product. Weour fancies, fetishes, predilections, and preferencesare what Google sells to advertisers.
The evolution of this unparalleled money machine piled one brilliant innovation atop another, in fast sequence:
1. Early in 2000, Google sold premium sponsored links: simple text ads assigned to particular search terms. A purveyor of golf balls could have its ad shown to everyone who searched for golf or, even better, golf balls. Other search engines were already doing this. Following tradition, they charged according to how many people saw each ad. Salespeople sold the ads to big accounts, one by one.
2. Late that year, engineers devised an automated self-service system, dubbed AdWords. The opening pitch went, Have a credit card and 5 minutes? Get your ad on Google today, and suddenly thousands of small businesses were buying their first Internet ads.
3. From a short-lived startup called GoTo (by 2003 Google owned it) came two new ideas. One was to charge per click rather than per view. People who click on an ad for golf balls are more likely to buy them than those who simply see an ad on Googles website. The other idea was to let advertisers bid for keywordssuch as golf ballagainst one another in fast online auctions. Pay-per-click auctions opened a cash spigot. A click meant a successful ad, and some advertisers were willing to pay more for that than a human salesperson could have known. Plaintiffs lawyers seeking clients would bid as much as fifty dollars for a single click on the keyword mesotheliomathe rare form of cancer caused by asbestos.
4. Googlemonitoring its users behavior so systematicallyhad instant knowledge of which ads were succeeding and which were not. It could view click-through rates as a measure of ad quality. And in determining the winners of auctions, it began to consider not just the money offered but the appeal of the ad: an effective ad, getting lots of clicks, would get better placement.
Now Google had a system of profitable cycles in place, positive feedback pushing advertisers to make more effective ads and giving them data to help them do it and giving users more satisfaction in clicking on ads, while punishing noise and spam. The system enforced Googles insistence that advertising shouldnt be a transaction between publisher and advertiser but a three-way relationship that also included the user, writes Levy. Hardly an equal relationship, however. Vaidhyanathan sees it as exploitative: The Googlization of everything entails the harvesting, copying, aggregating, and ranking of information about and contributions made by each of us.
By 2003, AdWords Select was serving hundreds of thousands of advertisers and making so much money that Google was deliberating hiding its success from the press and from competitors. But it was only a launching pad for the next brilliancy.
5. So far, ads were appearing on Googles search pages, discreet in size, clearly marked, at the top or down the right side. Now the company expanded its platform outward. The aim was to develop a form of artificial intelligence that could analyze chunks of textwebsites, blogs, e-mail, booksand match them with keywords. With two billion Web pages already in its index and with its close tracking of user behavior, Google had exactly the information needed to tackle this problem. Given a website (or a blog or an e-mail), it could predict which advertisements would be effective.
Read the rest here : http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/aug/18/how-google-dominates-us/?pagination=false
