originally posted november 09, 2003

why all the google hype?

I remember when there was a service out there that first became known as an excellent search provider. It then branched out, leveraging its strength in search to provide many new services. It became synonymous with the web as we know it today. Then commercial enterprises, legitimate and sleazy alike, began to creep in. While the company made money off of these commercial customers, quality of service declined until competitors came in to take traffic away.

It happened with Yahoo!, it happened with AltaVista, and now it's happening with Google.

I don't buy the hype about Google. It's an excellent search engine -- or rather, it was the definitive search engine for the web. Nowadays, people have figured out what makes Google tick and are using it to their commercial advantage. Google AdWords, which was touted as the only search engine advertising strategy that actually worked, has become so overused that seemingly meaningless keywords turn up a host of affiliate sites. Try searching for a Spanish phrase containing the word es, or "is." One of the sponsored links is for eBay, inviting you to search for the keyword "es."

Likewise, Google is up against a huge network of sites that have flooded its database with redundant links. Last weekend I was visiting a friend of mine who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. I searched for "somerville massachusetts hotels" on Google. The first 50 links were all to affiliates of the same two or three booking sites. After that, I gave up. Many sites bought keywords for Somerville and seemingly every other town in the country, begging to be clicked and to receive a commission on my hotel bill. Book titles, artists, even misspelled names have been flooded into Google to the point where it becomes a poorly-organized storefront for a few crafty webmasters. Even my full name has been used by at least one crapflooder to serve a few text adsin return.

People talk about Google like it's the second coming, how it's going to revitalize the New New Economy with its innovative thinking. It bought Deja News and restored 20 years of Usenet archives, so that I too can witness flamewars and crapfloods from decades of inane banter. I often find myself looking to Google Groups if only because the web matches are too polluted with affiliate sites, but Usenet "discussions" often spiral too far out of control to establish any meaningful context.

Google News looks like a good idea to start, but most of the time it just resembles a wire feed service like Yahoo! News. Thanks to the wonders of the Associated Press and Reuters, I can read the same story on dozens of sites using Google News. The list of sources is enormous and sometimes sketchy: I've seen web forum posts appear as news articles even when they merely link to CNN or another international source. This is supposed to allow readers to find unbiased news, but in effect it often presents absurd choices for news sources. When Pittsburgh Pirates baseball player Randall Simon knocked down a sausage mascot in Milwaukee, the story appeared on over 1,100 news sources on Google News. By contrast, most stories on the front page have fewer than 100 sources -- and I've seen some with as few as six. Furthermore, what can the Podunk Post, a small-town paper that just reprints wire stories, tell me that the Pittsburgh or Milwaukee papers can't? Beyond the top stories, the content is hit-or-miss. How can Google News effectively present sports stories when the smallest level of granularity is a whole country? During election time, how can I identify local races when my only choices are "World News" or "U.S. News"? Unlike more developed services, Google News (which is admittedly still in "beta" phase) doesn't allow very much customization at all. Either they're holding back some features for future deployment, or they fear becoming a portal as Yahoo! and AltaVista did before the late-1990s tech bubble burst.

The forthcoming IPO for Google will highlight the necessity for expansion. If it isn't into a portal, as other search sites famously did, then Google will need to showcase its abilities to search more than just the web as a whole. I'm not all that impressed so far. Froogle, a site that's supposed to search stores for relevant products, frequently turns up news sites that contain affiliate links to other on-line stores. (Yahoo!'s long-running answer to this, Yahoo! Shopping, recently added a search-the-web feature that works just as poorly.) Experiments in local search, where you can find links that match both keywords and physical locations, produce few meaningful results compared to a Yellow Pages search where businesses are listed with legitimate addresses.

I don't own any Yahoo! stock, and I still search the web with Google first. I just think that Google is a good search engine for the web, but not much more. Contrarian calls of a second tech bubble may not be true, but I'm still skittish about investing in a technology that is practically hailed as the second coming.

boston bound

With that mini-rant done, on with the next order of business: I finally got to take a trip up to Boston last weekend.

I met Meg during my freshman year at CMU. For reasons I still don't fully understand, we got along well from the start of the year. She left the school after just one year after feeling unappreciated as an English and psychology major. During the remaining three college years, with me continuing at Carnegie Mellon and her at Smith College in western Massachusetts, we stayed in touch.

Now we still live 600 miles apart. I stayed in Pittsburgh and she found a job in Boston. She won't visit me here in Pittsburgh, but I finally found the time to visit her. She lives in Somerville, a city just north of Boston and home to about 80,000 people. The weather was warm all weekend. We dodged raindrops long enough to walk around Porter Square and do a little shopping. I got to see the remarkably big apartment Meg and her roommate call home -- not as cheap as living in Pittsburgh, but substantially cheaper than renting in Boston proper.

Even without setting foot in Boston outside an airport or T station, I enjoyed my trip. The flights were all on time or early. Northwest Airlines made me transfer in Detroit in both directions, but I was blown away by the redesigned terminal in Detroit complete with an indoor overhead tram.

Perhaps the worst part about the trip: at this rate, I won't get to see Meg again until well into next year.

my first business trip

So after going about six months without getting on an airplane, I had two plane trips in a span of one week. Wednesday morning started with me getting out of bed at a ridiculously early 3:50 AM before a 7:00 departure for stately Newark, New Jersey. Two, three, four cups of coffee into the morning couldn't ease the pain of a full day in a tiny conference room with seven people and one hot projector. Our flight back was delayed for about an hour and a half due to fog and rain. By the time it was all over, I was totally thrown off for the rest of the week -- a week that included only three full days in the office. Traveling is overrated.

I'm glad I sold off my ticket for opening night of "The Matrix Revolutions" that night. Now my friends who have seen it refuse to see it again because it's that bad. I'll likely see it for the first time on Wednesday, when my company buys us tickets to see it in the middle of the afternoon.

Back to November 2003, or to the year 2003.