The Google Conundrum

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I <3 Google, but I think they will have a very big problem on their hands very soon.

Page Rank is fantastic. I think it goes without saying that Google pretty much crushes the competition in terms of quality of results.

However, one thing Google itself doesn't do well is search real time information.

For example, a few months back, Google played around with the concept of real-time search results using Twitter and Facebook. They have since disabled this and are focusing on using Google + for real time results. It makes sense, they want to keep all of the money/references in house.

However, what if people don't use Google +? Twitter and Facebook already have HUGE, established user bases.

What if Twitter or Facebook decides they want to get into the search field? 750M users will surely generate a lot of results for just about any query, and beyond that, the searches will also have the benefit of semantics because Facebook has so much information about what a user likes and dislikes. I think real time results will be very valuable as the quantity of information continues to increase at such a rapid rate.

I think Google has cause for concern. I don't think their market share will go away over night or anything crazy like that, but I think they've got a problem on their hands. Despite being an avid Google user, I find myself searching Twitter for answers more and more lately, and I doubt I'm the only one.

What say you?

[mraynrand]

Come to Facegoogle, where I can help you search for anything and everything based using face-expression-recognition software. Whatever you want will appear on your screen with just a hint of conscious thought. Skypfacegoogle lets you search for everything on the mind of the person your are communicating with via webcam. NSFW though....

[MJZiggy]

I <3 Google, but I think they will have a very big problem on their hands very soon.

Page Rank is fantastic. I think it goes without saying that Google pretty much crushes the competition in terms of quality of results.

However, one thing Google itself doesn't do well is search real time information.

For example, a few months back, Google played around with the concept of real-time search results using Twitter and Facebook. They have since disabled this and are focusing on using Google + for real time results. It makes sense, they want to keep all of the money/references in house.

However, what if people don't use Google +? Twitter and Facebook already have HUGE, established user bases.

What if Twitter or Facebook decides they want to get into the search field? 750M users will surely generate a lot of results for just about any query, and beyond that, the searches will also have the benefit of semantics because Facebook has so much information about what a user likes and dislikes. I think real time results will be very valuable as the quantity of information continues to increase at such a rapid rate.

I think Google has cause for concern. I don't think their market share will go away over night or anything crazy like that, but I think they've got a problem on their hands. Despite being an avid Google user, I find myself searching Twitter for answers more and more lately, and I doubt I'm the only one.

What say you?

It's too easy having the google search bar in my address bar. I just type what I want and it shows up. Even when I have facebook open.

[Little Whiskey]

I use yahoo

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It's too easy having the google search bar in my address bar. I just type what I want and it shows up. Even when I have facebook open.

You don't think that browser makers / companies would provide this functionality? I think it could be argued that every browser maker has a vested interest in getting people off of Google. Maybe not FF.

[3irty1]

Or Chromium. FF and Chromium together are half of the internet.

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Or Chromium. FF and Chromium together are half of the internet.

Yes I forgot about Chrome. FF is shrinking in Market share. I don't think Mozilla cares who they use period, so I could easily see them adding additional options such as Twitter and FB. If more people start using these, there isn't any evidence they wouldn't default to one or another.

Chrome would obviously not switch.

I think Google is in trouble here. If I'm heavily invested in Google, when Facebook IPOs I move my money there. What can slow down a machine with 750 million people actively using it (they just reported that 750 mil people were ACTIVE in the past month, that's insane!). If people start using Google +, then yes, they'll have a ton of info to apply semantics to search and be able to determine relevancy of ads/results based on the likes/dislikes of said person, but at this point it's a big ? whether G+ will become anything. I seem to recall Google being pumped up about Buzz as well and I'm sure myself, like the majority of GMail users, never actually opened it

Even though I foresee the future of Facebook being very bright, I'm not counting out Twitter in the search wars. Twitter is extremely conducive to search. Where I think FB has the big example is they can easily apply a "Serve not Search" principal because they know so much about the people.

[3irty1]

I see what you mean about Facebook and I wondered the same thing when I saw Facebook implement email. Even if they don't get into search, they can slowly sneak into other online apps that are dominated like Google like maps, cloud office suites, video hosting, etc. And you're right, facebook might be able to do all of those things better because of how much they know about you.

I wouldn't say Google is in trouble though and that's certainly not a company that you want to count out. They have been in the game so much longer and have a lot going for them to take over even more. They have youtube for one. Google and Youtube are still ranked 1 and 3 by Alexa. Google's ad system is second to none which is what actually generates the money we're talking about. They also have a video map of the whole world that took some time to put together. Google+ could blow people away. Lets not forget that Google also has the star embedded operating system Android. Facebook has a long ways to go if they want to compete with Google on all fronts.

You're obviously more of a twitter guy than I am. Explain to me what makes it such a great searching site. I've been on Twitter since the very beginning but only used it as an easy way to send automatic SMS from other projects. Now its really just a news source for me that I go on less than once a week. I can see how it'd be useful for those who track it constantly on smartphones but I still have a dumbphone.

