First
off I'd like to say that Eric Schmidt was a great & dynamic
speaker and I enjoined hearing him immensely. The main topic
of discussion was economic, focusing on turning profits in
the current economy. He was lecturing at Carnegie Mellon University
as part of the Verizon Foundation Distinguished Lecture Series.
Special thanks to Biznesshosting
Web Consulting for hosting this article
Outline-
based on topics of discussion in lecture
- Internet
Trends
- Google
Philosophy
- Google’s
Approach to Monetizing the Net
- Innovation
- Page
Rank
- Notes
on Open Discussion
- Conclusions
Side Notes:
He has a BS from Princeton, and a Masters/Doctorate
from Berkeley. He was previously CEO of Novell, and prior
to that CTO at Sun Microsystems.
Internet
Trends- Boom & Bust
The
turn of the century Internet Boom and Bust has many analogies
to the Boom and Bust of previous technologies. A very close
analogy can be drawn to the Railroad boom around the turn
of the 20th century where over 2000 railroad companies
existed, but were dwindled down to a small select few who
grew even stronger than during the Boom phase. Schmidt feels
this is happening now with the Internet, however at an accelerated
pace perhaps. He hopes that Google will immerge as a solid
backbone to the future of the internet’s growth, and is a
prime example of sound infrastructure, and innovation.
Google
Philosophy
Google’s
philosophy is based on customer satisfaction. They’re goal
is to provide the best and most relevant search results of
any search engine on the Internet. They’re strategy is simple,
Keep the end-user happy, and the money will follow, which
can be seen in Google’s approach to monetizing their product.
They attempt to provide this good customer experience through
a straight forward website (searcher in mind) and a complex
algorithm first developed at Stanford University.
Schmidt
overviewed the Google server structure. 10,000 machines that
all have one thing in common: “They are the lowest cost servers
possible that can function in the network”. They all run Linux;
why? Cause its free! Google has stayed cost oriented and uses
inexpensive systems with IDE hard drives (the cheapest on
the market at the time)
Google’s
Approach to Monetizing the Net
Schmidt
began his lecture with a description of the benefits of online
marketing to advertisers (mainly traceability and the ease
of reaching target audiences), and a brief overview of the
amount of money spent on advertising worldwide, and trends
in different avenues such as newspapers, radios, and television
spots. While the money spent in some of these advertising
areas shows a declining trend, he sees a steady growth in
internet marketing.
He
polled the audience on their opinions of pop-up/pop-under
advertisements and the new flash driven ads used by marketers
today to force browsers to see an advertisement before they
can view information. Schmidt vocalized the fundamental problems
there are with this, and began a discussion of Google’s approach
to monetizing their product which is a free service to users.
Google’s
approach is simple, incorporate advertising into the goals
of the site, and stay un-intrusive. Schmidt said that
Google will never incorporate monetizing functions into their
site that will negatively affect the customer experience.
The ease with which clients can switch to the competitors
is as simple as a click away, so Google recognizes the need
to stay relevant, which ties in with their philosophy and
search algorithm.
All
advertisements are text based and are clearly identified as
advertisements. Advertisements are ranked on interest, and
if users do not click on ads they are removed (this also makes
way for ads that will bring more money to Google, but this
is a benefit not a cause)
Innovation
Innovation
occurs where? At universities! That’s where Google was created,
and that’s why he was speaking at Carnegie Mellon University.
Universities are the primary source of inventions and innovations,
and Google attempts to recreate this atmosphere on the job
(although Schmidt admits it cannot be duplicated). Google
employs a system of teams. They removed all of the engineering
managers, and tried to bring everyone down to an equal plane
to help ideas flow freely. They then organized their developers
into teams of three, a head with two other members. The company
organized the top 100 projects they would like to employ within
the company (the list ended up being 170) and then assigned
these projects to the teams of three. Each team is given a
goal of 3 months to complete their project, although it usually
takes 4 or more Schmidt humorously commented.
He
gave examples of the successes of the company with no middle-management.
