Tech Rivalries: Google vs. the World

the point is probably moot. Okay, well, I'm going to try to puzzle out what that is actually doing with this subject. Absolutely nothing. Sorry I spoiled it for you, But today we're gonna talk about we decided we're gonna do another kind of series. And if you if you're if you're aware of our series, you know that we

do these sporadically. Um, but we we like there's certain series we like to do where there's a lot of stuff on a particular kind of sub topic in tech and we think, oh, that'd be great to tackle that. But there's no way we can do one episode that covers the whole topic, right, It's just too big. Right. And and for those of you who have been with us for a long time and you you hear us launch series and you go yeah, but you don't come back.

It's because we we think of these lists of stuff like this, and then we go, oh, we just didn't two on that, we should wait a while. Yeah, and then so so we'll have to get back to like the two series we need to get back to sooner rather than later, our our electronic series, in our medical series, because we've had requests for both of those, so we will go back to those. But in this case, we're

talking about tech rivalries. And we've talked about some tech rivalries recently in the podcast, Like we've had podcasts that were recently talking about Edison and Tesla, and that's one of the most famous rival reason technology in all of history. Yeah. The funny thing about when we talk about companies, which we're going to do today, is that in a lot of cases, uh, some of these companies are sort of frenemies, you know, friends and enemies. They might have a history

of working together as well as working at cross purposes. Actually, come to think of it, I guess Edison and Tesla did work to them for a little while. But anyway, but yeah, they were more enemies than front of me. Yes, yes, so yeah, so we're going to talk today. The tech rivalry were specifically talking about is Google versus pretty much everybody else. In fact, in a way, this could be a part one of google rivalries with other companies, because truly,

Google has had it Scott's finger in a lot of pies. Actually, the funny thing is that the one will probably end with is the rivalry that just sort of popped up and made us think of this, And it's not somebody we necessarily would have thought of as being or at least I would have thought of as being a competitor with Google. So let's start with the obvious. So from a consumer standpoint, like a customer, like an end user like me or or like Chris. To us, Google is

a search engine. Yes chiefly. I mean there are all the other things that Google does as well. But if I say I'm going to Google something, that means I'm going to a search for it, and uh, and I mean there is a verb now for googling. So that shows that Google really has dominated this whole section of

the internet. You know, the marketing department will probably their marketing department probably disagree that it's a verb, but they probably secretly are going, yes, yeah, I wouldn't imagine so the so the the first rivalry we wanted to talk about was with Yahoo. You know, another big search engine and in fact was a huge search engine back in the nineties. Yes, well sort of it, I would argue, it was enormous. It was only after the dot Com crash that it started to really have to it really,

it took that hit pretty hard. Although it survived obviously as opposed to some of the other companies now, it then built up quite a bit again, only to start suffering again in the late two thousand era. Why, I don't want to, uh to put it down as a search engine, but I don't think um okay y'ah, whose existence predates Googles by a few years. Yeah, and when when Google made the scene, Yahoo was at least one

of the search leaders. There were others like Alta, Vista and Umu hot Bot, which actually used a different engine deemed Yeah, and so there were a lot of them, but Yahoo, um at the time they were uh, you know, I'm pretty sure they were using a lot of human based power. But the thing is they were sort of leveraging that. Now, if you think about Yahoo right now,

it's sort of a content engine. Uh. They have a lot of material that they create, editorial content or a license from other people, and they were sort of doing that. They were sort of contextualizing search, like if you were looking for something in particular, they might tell you, uh, you know, promote somebody that they had worked with and say why it was that you might want to pick them. It wasn't necessarily as search result, although you would get

search results. Yeah, the uh that sounds weird. They were kind of a web portal. Yeah, they really were. So you think it was sort of a combination of the the the search engine, the the Internet search engine, and so almost like the online service providers we talked about in previous episodes. It's like the old days of all

l and Prodigy. It kind of had its own sort of portal into the Web that wasn't all inclusive, but gave you a good spread of information across various topics, so that you know, you you could at a glance on one page see some interesting headlines and that might be that might be the extent of your experience using the Internet. Back in those days. Well, people didn't necessarily know.

I worked in a an I s P and Internet service provider in the mid ninety nineties, and there were a lot of people who would who would call our phone number. I've worked in sales for a bit and people would call and ask, you know, my son or my daughter told me I need to get an Internet account so I can send mail messages. What is this internet thing? And and what do I do? And the thing is, people didn't really know what a u r L was back then because they were being introduced to it.

