I guess this post has been a long time coming - my IRL friends [yes, I do have a few IRL friends!] have heard this gripe time and time enough.

I don't like Google. At all.

Honestly I don't know why so many people buzz around Google like it's the Best New Thing. It's not. They are simply a company that built one good product [Google Search] and ended up on the end of a viral campaign through the net that goes on today. It's really no surprise that the biggest beneficiary of a viral Net campaign is ... a Net company.

Let me start off by saying that Google's axiom of "Do no evil" is much too vague. As a recent interview with GQ says, evil is what "Sergey believes is evil." Thanks for the great clarification.

My primary gripe is that this arrogance that Google has is completely undeserved. Let's look at their "offerings:"

Google Search

Google Search. Their flagship product. I have no experience how well their "Search Appliance" works, so I'll focus on their web search. It's broken. PageRank is completely broken. Honestly, I still use Google as my default search, but more often than not I get spam links. I used to be able to "I'm feeling lucky" all the time... now I'm reluctant to do so.

Let's do a fun search of 'Tabulas' on Google. What is the second return?

That's right, "Customized Belt Buckles." Explain what this has to do with Tabulas. Do you want to know *how* that ended up so high on Google's PageRank?

I wrote one errant post that linked to that website. One post. And Google decides that this should be the second value for Tabulas. Forget the Tabulas forums or the help center. No sirree. Customized belt buckles.

If one errant post can skew results for a small-to-medium sized request ... in my mind PageRank is broken.

Other web properties

Gmail is the only website that I would say is even a moderate success. Orkut [granted, not a "official" Google project] sucks. Froogle ... does anyone use this a lot? I've tried to use it a few times and find the results less than satisfactory. I've heard that Google Groups has nothing on Yahoo! Groups. Gmaps is cool looking, but absolutely useless in terms of real functionality. Neeraj made the mistake of giving Gmaps directions to James, who promptly got lost.

So the projects are in "beta." For a big company like Google, they should do better than throwing out incompleted projects and simply calling them "beta." It seems they've misconstrued the "beta" as a excuse to not really build "completed" projects and to write off any criticisms with "oh it's in beta."

AdSense is shady as hell. I use AdSense with Tabulas, and the results are so skewed on a day-by-day basis that I'm not sure Google is really being honest with my results. Their "daily page views" never coincide with what I see on my server logs... and how do I know that Google isn't just pocketing extra cash from my AdSense account? Where's the transparency? Oh right, I get none. It's Google. They know better than me.

Gmaps and Gmail use great new interface [XMLhttpRequest], but this is hardly worth any real consideration. Unlike Amazon's API, Google's APIs are quite limited. Gmaps was preceded by map.search.ch, who did the real "groundbreaking" work a long time ago. But for most web viewers, Google is the first site that is really pushing these technologies ... so the credit and adoration goes there.

I wonder if Google cares about the semantic web

Google has no interest in seeing the growth of the semantic web. The semantic web is simply an effort by publishers to make content on the web more readily machine-readable so context and content can be drawn out by computers and metadata can be extracted. It's also supporting open APIs ("open platform") so that all web services can eventually be interoperable. Take a great look at technorati and flickr for sites truly contributing to the growth of the semantic web.

When Google relaunched "Blogger," they only offered Atom feeds for syndication. Instead of offering backwards support to the de-facto standard (RSS) ... Google decided what would be good for the web. I can understand throwing your support behind an emerging spec [Atom seems very promising], but is it really necessary to "break" support for a standard that is working alright? It's not like Google or Blogger were financially limited or didn't have the resources to quickly add RSS support.

Besides being visually compelling tools that almost anybody could build, Google doesn't offer much to the community at all. To me, it seems that Google is just developing a bunch of random projects and hoping another one hits gold ... but their flagship product seems to be suffering from a lack of attention.

As a single web developer, Google does some cool stuff, but nothing that a small web-development team couldn't do. It's not amazing. It's not ground-breaking. Everytime they have a new service, though, I am consistently surprised in how limited it is. Don't they have a lot of money? can't they develop something really groundbreaking?

I must confess the immediate reason I wrote this post is because I read this great post about a great calendaring feature. But why do people immediately assume it has to be Google? I bet if you got a bunch of smart hackers and gave them enough money for half a year, they could really do a better job than Google would. Plus I bet it would have open APIs and wouldn't break existing standards.

Their blog is an absolute joke; it's just another PR/marketing attempt to "connect" to the web.

