Is Google actually producing?
Thursday March 27, 2008 by Derek Young
Large software companies can accomplish projects that smaller groups cannot come close to replicating. These big projects become the flagship products of the company, and each large company has at least one of these. Examples are Sun’s Java environment, Microsoft’s .NET framework, VMware’s technology, or Oracle’s database.
Some companies have many of these complex projects. Microsoft has Direct/X, the Microsoft C compiler, Visual Studio, XBox 360, and Microsoft Office, to name a few.
Google has one project like this, their search engine.
In the recent past, Google has gone on a hiring binge, acquiring big name open source developers and opening offices around the world. Expectations are high for a group of developers like this. My question is what do these people do?
My impression of Google is that everyone is working on their own or in small groups. Developers choose their own direction, working on their side projects, either unofficially in their 20% free time or officially. Sometimes these projects are made public, leading to hit or miss offerings like video.google.com and toys like Google Sky. The services Google has come up with recently have been mostly smaller (though well implemented) productivity applications. You get the impression that no product produced by Google has more than a small group of developers (besides the search engine).
GMail is probably Google’s second most advanced service and this is built on a distributed storage system that already existed as part of their search engine. Google Maps is well done, but the hard part (the data behind the maps) is licensed from NAVTEQ.
Do the best developers at Google work only on smaller independent projects? Are they doing internal projects that support the search engine? There’s a limit to what small groups can accomplish. Does Google have the logistical ability to produce another service as advanced as their search engine?
Not all products and service require highly sophisticated implementations. However, small competitors can clone simple applications (Google Calendar, Google Docs). This leaves Google vulnerable if its flagship product is toppled. If you took the search engine away they would not survive with what’s left.
Frustration a necessary part of coding? Google Apps email list spam prevention
I thought adsense was their flagship product these days?
— Pete Mar 27, 11:19 AM #
Maybe the search engine (along with AdSense that Pete just brought up) is the reason all the rest exist. And maybe that’s intentional.
I think with the profit made by the flagship products, they can risk having zillions of projects and not being productive right away. If one of them becomes a new breakthrough, they accomplished they goals.
I think Google’s environment is very favorable to make this happen.
— Felipe Coury Mar 27, 11:21 AM #
I think Felipe brings up a good point. It harkens back to the time of Bell Labs and Xerox’s PARC. They didn’t have a mandate to create anything income-producing; they were just to create and experiment. Out of that, we have Unix, Ethernet, computer GUI’s, and probably hundreds of other technology inventions that we might not have had otherwise had there been a direct cost/production mandate. Google is one of the few companies that can afford to blow lots of money to try to come up with new things.
— Joshua Kugler Mar 27, 01:54 PM #
Google hit a wall because they solved a hard AI problem by cheating.
The hard AI problem was to search the web by content. AI has consistently failed to figure out the meaning of human text — the classic example being the phrase: “Sally saw the puppy in the window and wanted it.” When you ask the AI program “Which did Sally want, the puppy or the window?” it can’t answer because it doesn’t know what any of the words mean.
To do useful search, you have to know what the content of web pages means. Google figured out how to do this by cheating — they stole free information already available (links created by humans) and monetized it.
The big problem for google is that there’s nowhere else to go. Google seems to be hiring the world’s best programmers in a frantic effort to solve the GOFAI problem, but as Bruce Sterling points out, http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2007/09/we-need-an-open.html:
“`Artificial Intelligence’ is so far from the ground-reality of computation that it ought to be dismissed like the term `phlogiston.’”
AI remains a spectacular failure, a classic example of a degenerating reserach project that has hit a permanent brick wall, akin to the Air Force’s atomic jet bomber boondoggle of the 1950s or the CIA’s remote viewing escapades of the 60s. No computer program can do the things even 10-year-old kids can do effortlessly, such as read a poem and concisely summarize it, or meaningfully translate from one language to another, or decide which entry in a bibliiography is most closely related to the subject matter of the article.
Meanwhile, the problem for google has only gotten worse. Now they’re scanning in millions of books. But books are even worse than webpages in terms of extracting meaning because many of the words are obsolete and much of the info only makes sense in cultural concept now centuries (or millenia) past. When Chaucer describes springtime as the season when trees’ roots are drenched in rich liquor, google adsense is likely to vomit out ads for alcoholic beverages. Double plus ungood, Winston.
Google is pissing money away because they have nothing else to do. It’s a hail mary pass. Meanwhile, the future of search is humans:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-04/bz_curator
Initially Google tapped the work of human beings by counting search links. Unfortunately, it was a very crude way of tapping human intelligence, because quantity of links is not =
quality of information. If it were, our libraries would contain mostly
copies of People magazine and TV Guide, far more popular than any of the books libraries actually possess.
Wikipedia fails for the same reason. Popularity is not accuracy. Facts are not determined by majority vote.
The semantic web, which boils down to tagging, fails for reasons Clay Shirky has explained:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
That leaves humans examining web content and summarizing it. Such people are known as “librarians.” Thr problem is that web content is getting generated exponentially faster than people can read and summarize it. It would help if we came up with one general semantic web tag: <MEANINGLESS CRAP>. That would eliminate 99% of web content. Alas, the remaining 1% still expands faster than the entire population of the world could read & cateogrize it, even if we could afford to put the entire population of the planet to work doing that (which we can’t).
— mclaren Mar 27, 03:32 PM #
The combination of the dominating search engine with Adsense/Adwords seems to be quite enough to invest in all those other projects.
The most interesting activities are around integration of the different applications and third-party applications. For example the Youtube API (http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/overview.html) allows your application to use Youtube for uploading and sharing videos, by using the GData and JavaScript APIs. The chromless player allows you seamless integration into your app, where only the watermark indicates where the video is actually coming from.
Its not hard to imagine a fee for a remote video hosting service that offers seamless integration. It would still be a lot cheaper that building it yourself.
— Jörn Zaefferer Mar 31, 08:02 AM #