[Freak Out]

I'm in the beta of both Google Music and +....I like them both....I hate Facebook.

[MJZiggy]

I'm in the beta of both Google Music and +....I like them both....I hate Facebook.

Actually, Facebook needs to improve their security before it will ever take over google. There are too many instances where FB is trying to use your private information in some way that you did not know about. That said, the new partnering of FB and Skype should be interesting. Then again, I don't need to be on FB to skype someone and I don't even know if any of my facebook friends are skype connections. I still use google every single day. Many times. For just about everything. Don't know whether + will pan out or not, but if it doesn't, I don't see it really being much trouble for the company. They still get 85,000 applications a year. I'm sure they can hire bright enough folks to come up with something cool for the next go-round.

[Freak Out]

Google maps 5.7 for Android rocks.

[MJZiggy]

Google maps 5.7 for Android rocks.

Yes, yes it does. Latitude is pretty awesome too.

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I see what you mean about Facebook and I wondered the same thing when I saw Facebook implement email. Even if they don't get into search, they can slowly sneak into other online apps that are dominated like Google like maps, cloud office suites, video hosting, etc. And you're right, facebook might be able to do all of those things better because of how much they know about you.

I wouldn't say Google is in trouble though and that's certainly not a company that you want to count out. They have been in the game so much longer and have a lot going for them to take over even more. They have youtube for one. Google and Youtube are still ranked 1 and 3 by Alexa. Google's ad system is second to none which is what actually generates the money we're talking about. They also have a video map of the whole world that took some time to put together. Google+ could blow people away. Lets not forget that Google also has the star embedded operating system Android. Facebook has a long ways to go if they want to compete with Google on all fronts.

You're obviously more of a twitter guy than I am. Explain to me what makes it such a great searching site. I've been on Twitter since the very beginning but only used it as an easy way to send automatic SMS from other projects. Now its really just a news source for me that I go on less than once a week. I can see how it'd be useful for those who track it constantly on smartphones but I still have a dumbphone.

There was an article I read recently from a senior engineer who was leaving Google. Basically he was talking about their technology and how it's pretty outdated now and a bitch to maintain and scale. Where is the motivation to improve your core products when you're growing so fast and printing money?? They were basically making the argument that Google is in a lot of trouble with their technology stack and their "Google way", where they basically make every product fit into their distributed systems (such as Big Table) when they really don't need to be and end up taking a lot more time to make something work. Basically he was saying the small, fast and lean company and it's 20% free creative time was really a sham. It was an interesting read, I'll see if I can find a link.

Twitter is great for searching because you're getting current information and seeing conversations between two or more people. If I go and search for "UITableView grouped background color iPad" without quotes in Google, I will get all sorts of results from iOs 3 all the way through iOs 5, for example. I would have to use the filtering options such as "latest" for the time duration, etc. Basically, I'm going to have to weed through a lot of deprecated results because page rank doesn't really account for something being a year old.

As I'm sure you know, Page Rank is kept under pretty tight wraps and I'm sure it's evolved, but my understanding is the backbone of it is the more links from other highly rated source, the better your site will score.

So, in the above example, Stackoverflow is a great source for developers, so it's always very high in the search results because people link to their stuff all the time, but often times the first page of results is outdated because there are so many old references to it. I find myself using the time period restriction in Google more and more to get applicable results.

With Twitter, it's quite a bit more likely that I would get someone asking/answering the question in the past week. With the size of the site's membership, I would guess it reasonable that there would be an answer from today. Also, the platform has given me the ability to reach out to people that I otherwise wouldn't in a casual way. I've reached out to the iOs twitter developer about the quality of his table cells and implementation of double buffering, etc in the past.

An example from today. I was googling "Bill Michaels" to find out what was going on with him and WSSP. I had to adjust the settings to "Past 24 hours" (or latest, whatever) to get the information, but Google didn't have anything about it really. Twitter did.

Twitter is not great for searching yet. It has the potential to be. I think Facebook could really mop the floor if they wanted to.

[3irty1]

That's interesting, it never occurred to me to use twitter like that but it makes sense that actual people indexing stuff has some advantages. And as less and less people share their opinions through blogs, personal websites, and such in favor of things like twitter and facebook which google doesn't index your preference for twitter over google could increase.

I never thought of Google as small or lean, they are a giant software powerhouse. They pump out monster projects like no other software giant I can think of. It kind of makes me wonder what Microsoft does with its time.

[mraynrand]

This is an interesting thread. I'm not on facebook or twitter, but I've had a lot of people request that I sign up for facebook, so they can network with me that way, so I probably grudgingly will go there. I find the aspect of several different networks having content 'walled off' from one another to be disturbing. So now when I search for info using google I guess I know that I'm probably missing entire massive set(s) of information. But is this entirely true? Google searches seem to have facebook and twitter links - what is that all about?