Category: Random, But Interesting

Google Tops Fortune’s 2007 List of Best Companies to Work for, Yahoo and MS Also Makes List



SearchEngineLand Analyzes Its Growth

USC Collaborators Preserve the Digital Fingerprints of Ancient Scribes

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Totally off topic, but….

So today I posted a couple of jobs over at FM, and I used LinkedIn’s job listing service. I plan to use others, including some of the job boards at FM sites like GigaOm, TechCrunch, and the like, but I was on LinkedIn for other reasons and decided to get it done there first.

One of the features I like best about LinkedIn’s job postings is the ability to send an email to your entire network about the job. Now, this can get a bit perilous – not everyone likes to get unsolicited emails. But on balance most folks seem OK with it, and I don’t mind getting them, so I sent all my colleagues the job announcement. Now, I am not in the business of actively building out a LinkedIn network, but over the years more than 400 folks have asked me to join their network, and I generally do.

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From time to time, I am jolted into re reading stuff that I practically memorized while writing the book. Here’s one passage, an appendix to “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” – the original paper by Larry and Sergey introducing Google – that felt like it was worth another look, in particular given the tempest over “tips” and ongoing pressures to monetize partnerships like AOL and YouTube, as well as the increasing creep in the number of ads we all see in Google results. I’ve bolded that which I find particularly worthy.

Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is “The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention”, a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.



Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who “deserves” to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from “friendly” companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline’s homepage when the airline’s name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

It was killed by “conservative managers” says an ex-Googler in this Chronicle article from earlier in the week.

The piece tracks familiar territory of rich early employees getting the itch to go do something else.

Extremely wealthy from stock options that soared in value, 100 of Google’s first 300 workers have quietly resigned to go to law school, help poor shopkeepers get loans or simply to live the good life. Although hardly a mass exodus, the numbers are adding up, scattering what some employees considered their second families.

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Google’s Matt Cutts explains what I thought was going on. Yahoo lost views due to Ajax.

I don’t trust any metrics but this one will make headlines. From the Times:

Google, the search engine company, displaced Yahoo as the world’s second-most-visited Web site in November and closed in on the leader, Microsoft, a market researcher said yesterday.

Visitors to Google’s sites rose 9.1 percent, to 475.7 million in November from a year earlier, while those to Yahoo sites rose 5.2 percent, to 475.3 million, the researcher, ComScore Networks, said. Both sites trail Microsoft, which had 501.7 million visitors, ComScore said

Aaron argues yes. I say, if it works, do it.