For a company that's supposedly so avant-garde ... they really don't 'get it."

Their recent mishap in handling the whole "autolink" fiasco is another example. Google has created an option in their toolbar that lets the user click a button... the toolbar then audomatically converts words into links. For example, addresses would link to Gmaps ... ISBN numbers would link to Amazon books. Etc.

The problem here is that publishers have absolutely *no* way of opting out of the service ... Google is basically saying, "We can change the content of anything on any website and there's nothing you can do."

That is absolutely plainly wrong. I've joked about content modification before, but I would never seriously implement it. The way you write text ... the way you capitalize, the way you link, the way you have small typos is your editorial content. If I choose not to link to a ISBN number, Google has no right to profit off of that.

But Google's response? Well, given no real blog to respond to criticisms, it's been generally "we know better than you." Thanks.

At least with Microsoft, they've got someone like Scoble to open up the door to the MS world to see what they've been up to. And reading some blogs from MS, I get the distinct impression that the developers there are really listening to the community and trying to improve their products.

I'm just surprised that MS hasn't been more competent in developing their web properties while Google constantly missteps. Why doesn't MS hire some real web developers and fix up Hotmail so it doesn't suck so much? Or MSN search? I mean, MS doesn't fail horribly on the technological aspect ... but their webproperties have atrocious webpages and are too influenced by marketing people instead of gearing the whole thing towards the user experience. Where's the simplicity, man?

So now you know.

Posted by roy on February 28, 2005 at 06:29 PM in Web Development | 19 Comments

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Comment posted on March 2nd, 2005 at 09:56 AM
i disagree... i like google news. a Lot.. they aggragrate a much better compilation of news than any other news site. And while yes... i know i can do my own RSS feed and set up exactly what i want... I'm not going to simply because I don't want to be completely inundated with items of interest. I keep my morning surfing very light.

Google news, slashdot (which REALLY needs a make over...), fark, and maybe some blog reading.


secondly.. Google USED to be amazing because i could find what i wanted quickly. your right.. msn, yahoo is catching up quickly. I kinda like the A9 search but i think it's too buggy.

And we've also talked about this before, but I think pagerank 3 years ago is better than pagerank today. Because people found ways around the old one, so Google has been reacting to the abuse issues. When Google hit.. it was them innovating.. and they now have become corporate... so they are reacting.. It's a natural business cycle... When they were the new kid on teh block.. they could afford to introduce new extreme measures... I don't think they can afford to do that anymore.. well.. in so far as their stock options haven't matured yet =P.

it's KK vs 99
Comment posted on March 1st, 2005 at 11:19 AM
This is really simplistic, but I haaaate how google's cache is on there forever. I can't control the use of my own name. And all the google queries are really me.
Comment posted on March 1st, 2005 at 07:47 AM
Hmm, I think you both miss the point. I know why I personally prefer Google search engine over all the others, it's because Google is really the best. It's simple, fast and efficient, and despite your Tabulas example (personally I don't get this link to "Customized Belt Buckles", even when searching within the results), it's still the most relevant. Do the same search with MSN, Yahoo, Lycos, Teoma, whatever, I don't think you'll be more pleased with the results.

Same with Gmail, why do you say that it's limited in scope ? I've been using free e-mail service since I'm on the Net and I had some really annoying time with some of them (Caramail and Hotmail among others); Gmail has been by far the best that I have tried. There's lot of space, it's fast, it works, the name is relatively elegant, spam is well filtered and now that I start to have several pages of mails I realize how useful the search function is.

Many people don't care about the extra features and stuff, what they care about is the basics: speed, ergonomy, user-friendliness. You should try to find out how many people among Tabulas users fully use all the features you have implemeted.

On the other hand, I am a "Microsoft hater" but I also know why. Google doesn't have a monopoly as far as I know, Google is not even number 1 in terms of users, I think Yahoo is still first. If you're dissatisfied with Google, there are tons of other search engines to choose from, if you're dissatisfied with Gmail, same again, I don't think there's a lack of offers in this field. But with Microsoft and Windows, we all know it's different, you practically have no choice and it's not for the best as we've seen with Firefox vs Explorer.

