From a 2004 Playboy interview with Larry Page, in which the Google co-founder describes a very different company from the one we use now…
PLAYBOY: Portals attempt to create what they call sticky content to keep a user as long as possible.
PAGE: That’s the problem. Most portals show their own content above content elsewhere on the web. We feel that’s a conflict of interest, analogous to taking money for search results. Their search engine doesn’t necessarily provide the best results; it provides the portal’s results. Google conscientiously tries to stay away from that. We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible. It’s a very different model.
A lot changes in eight years. [PandoDaily via Gruber]
warcroft
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 7:23 AM“We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible.”
So long as that ‘right place’ is Google too.
Cecila
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 7:45 AMNo one is obliged to use Google. Its not a monopoly. If you don’t like its practices go take yourself somewhere else.
Scottc
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 8:00 AMI am interested in some examples of this. Sure you put in an address in google and the first result is google maps; but aren’t google maps the best?
I happened to find myself yesterday at a “google movie times in my local area” type search result. I clicked the link to the trailer for one of the movies and it took me to trailers@apple.
Personally I got frustrated because the quicktime plugin didn’t work and would have preferred the youtube version of the trailer.. But I hear Apple is the place to go for trailers and it seems google has willingly linked there…
RooBoy
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 8:03 AMGoogle is quickly becomnig the anti-christ of the web.. Has anyone found an alternate search engine that provides results? I’m sick of Googles results filtering.. they are nearly a scungy as FBook now…
Barry
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 8:54 AMRooBoy, try Bing
Harvz
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 9:20 AMyou know bing has been personalizing results for quite a while now, and they also push Microsoft products. While i agree Google is moving in a bad direction i dont mind them telling my to try google docs or use maps because they are good products and if i dont want to there is a link below that for Bingmaps or whereis
eckythump
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 9:32 AMDuck Duck Go!
RooBoy
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 1:37 PMThanks Eckythump.. I got off my arse finally and started looking at other engines, I came across Duck Duck Go and it looks like a contender!
cheers
Danny Allen
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 4:08 PMG’day Ecky, welcome back from holidays!
Jaezass
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 9:45 AMThere are alternatives out there, I think Gizmodo ran a story about a week ago. I started to use Duckduckgo and it’s good but I prefer Bing, plus as was mentioned, Bing maps are better than Google!
TSH
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 11:05 AMInterestingly, Nokia has its own Maps site (maps.nokia.com) which is actually damn good. MS is apparently going to integrate Nokia maps into Bing as part of the WP7 deal, which IMHO will be great because IMHO Bing Maps is kinda crap at the moment.