It's funny that Google is publishing this. I work in the ad tech industry and Google did this to us 3 months ago, in order to connect to ad exchange<p>Signed contracts of about 200 pages long, including really long NDAs
Took $35k deposit
Put us through Dev / Testing Cycle including a few hundred million hits each day for about a month.
After spending 3 months on it, they said that we were profiling user data (which we were not - it was an ignorant mistake on our part in checking an item YES in the contract rather than NO). We pleaded, begged and argued with no merit.
Google blocked us from accessing their ad exchange ..<p>In the meanwhile...Google does user profiling openly, mining search queries, Google+, Google Maps and everything else available at their disposal, including the kind of apps that you open on your phones (non android included, thanks to Admob).<p>It seems to me that they are deliberately blocking any fair competition in the marketplace. If this is not a monopoly, then what is this supposed to be?
<i>"For every search query performed on Google, whether it’s [hotels in Tulsa] or [New York Yankees scores], there are thousands, if not millions of web pages with helpful information."</i><p>True.<p>But there is exactly one Trade Winds Central Inn in Tulsa.<p>If I look for [hotels in Tulsa] right now, the name of that inn is prominently displayed in the "Hotels in Tulsa on Google" box. Clicking the name will lead not to a page about the inn but to a page of search results where that specific inn is again prominently displayed at the top. Clicking that link will bring a booking page where Expedia, Priceline and multiple others bid on providing booking service for that specific inn.<p>And if I scroll all the way to the bottom of that page I find a little link: <a href="http://www.tradewindstulsa.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.tradewindstulsa.com/</a> That's the the one vital link for that one little inn in central Tulsa, Arizona.<p>The "algorithm" placed the name of the inn on the top of the front page. Then it placed the actual link two clicks deep and at the bottom. The "algorithm" is not stupid...
Maybe I'm just a cynical, skeptical bastard, but if you have to actively state that you have serious competition, then I can quite reasonably assume that you are, in fact, a total monopoly.<p>Welcome to the Ministry of Truth, my friends. Let the doublethink engulf your senses, and may the newspeak slip off your tongue, for it is clear that Big Brother is watching, and it appears that he is deathly afraid of the EU. May the DOJ have mercy on his soul.
I work at <a href="http://samuru.com" rel="nofollow">http://samuru.com</a> we have about 70% unique searches. With out the hordes of default install users who type in the product slogan of every commercial, or try to get the Jeopardy questions before the clock runs out, we don't have a great cache hit ratio.<p>Combine this with the fact that Google is doing more and more to get Cache Collisions in their results (returning results that don't contain all the words in your search because it deemed word unimportant, or using synonyms) and it is hard to compete on speed.<p>That's why we don't. We compete on the idea we have better results.
Completely off topic, but why can't I keep the page zoomed out far enough to view the entire width of a paragraph? I'm on my iPhone; is Google doing something screwy to fuck with iOS users?
I wonder how many of them are literally "new", as in, "What cures a hang over" versus "What cures a hangover", and how many of them are "new" by the time Google's computer breaks it into a normalized query? I guess to the engineers designing that process, it's all new data that their algorithm has to deal with. But it'd be interesting to see the vitality of the search for new concepts and knowledge among Google's users.
Google Search is broken.<p>Even Verbatim search starts to look fishy.<p>Search for 'engine oil' and you will find 'health benefits from using fish oil'. I'm tired.
A few years ago it was reported at being 20-25%. <a href="http://searchengineland.com/google-25-of-queries-are-new-adding-question-engine-11535" rel="nofollow">http://searchengineland.com/google-25-of-queries-are-new-add...</a>
I feel Google will get replaced soon. The fact that search is getting more personalised is hurting me more than anything else. We dont get unbiased results. The User experience will definitely die down with this !!!
I've been trying to ween myself off search engines, and rather search directly from within specific websites:<p>Wikipedia - general information<p>StackOverflow - programming<p>IMDB - actors/movies<p>etc...<p>Obviously finding those websites in the 1st place requires a search engine or index of some kind, but I'm getting faster results going directly to the source :)
The whole 'algorithms do the ranking' thing is a misdirection. Algorithms do of course rank pages, but they do so according to criteria chosen by <i>humans</i> employed by Google. Google absolutely chooses which pages rank highly and which do not according to their own subjective human judgement, applied by machine. It is disingenuous of them to pretend otherwise.