It was a sort of a new concept. The Internet had been around, but it wasn't always a consumer uh you know service, and it wasn't necessarily user friendly. I mean this was built by engineers. Yeah, and so I love you engineers, I love you all. Yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean that people knew where they were going on the World Wide Web. I mean Worldwide Web was only you know, a few a couple of years old

at that point, a few years old. Yeah, yeah, who you know who launched officially as a company in n Now it actually grew out of a service that had existed before that, but in became Yahoo and then they launched Yahoo Mail in nineteen. It sort of became a web portal. They purchased Geo Cities in nine, which was, you know, a web page hosting service which now no

longer exists, but was. It was big for a while, and it it organized web pages into neighborhoods, so it was it was an attempt to make the web more uh, user friendly and understandable to the common consumer by by relating it to concepts that the consumer would already be familiar with. So yeah, I was really doing a lot of work in this area. Uh. And then they had the dot com bubble burst in the two thousand two thousand one era. Right around two thousand, Yahoo began to

do something interesting. Yahoo began to use the search algorithms, licensing them from another search engine company, and that search engine company was Google. Google h they registered Google dot com in the company itself officially launched in night, so it was late to the game compared to Yahoo. But Google's service was considered to be one of the best on the web. For one, Google was able to index millions and later billions of web pages and had a

very stripped down simple user interface. I mean it's the same as it as today in the sense that you go to www dot Google dot com, you're gonna see the Google logo, you're gonna see the search bar, and then you just type in your query and you hit search Plus. There's other stuff there too, but it's not much right. They kept it really stripped down and simple.

And so that was Google's philosophical difference between you know, from Yahoo's point, like Yahoo strategy was web portal, throwing as many services there, try and be as useful as possible and be the destination for the people on the web that they will get their web content through Yahoo. Didn't you write an article about that about what the Google algorithm? Yes I did. I wrote an article about

what makes the Google algorithms so important? And in fact y'ah who recognized how important the Google algorithm was, And so again in two thousand they started to work with Google. They began to use the Google search engine technology on Yahoo. Now, Yahoo, of course was really concentrated on building up that web portal aspect of their business at the time, and they used the Google algorithm till about two thousand four, and that's when Yahoo ended that relationship with Google and switched

to an in house developed search algorithm. Uh, so they're back doing their own search at that point, because then you've got another element that comes into play a little later. Um. But yeah, so you then you have started to have this this rivalry in search between Google and Yahoo, a true rivalry as opposed to the kind of weird semi rivalry when you have one company competing against another company

that's using the first company's technology. That's just kind of you know, it's hard to get get your mind wrapped around that. Well. In two thousand three, Yahoo bought a company called Overture Services. Now, then in two thousand four, Yahoo levied a huge patent lawsuit against Google that said that Google was was used being technology based on patents filed by Overture Services, which yeah, who now owned in purchase the year before. It all hinged on online advertising,

which is the way Google makes most of its revenue. Yeah, and Yahoo also has quite a lot of revenue. If you ask, if you ask an entrepreneur what Google's businesses, they're not going to tell you it's search engine. They're going to tell you it's online advertising. So uh and and the you know, you, yourself, you the user, are the commodity. Then the advertising is the way it generates revenue.

So this was a big deal. I mean, Google depended on and still does depends on online advertising for money. So a lawsuit that could potentially, ah, we'll throw a monkey wrench into the works as far as online advertising goes, was a huge problem. Well, eventually they settled that lawsuit and Yahoo was granted a perpetual license to use these these technologies to Google, and Google in turn gave some stock to Yahoo, Google stock to Yahoo. Actually the two

companies own stock in each other. Um, it's kind of interesting, but one wonders if perhaps Yahoo may be folded a little too easily, because since then, Yahoo has had some problems to the point where they've had massive layoffs and the company itself has been devalued massively over the years. And there's been some very highly publicized political struggles within Yahoo over the last couple of years as well, and and a lot of struggling at the executive level at Yahoo.

And so then you've got a point in two thousand eight where Google and Yahoo had reached an agreement in which Yahoo could use Google advertising on Yahoo pages. So again you've got like this weird relationship with they're kind of competing against each other, and then they're kind of you know, who wants to depend on this? Well, I mean, this is all good news for Google because they're gonna get money using their you know, licensing out this this

advertising technology. But there was one little tiny problem. Oh yeah, the United States Department of Justice said that this smacked of monopoly as far as advertising on the web goes, and so they struck it down through antitrust laws. So

this agreement never came to fruition. Uh. And then eventually you get to the point where you rereach today a coint to Business Insider, the most recent figures I could find for the market share for search has Google with sixty five point seven percent of all online search all the world around. Yeah, okay, and Yahoo fifteen point seven. So and then you've got you know, he's in third place, yes, being being nine percent. Now, Google is more or less plateaued.