Some time ago, I heard they released a new laptop in US which was much cheaper than usual, and one reason for this was that it runned Linux instead of Windows. Interesting I think. I'd like to buy a new computer, but I'm not particularly interested to have it running Windows XP by default, I'd like to have my new computer and be able to choose what I put in it, but I can't because, to use your own words, Microsoft knows better than me. And here, unlike Google, I have practically no alternative. Another reason why I don't like Microsoft ("hate" is too big, I leave it to Leedar :) ) is because, once again unlike Google, they extend their scope of operation beyond their original field: I'm personally annoyed at their presence in the gaming industry, and I don't see what they do in the cell-phone market... it's like Sony who went from the manufacturing of high-tech products to game making, music, movies and so on. It's no blind hate, on the contrary, it's awareness with the eyes wide open.

What I find annoying at the moment is that it seems it's getting "chic" to disdain Google, to say they're going to be the next Microsoft and after all their "products" (not that they sell much of anything) are not that good. And I think it's highly contemptuous to say people are blind because they like Google. Google gives people a lot of useful tools that they enjoy using, if they are grateful and faithful in return, I do not think it has anything to do with blindness, people just show respect and for once that's a deserved attitude.
Comment posted on March 1st, 2005 at 02:46 PM
Re: Simplistic UI

Try using <a href="http://search.yahoo.com/">Yahoo! Search</a> [not the one on the main page] for a week. I guarantee you that you won't find the results that different from Google.

The gap between search engines is closing rapidly. Google needs to keep innovating.
Comment posted on March 1st, 2005 at 02:21 PM
"It's simple, fast and efficient, and has good simple UI" [paraphrasing why you like Google].

Yes, all are greatly legitimate reasons why Google *was* great. I don't dispute any of this.

But their search engine quality has diminished greatly. Try out Yahoo! search sometimes, it gets you relevant results just as often as Google does now.

Their "simple UI" *is* the main reason why they became so popular. However, you notice how Google search is slowly becoming bogged down with more and more useless stuff? What is up with randomly putting up image searches when I'm doing textual searches?

Gmail is a great application because you've used horrible applications in the past. But where are the advanced features? Where is the POP/IMAP connections? Besides simply doing your e-mail, it have very little application. My point here is that Google, a company being heralded as such a bleeding-edge technology company, should of done *more* with GMail. Just simply providing the features of Hotmail in a better UI is not enough, in my book, to qualify it as a monster project.

I know the reasons *why* Google is/was great and why they are so beloved. I'm not arguing against that. I am simply stating the small things I'm seeing that indicate a general arrogance and seem to hint to me that Google is not as great as everyone claims them to be.
Comment posted on March 1st, 2005 at 09:06 AM
(funnily Gmail is not working well now, can't send a message, arrrrgh, they want to prove me wrong)
Comment posted on March 1st, 2005 at 12:29 AM
You are missing the point, Roy. Google is trying to control the flow of information on the Web.

Think about it: Google Search, Google Mail, Googler Blogger, Google Ads, Google Shopping, and now Google Browser is seemingly in the works (presently Google Toolbar is filling this gap) as well as an offer to Wikipedia (or should that be Googlepedia?). Don't forget 'their' newsfeed format, Atom.

Unlike Microsoft, they've got a better brand and have had their shit together when it has counted. Those 'beta' services won't be around forever.

If you haven't, check out Google Watch ( <a href="http://www.google-watch.org">http://www.google-watch.org</a> ). Despite what you may think, this isn't a joke Web site. They actually do hire 'spooks' ( <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20030104105005/http://www.google.com/jobs/eng.html#deploy">shortened link</a> [web.archive.org] ).

You love Big Brother.
Comment posted on March 1st, 2005 at 12:49 AM
They are trying to control the flow of information. But the point is, they are sucking at it. Gmail is incredibly limited in scope, Gmaps is useless as a real tracking tool, and Froogle is absolutely useless as well. Their main search engine quality is degrading, and the gap between them and the competitors will not be as pronounced as it used to be.

i'm not so sure Google has their 'shit together' yet. They are still a relatively young company - MS has, on the oter hand, managed through at least two decades of tumultuous change still managed to stay on top.
Comment posted on March 1st, 2005 at 01:27 AM
Information control != information distribution quality. Google has the brand name to keep people coming.

For every Roy complaining about the poor quality of Google there are at least one hundred fanatics.
Comment posted on March 1st, 2005 at 01:42 AM
"Google has the brand name to keep people coming."

Which is precisely what I don't like. These same 100 people will blindly say they hate MS because of the whole "monopoly" thing.

In my world, that respect should be earned and not granted.

Google will not succeed well as a company in the long term. Two years from now, once people are allowed to dump the IPO stock ... we'll see Google's net worth be more realistic.

