Not necessarily. If I’m an inventor, I might be more motivated to work by the knowledge that if I come up with something good, Google will pay me a lot for it. In some ways it’s even better, since they’re motivating all of the inventors in the world, not just the ones they’ve hired.
Not sure that follows if Google as the buyer is what motivates smaller outfits to take chances. That is what happens often in pharma at least. Small companies bet it all on one or two high risk big pay-off products (with venture capitalists taking stakes) with the pay-off getting to a point that a Big Pharma will buy them to bring it to market. Without the ecology provided by the Big Company the small outfit would not have a path to get product to market.
Of course though we do not know which is actually the case. Looked at the first three of those 17,900 patents and one seems to have created this work within Google. (Previously of another company not currently owned by Google and before that in school in MN. The other is also creating his work within the company. The third came with this company that they bought. Now I am not going to do a very deep sampling of those 17,900 but two for three makes me think they do a lot in house and also buy up talent as complete teams.
I think that’s very exagerated. A number of search engines were quite good at what they were doing. Google was better but it wasn’t so overwhelmingly better that searching the web became completely different experience.
(and its quality has seriously degraded since it decided it knew better than yourself what you were searching for)
I feel the need to point out that ‘invention’ hasn’t been defined yet in this thread and maybe cannot be. Google holds literally thousands of patents, some of which were bought and others that were developed in-house, so that is one way of counting it. However, software patents are conscientious in general and even those do not define an invention.
So what are we actually discussing here?
Google invented the Google search engine which is indisputable. It is true that there were search engines before that but they all had the problem of what engineers and even end-users call ‘suckitude’. I was an early adopter to the web. Altavista was the best search engine for a brief period of time. I got quite good at using it but then Google, even in its most primitive form came along and just bitch-slapped every other search engine off the table in a very short time just through nearly instant user adoptance.
It was so much more effective than the others that it was like putting up a pee-wee baseball team against the New York Yankees and their adoption reflected that. Henry Ford did not invent the automobile but he did make it available to the masses. That qualifies as a major invention in my mind as well as a lot of the subprocesses he used to get that done.
The same thing can be said for Gmail and now the Android Operating Systems (Android isn’t true as a whole because they certainly did not invent operating systems and they have competition through Apple but parts of it are unique and qualify as an invention in their own right even if the general idea does not).
The same can be said for Google Maps. Mapquest and others existed before it was ever born but they couldn’t you you street level pictures and tie together information seamlessly through multiple devices and platforms.
I get the impression that the OP is asking if Google has invented many major physical inventions but that isn’t a good metric for a company like this. They have to do that as well for practical reasons but most of the things they ‘invent’ are behind the scenes and completely transparent to end-consumers. It is hard to overestimate how far Google has taken large-scale computing to make it accessible to both the general public and everyday businesses but you won’t hear much about any of that unless you work in the industry and follow it.
A decent analogy is that people have always known that you could pile rocks across a stream to create a dam and you could get some small amount of energy from it. That rather primitive dam was computing until a couple of decades ago. Now imagine that someone decides to scale those ideas up immensely and build something like the Hoover Dam that can power large cities including Las Vegas. That is a new invention even if the basic idea was known before.
Google is also perfecting Google Glass, self-driving cars and lots of other technologies that may pay off in big or small ways but they are committed to innovation. They have already delivered a lot in very real ways. The OP seems to be asking a version of ‘Of course, but what have you done for me lately?’
“Invention” does not necessarily mean “an idea for a new type of service/product”. Most inventions are techniques that make it possible to offer such a service/product, or improve their quality, or lower the cost.
I was there the whole time (even before real search engines were even invented and you had to use printed directories). They sucked. Altavista was the best thing going for a while. It was usable but you had to be really sophisticated about what you asked for and that had to be done through experience that most people did not have. That was also at a time when web content was at less than 1% of what it is today. The whole thing would have collapsed under its own weight if Google had not come along.
There were tons of search engine startups around in the late 1990’s that were somewhat good but just did not deliver. I had friends that worked for them. Google is the only one that made it and has over a 70% market share to this day despite the best efforts of Microsoft and a few others that are hanging on. The only reason that Google took hold of the market so strongly was because they were that much better. It is just a web site that people go to and there are others that they could go to but they generally don’t. It is also the only search engine that also became an English verb.
You don’t think that the promise of selling your invention for huge bucks promotes innovation?
Yes, but what they were doing wasn’t what Google started doing, and people liked what Google did better. Plus, it very quickly got to the point where Google was doing what those other search engines were doing, too.