It hasn't really gained or lost a significant percentage of that market share in quite some time. It's it's kind of lost a little bit, but not a whole, not a lot. Yahoo has been in a very very slow, gradual decline, Bing has been in a climbing pattern, and Being is starting to steal some search traffic, our search market share from both Yahoo and Google. Yes, um, more

Yahoo than Google really at this point. And that actually kind of is another interesting point because you know, Microsoft and Yahoo entered into a ten year agreement not too long ago in which Microsoft gets full access to Yahoo's search engine for the ten years. This was related to uh to bing to be able to use the technology that Yahoo had developed to help bolster the Being search engine.

It doesn't mean that Being is completely based on Yahoo's search engine technology, but it may partially be based upon it, right, And if you run a search in Yahoo now, if I'm not mistaken, you will get uh bing Yahoo powered search. Yeah. So ten year partnership that was signed by the way in two thousand nine, So that would end, of course in another few years. Yeah. Microsoft's Live search product had been floundering, uh compared to some of its competitors, most

notably Google. Um, you know, you wouldn't necessarily think that Microsoft and Google would be competitors. I mean, Microsoft makes operating system software, productivity software. You know, some electronic devices, the Xbox Zoom. Hey wait a minute, what so does Google Google creates an operating system called Chromos, and Google has a suite of productivity software called Google Docs. Yeah, this is this is a rivalry I think is heating up. Yeah.

And this wasn't around. I mean when you were talking about just a couple of years ago that it wasn't necessarily a rivalry. This is something that's cropping up now. There was a rivalry as far as search goes because of Coach. Microsoft have Microsoft Live Search. And then there was a rivalry in web based email as well, because you had hot mail and live mail accounts through Microsoft.

You had the Yahoo Mail accounts through y'all who by the way, y'all who actually totally redid their their mail system after Gmail launched, because then that's the other one. You've got Google's Gmail. So you've got these three different or technically four if you talk about live mail versus hotmail, uh, four different web email based services. Uh. I know, just anecdotally talking with other people who are in the tech industry, tech journalists and and such, they get surprised when they

see an email from a hotmail account at this point. Yeah, because everyone thinks of that, at least when I say everyone, like all of the people I talked to think of that as like the spam account, um, and my my spam box filled up pretty quickly and hot mail and I hadn't even given it out to people, so I guess they're just blanketing everything there. Um. So yeah, being launched in the summer of two thousand nine, so it's really not even all that old as the time when're recording,

is this less than just less than two years? Yeah, it feels like it's been forever. Yeah, it does actually, um, And I think a lot of people were skeptical. I mean, Google's had a sort of an iron grip on the search market for years, um, but then Being started eating into Google's market share. When you think about it, two years to go from nothing to thirteen point nine percent

of the market share of search. That's enormous now. Granted, you could also argue that Being is sort of the the step child of Live Search, in which case you would have to look at the market share that Live Search had and compared to what Being has now. But that, you know, beside the point. Yeah, I've heard generally when I've used it, it's been a pretty good search engine, and um, a lot of other people seem to feel

that way too. I have seen critical, critical praise for being um but yeah, all of a sudden, now, uh, Microsoft is completely retooled at search, and not every company has the pockets deep enough to just go, let's start a new one from scratch. Microsoft of beviously does and uh you know, now they're competing on that front. And then, as you pointed out, um, Google decided it wanted to

get into the productivity software business as well. And this has caused Microsoft to react because we actually Google sort of acquired a series of they had their own, and then they sort of acquired a series of independent cloud based tools and a cloud of courses the internet. Um. You use these these pieces of software in your web

browser online. The documents are stored online in general, although with Google Docs you can upload uh files and you can also have with Google Gears you can have offline capability as well. Yeah. But yeah, at the time, it may not have looked like it was an indirect competition

because that functionality wasn't there. You had Microsoft Office, which as many of you know, is a well well entrenched productivity suite that includes presentation software and a spreadsheet document creator, and uh in an email client, the word which is the word processing software, and depending on the package you buy, it will include other different pieces of software, but those

are the big ease UM and Google Docs. Google acquired rightly, they acquired uh UM, Presentation program, Um and and several others. And then you wouldn't necessarily Okay, so you've got the one that's based on your hard drive, which is Microsoft, and you've got the one that's based online, and they're compatible. Uh, well, you know, not such a big deal. Well then Google up the anti They said, let's go ahead and add

offline functionality. So now you can download document or you know, work on stuff offline, you can upload it back to Google Docs. So Google counters, but you know with Microsoft counters. I'm sorry. Microsoft counters with its own online version of the Office Suite, which has actually again gotten some critical praise.

