Death of the Google Spirit: Farewell to the Ideals and Beliefs of the Past

The discussion caused by the death of Google Reader is far from over. More and more people are participating in it. The focus of everyone’s attention is not only the current situation and future of RSS services, not only the adjustment and development of Google’s business base, but also Google’s culture and philosophy. of transmutation.

Blogger Huo Ju reflected and summarized this in a long article. In his opinion, Google, which is now vigorously promoting “integration” under the leadership of Larry Page and putting Google+ at the center of its business, is no longer the Don who once strived for innovation and openness. Google ‘t be evil anymore.

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The youngest Google has grown old quietly, even older than Microsoft.

TECH2IPO has abridged the original text.

1. Search and socialization

The former product manager of Google Reader answered a question about the closure of Reader on Quora. The main reason for the closure of Google Reader was Google Plus. This is not an unexpected answer. After Google forced Reader’s sharing function to Google Plus, many people knew that this day would come sooner or later.

A few years ago, SNS did not cover enough of the population, and at that time search engines were an important way to obtain information. This is easy to understand. When people encounter a problem, they will go to Google to search for the answer. For example, a few years ago, people would have gone to Google and searched “Why is Google Reader turned off?”

But now, SNS has covered enough people, and things have changed. Now you will no longer search for this question, but will go to your commonly used SNS, post this question, and then you will I received a lot of answers, including one-sentence answers, such as “because of Google Plus” and “because RSS is not important anymore”. Some people will also give you some links that will take you to longer articles, such as Google Blog. An official statement, or a blog like mine.

As a result, people have discovered that asking questions to friends on SNS is better than searching directly for more and more things, and the answers they get are of higher quality.

why is that?

The reason is very simple, because the relationship between SNS determines the scope of attention. You and your friends often focus on similar fields, which means they help you expand your horizons. In the past, you needed to read all the relevant information, but now you don’t need to. The information you haven’t read is likely hidden in the minds of your friends. You just need to ask, and your friends can often help you get more accurate answers.

Google has accompanied us through the era of scarcity of information on the Internet and into this era of excessive information prosperity. Today there is not too little information, but too much information. Finding what you need from the plethora of information has become harder than ever.

A few years ago, PageRank could be used to obtain the most valuable information, but today this method is no longer so effective. On the one hand, real-time information is more important, and on the other hand, due to the diversity of needs (or called the long tail), Any search result should have a completely different ranking for a specific person. The SNS model can inherently solve these problems.

Traditional search will not disappear completely, but SNS-based search, or knowledge sharing, will inevitably take away the market share of traditional search. For Google, this means that some of the money that could have been earned will be made by SNS such as Facebook and Twitter, and it may even mean the end of the growth period of the search engine business model.

From another perspective, social relationships can provide more accurate data, thereby greatly improving ad matching, thereby increasing hit rates and bringing in more revenue.

It can be seen that search engines and socialization have long been inseparable. Google’s attempts at socialization began very early, and going back chronologically, we can see the entire process.

• 2008.11SearchWiki

  Through this function, users can reorder search results. This function only affects logged-in accounts and is not a complete social search, but it is a good start.

• 2009.10 Google Social Search

  This time it was a truly social search. The search results integrated the friend relationships of Twitter and FriendFeed, and later added the friend Share results of Google Reader. If you are a heavy user of Twitter and Reader like me, you will find search extremely useful during this period. My search results are often content shared by friends. Even when I am looking for some technical issues, I will go to Find a friend who has shared the content I need and send an email to discuss it directly.

• 2011.3 Google +1

  Technically, this is a great product. If your friend clicks the +1 button in the search results, you will see it when you search in the future. This will make everyone’s search results affected by the friend relationship, thus Completely different and more accurate, this function requires a huge amount of data and calculation support, and it is almost real-time. This is an amazing achievement technically.

  The passing of the spirit of Google

  A few years ago, Google was an innovator. It was innovative and open. But today, Google is becoming more and more accustomed to guarding against possible competitors. It is no longer so open. It has begun to imitate potential competitors and compete in exactly the same way as the other party. , and then use its huge size to try to crush the opponent, just like Microsoft did in the past.

  There are a few events that I think are very important:

  • The dispute between Google and restaurant review site Yelp. Google and Yelp used to be partners, but when Google failed to acquire Yelp, the cooperation stopped. Google began to use crawlers to capture Yelp data and display it on Google Maps without giving the source. After being protested, Google simply created Google Places to compete with Yelp.

  • Google was worried that mobile Internet and apps would affect search traffic, so it acquired Android and made Androd more and more like iOS to compete with Apple. The first Android phones released were very similar to Nokia at the time, but now they are very similar to iPhones, and Google doesn’t care about partnering with unscrupulous companies like Samsung to fight Apple.

  • Google was worried that social search would affect traffic, so it gave up any efforts in the direction of social search and built Google Plus exactly like Facebook.

  • Google was worried that e-commerce websites, such as Amazon, would become new traffic portals, so it launched Google Shopping and even provided Google Shopping Express logistics services.

  These things are so boring.

  Google split into two, one was the boring Google led by Larry Page, and the other was Google X led by Segrey Brin. On Larry Page’s side, you can see the spirit of Google disappearing.

  • Google no longer wants you to leave Google immediately after finding the information you need. Instead, it wants you to do everything on Google, preferably on Google Plus. Google is no longer Don’t be evil, but be evil.

  • Instead of helping entrepreneurs, Google is using its scale advantage to suppress startups. Google Plus is probably Google’s first product developed entirely for competitors rather than users. It has little benefit to users and a lot of disadvantages.

  • Google is no longer open. You can only see results from Google Places on Google Maps, not Yelp.

  Openness and closure are always relative. No one will be open to the strong part of oneself, but one must be open to the weak part of oneself.

  Google will not open up its own search algorithms and logic, nor will it allow third parties to have the opportunity to interfere with the search results page. Apple will not open up its own hardware and operating systems. But Google will open up its hardware and operating system, and Apple will open up its Internet services.

  The open became closed, and the closed became open. Such changes have been repeated throughout the history of business.

  In the case of Google Reader, an enterprise change can even be completed within a year. This is both a frustrating and hopeful fact. Countless changes are happening all the time, but at least we know that we can’t kill each other by using the same methods as our competitors.

  No matter how hard Google tries, Google Plus can’t kill Facebook, Android can’t kill Apple, Google Shopping can’t kill Amazon, and even Google Places can’t kill Yelp.

  The company that will really kill Google will definitely exist in the future, although we don’t know where it is yet. Google is much younger than Amazon and Apple, and this year, people started saying Apple lacked innovation, while Amazon continues to push the envelope by spending every penny it can make.

  To my surprise, the youngest Google has aged quietly, even older than Microsoft.