First was that the new news section of Google, the
ENTIRE SECTION was created by one of these teams of three
people within a 4 month time and brought to beta, and the
ENTIRE MIS-SPELLING/GRAMMER correction algorithm was created
by a single person (He gave an example of the over 300 common
miss-spellings of the celebrity Brittany Spears, illustrating
the complexity of the spelling algorithm)
Page
Rank
Schmidt
spoke about the Google Search Algorithm in length, but not
in any specific detail. He said that Google distinguishes
its results by use of the Page Rank algorithm. The Page Rank
algorithm is a method by which Google ranks sites in their
search engine results pages. Page Rank uses the links from
other websites and the text surrounding those links to give
websites a score or “Rank” that helps determine the relevancy
of a site. On the page factors (such as keyword density, title
tags, description tags, especially keyword tags) can be modified
very easily by webmasters, therefore to objectively provide
good search engine results you need to incorporate an off-the-site
method of ranking. See this article on Page Rank for more
info- http://www.supportforums.org/PageRank.pdf
Schmidt
said that Google's goal is to provide the best possible benefit
for the user searching with Google. He spoke at length about
the negative aspects of pop-up/pop-under advertisements on
websites (highlighting the Google text ad strategy). My interpretation
was that in the future Google may penalize websites that incorporate
pop-up/pop-under advertisements, but if and when they will
and to what extent is questionable.
Open
Discussion Questions
question:
Ask him if Google have any plans to reduce
the SERP's of sites that have pop-ups/pop-unders on their
site!
Schmidt said that Google's goal is to provide the best possible
benefit for the user searching with Google. He spoke at length
about the negative aspects of popup/pop-unders on websites
(highlighting the Google text ad strategy). His response was
ambiguous, but my interpretation was that in the future this
may be a factor in determining a page score as it is a negative
aspect to a site.
question:
Does he have any concerns about the near monopoly
power Google has achieved especially in light of their removal
of certain websites from their directory!
His position was that Google provides
a free service, and as far as they're concerned the best of
its kind in the industry. People do not have to use Google,
but they choose to because of the quality of service Google
provides. In other words, he feels that the monopoly benefits
the end-user since his results are better than the competition.
(I may be putting some words in his mouth)
question:
Anything about search king suing them!
He touched on this issue, with several
humorous remarks. My impression was that he feels it is trivial,
and that Google is simply trying to provide the most relevant
search results possible (which cannot be done if people try
to manipulate results the way search king did)
question:
Any plans to index Flash / JavaScript?
He said that Google is working on technology
to Index multi-media software like movies, Flash, etc. He
added that the project was being handled by the team method
explained earlier, but is in the early stages.
question:
How much has the page rank formula changed
if any since the original white paper was released?
I was not able to ask this question,
but my impression from comments on related topics was that
the algorithm is fundamentally the same, but that they tweak
it constantly to improve upon it.
question:
How accurate is the Page Rank score given on
the Google Toolbar? And what is the Toolbar used for by Google?
I asked him about the uses and accuracy of
the toolbar, and his answer was pretty common sense (and point
2 can pretty much be logically assessed if you read Page Rank
Uncovered http://www.supportforums.org/PageRank.pdf)
1. The Toolbar is used to determine Google's
consumer demographic. Its important to for their presentations
to potential clients (Yahoo!, AOL, etc) and investors. They
don't use it/plan to use for PR since the Toolbar could be
used as manipulative mechanism for PR. Also, he said that
they use it for determining what sites their users visit,
and they may use it finding sites spamming the index.
2. The Toolbar IS THE ACTUAL 1-10 PAGERANK SCORE, at the same
time, this means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING since the PR scale is
exponential (you can read about this in the paper) and a page
rank of say 9 could mean a variation in score of thousands/millions
of points.
Conclusions
I
feel there is a lot to be learned from Google’s success on
the internet.
From
a Webmaster’s Perspective:
Search
engines are trying to provide the best possible experience
for their users. You don’t need tricks to get to the top of
them, just build websites that provide a BENEFIT to the browser.
Make the site easy to navigate, make your goals clear, and
make sure your site has content.
Remember Position= On-Site Score X PR
I feel you can induce a few things from this; mainly you need
to ask yourself what is easiest to maximize? Obviously your
main goal should be to provide a site that benefits a searcher
of Google, since Google is trying to benefit its users. If
you have a well created site that is easily navigable then
Google will appreciate this and rank it well.
PR is important, but you should start with links from good
sites like DMOZ to help this out, and try to get links from
sites that you want links from, not merely for PR purposes.
From
a Business Perspective:
Keep
your purpose clear:
you want to keep your clients coming back, make their visit
at your site as pleasant as possible, and give them what they
want.
Stay
cost effective:
Don’t overdue your expenses, keep it simple, and spend wisely.
Invent,
Innovate, Adapt, Grow:
don’t get bogged down by traditional corporate hierarchy,
the future is now! Adapt the infrastructure most conducive
to growth for your business.