Couple that with the seemingly low salaries and benefits for the engineers who make Google good ... and we shall see that blind faith in Google dry up.
Comment posted on March 1st, 2005 at 03:46 AM
Do you think a Google fanatic cares if they pay peanuts to their lower employees? Google's share value is of marginal importance in relation to their influence. People don't use Google because it is worth whatever billion dollars; they use it because of word of mouth (brand name value) generated in the days back when it was actually decent in comparison (or so we are told).

Controlling the number one search engine, a popular e-mail service, a popular blogging service, etc, and possibly a mirror (and therefore direct access) to the biggest encyclopedia ever made is nothing to scoff at or underestimate.

Remember we aren't living in your idealistic world, Roy, and neither is Google. :)
Comment posted on March 1st, 2005 at 03:48 AM
Quite true. I don't dispute any of these facts.

I just don't like how people blindly follow Google as this "great company" who does "great things." It's the same way I rail against blind MS haters and blind Apple lovers.

dorie (guest)

Comment posted on February 28th, 2005 at 10:01 PM
Actually when I search for "Tabulas" on Google the second result I get is the Tabulas.com Fanlisting (<a href="http://www.regretless.com/tabulas/)">www.regretless.com/tabulas/)</a> o_o;;

But I don't love Google either. I mean, I like Gmail, but Google is kind of... umm... I can't think of the right word for what I want to say. And you've heard about Gbrowser right?
Comment posted on February 28th, 2005 at 08:40 PM
Thanks Roy,

I'll check it out... I only hesitate to read your blog sometimes 'cause I end up spending so much here when I do! =)
Comment posted on February 28th, 2005 at 06:51 PM
Definately opens some opportunities out there for the quick and the smart for a discerning few... Like the early mammals with the dinosaurs! ;)
But the "masses" always think that bigger is better and are used to the bs PR, so don't expect too much. The headway that Firefox is making is truely amazing to me. Just shows how bad and dangerous IE is to make the typical user change their ways...
Have you read The Wisdom of Crowds? Most interesting book...
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385503865/qid=1109641750/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/102-6515851-1635303?v=glance&s=books&n=507846">shortened link</a> [www.amazon.com]
Comment posted on February 28th, 2005 at 06:57 PM
Very interesting! I'll go check it out at Barnes tomorrow... have you read The Tipping Point? It also plays on the whole "group" thing... but more on the consequences of group action. It's quite an interesting book as well.
Comment posted on March 2nd, 2005 at 01:28 PM
Tipping Point and The Wisdom of Crowds were written by two of the absolute best writers at the New Yorker. I try to buy the magazine whenever a big article by one of the two of them gets prominant play on the front cover.

Roy, what about the other google products? The Google Desktop Search tool or the Picasa photograh organizer. The idea desktop tool scared me a little, so I've never tried it. Picasa is pretty good though.

One tool that Google does a great job with is the Google News Alert.
Comment posted on March 2nd, 2005 at 02:08 PM
I MUST buy Wisdom of Crowds now! I absolutely *loved* Blink and Tipping Point... time to make a Barnes run now :o)

Desktop search is a bit overhyped in my opinion; perhaps average Joe can use it more than me, but I found it absolutely useless. I have a really strict hierarchy when it comes to file managemement... I guess if you were a bit nonchalant about how you save your files, this would be an OK tool. But the built-in windows tool works fine for me.

Picasa is a different case, in my opinion. This was one of those situations where a great product existed already and then Google simply bought them out. I do have to say the new changes are quite impressive, though. But it's not a web-integration tool, so I have absolutely NO clue how Picasa fits into the Google business family.
Comment posted on March 2nd, 2005 at 03:08 PM
i'm personally not a big fan of the Google Desktop Search, i've found the MSN Desktop Search a much better desktop searching experience (I've installed both and used both for a period of time). The Google Desktop Search at the time felt a bit more "scratchy" at the time, and it didn't even allow me to search through some of the other file types that I would have loved to search through. (eg: Some of my source code files don't get indexed, which would have been handy. MSN Search indexed them alright though...)

Both keep an additional "index" to help quickly return the results of the search.

Picasa fits into the Google business family by linking to their acquired image sharing website Hello.com. Which also has a linkin with Blogger. (<a href="https://secure.hello.com/how_bloggerbot_works.php)">https://secure.hello.com/how_bloggerbot_works.php)</a>

Many people have been hosting pictures hosted by Hello on their blogger accounts.