Let’s suppose, for instance, that you’re looking for information on some incredibly obscure, very specific topic, such that there are only a handful of pages on the Web about that topic. AltaVista was great for searching up things like that: It’d give you all four or five hits for your precisely fine-tuned search query, and you could then check through them yourself. Google, for the first year or so of its existence, wasn’t so good for those sorts of searches, since its coverage of the entire Web wasn’t as exhaustive… but then it caught up, and you could do that with Google too.
On the other hand, let’s suppose that you’re searching for some relatively common topic, that has a vast number of webpages about it, but you only want the best pages for that topic. In a case like that, AltaVista was useless: It’d get you all of the hits, all right, all 17,392 of them, and then you’d have to go through all of them to find the best one. Or more likely, all of the first page before giving up. That’s where Google shines: The hits are sorted by relevance, and the relevance is actually meaningful, so the first hit (or at worst, the second or third) is probably going to be the one you want.
Unsurprisingly, people search for common things more often than they search for uncommon things, so Google was usually better, even before it caught up on coverage. And it’s become all the more true as the Web has grown: Nowadays, even the really obscure topics have 17,392 hits, so the case where Altavista was usable has completely disappeared.
This was my recollection, as well. Altavista actually was pretty decent for fine-tuned searches and was my search engine of choice (and I’d use Yahoo for very general searches), but as you said, there was a level of sophistication you needed to have to really work it well. But I remember once Google came out, I adopted it within a couple weeks and dumped pretty much all other search engines, it was that much better than any of them at delivering high-quality results with minimum digging.
What does that have to do with anything? We’re talking about how the structure of Google affects the output of Google. Another study might be what makeup of an economy most efficiently innovates. Perhaps the US does have more inventions with lots of small companies making things and selling them to Google. Maybe it’s more efficient for Google to use the money that they’re currently using on buying other companies for internal R&D. Maybe a mixed approach is best.
I’m not sure how suggesting that the structure of a company might affect how well it innovates is at all controversial.
By fine tuning I think we mean complex Boolean strings to try to home in on some pages that were relatively useful. I’m sure there are still some people who do this, but for me Google searches are much simpler to define.
People didn’t abandon the other engines in droves for no reason.
But Google’s biggest and most important invention was figuring out how to monetize search.
? Not really. You were talking about how Google’s organization may “stifle innovation”. If you were only speaking narrowly about innovation inside Google, maybe you should have said so?
Oh Jesus - can’t believe I forgot that.
Before Google people did PPC as a first price auction with the higher bidder getting top position at price X. People manipulated this by bidding high, but prequalifying the text by encouraging people NOT to click. So I would make ads that mentioned the high price of the product and a credit card was required. It gave me a low CTR, but goto and others didn’t care.
What Google did was combine CTR with PPC as well as a quality score - and measuring stuff on the back end - so they could see conversion rates with stuff like Adsense. This allowed them to adjust the prices the advertisers were paying - so they essentially were still paying the same amount - for the same quality traffic.
Plus they implemented the use of second price auctions. You didn’t pay your maximum bid - you paid just enough to be right above the second highest bid. This made the market much smoother (and supposedly according to auction price theory - generated just as much if not more money).
This might not seem like a big deal, but it was HUGE. Lots of what Google does is like this - the end user doesn’t notice - but they are doing really complicated stuff.
Isn’t pagerank a methodoly? After all, it’s just a set of rules.
Sure, but what difference does that make? Methodologies are still inventions.
I dunno, it’s just not an invention - it’s like sayig the sentence I’m writing is an invention. It is, but I suspect not in the ‘discovering’ sense the OP means.
The sentence you’re writing won’t help anyone do anything better. Google’s PageRank will.
Besides which, all inventions are really nothing more than a methodology. Edison didn’t personally make all of the lightbulbs that came out of his factory-- He made a design for lightbulbs, that others could follow. The part of the work that was his, the part that required a genius, was the methodology.
Besides, all software, fundamentally, is “methodology”. If methodologies are not inventions, then no one has ever invented a piece of software ever.
The PageRank methodology involves manipulating an n by n matrix where n is the number of web pages that exist (or at least an appreciable fraction of them). There were certainly new techniques involved in handling that much data.
Yes, in part.
But in larger part, I think it was the cutesy, easy-to-remember name (a name that became a verb and a meme very quickly).
Getting back to the original question (and away from the discussion of the search engine)…
Does Project Loon count?
This is an attempt by Google to supply internet access to New Zealand by floating balloons in the Stratosphere above New Zealand. Actually sounds pretty cool to me. 
J/