I've seen some reasonably positive remarks on it. And the one of the big benefits of the Google app, which was that it really created new opportunities for collaboration because you could share documents across multiple users and then collaboratively work on projects without having to create new copies of

a document. That was the big problem with the old offline system was that if I wanted to work on a document and I wanted Chris to be able to work on it too, I would have to I would have to send him a copy of it, and I would work on one instance of that document on my computer. He would work on another instance of it on his computer, and then we'd have to recombine the two, which was

always kind of a messy way of doing things. And it could mean that perhaps we both made changes to the same section, and then how do you incorporate two different sets of changes for the one part of that document.

Sharing it online meant that everyone was working for the same master document and that you know, you still have issues that you run into there if you have two people trying to edit the same section at the same time, but you can see it in real time or or close to real time and h and tell the person, Hey, knock it off, I'm working on that right now. Yeah, then you can review it and you can make changes.

So it made that a little more of a smoother process. So, yeah, there's definitely a rivalry between Microsoft and Google, and it does go beyond just the the productivity software and even the operating system, because like we said, Google's launching Chromos, and that's really starting to look kind of interesting. I don't know, I don't know that's going to get widespread adoption,

but Google is putting a lot of muscle behind it. Now, keep in mind, we've seen Google push other products really, really hard, only to have to eventually give up on them. So there's no guarantee that Chromos is going to be

a huge success. But they're not sparing any expense and trying to make it one now, and they're not above defending their turf as we saw earlier in two thousand and eleven with the accusations flying back and forth between who's stealing whose search results between Google and being But there's another front too we hadn't talked about. You know, Windows has been making an operating system for PDAs and

later phones smartphones for years. Um. You know, Windows just came out with a new version of its operating system for phones, which again, UH seems to be getting some reasonable success. But it's hard because they already have UH. Google already has its Android operating system, which is on millions of phones worldwide, and they're also competing on another front with that, which is with another company that creates smartphones, yes, and that would be Apple. Yes, there are other companies,

of course that do create smartphones. We're not forgetting BlackBerry, BlackBerry, and we're not forgetting some of the other players, Nokia with the Symbian. Yeah, although Nokia is now doing Windows Phone. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, So you've got Google battling Microsoft multiple fronts, including the smartphone. Then you have Google battling Apple on multiple fronts, including the smartphone. Now, and here

here's an interesting point. If you were to look at the Google versus Microsoft part of this picture, you would say that Google was the one who got there first for smart phones in that Android was more of a smartphone operating system than the old Windows Mobile operating system. Now, uh so Android was able to get established in that market before Windows Phone showed up because Windows Mobile Windows Phone or two different operating systems for phones, and Windows

Mobile would be the more primitive version. Windows Phone is really snazzy. But Android already had a foothold there. So that in that case, you're talking about Microsoft trying to take down a giant. But really Google faced that same problem because in two thousand seven, uh the iPhone launched in in June, and it wasn't until November of two thousand seven that the Android phone launched, so Apple had a big jump already. You might say, well, that's just

a few months, that's not a huge deal. It was an enormous deal because Apple was able to do something that no one else had done up to that point. Apple was able to create a market for smartphones among general consumers. Right. Of course, BlackBerry already had a pretty big presence, you know, in the in the in the enterprise market forces for companies corporate users. Yeah, because I mean, you know, you might have a p d A, but you'd use it for your personal appointments and things you

don't really necessarily need a smartphone for. And and they were expensive at the time too, so you don't you don't necessarily need one for your own personal use, right sure. And it wasn't until Apple was able to show it as a consumer device, not just a corporate device. Now, the key there was to make sure that you still showed it as something that you could do productive work on, but at the same time show it in a really

sleek and sexy and fun way. So it had lots of games and the animation was beautiful, and the graphics were gorgeous, and the apps that they developed were really really compelling apps. For the most part, they were couple clunkers in there. But and then opening up the app Store was a brilliant move because now you just created a market for all this kind of software. It was really, you know, a great, a great strategy on Apple's part, and they could not have done a better job with

their launch. Whether you love the iPhone or you hate it, you gotta admit that their launch of that product was a complete success. Yeah now, and I'm sorry, no, please go ahead. I was going to point out I'm amused by this because, uh, you know, a couple of years ago, I was asked to write an article. I don't write many articles for How Stuff Works dot Com only have a small handful. But on this this um column by

technology writer Nicholas Car Do you remember this? And I have to uh have no of him, I don't actually know him. I have to laugh at this because the name of this article is how the Google Apple Cloud computer will work. Because you know, the idea was and Car suggested, and at the time it was brilliant because you know, he said, Google can supply the cloud infrastructure.

Apple can supply the software and the hardware, which would look amazing WHI would look amazing and work does Yeah, Apple makes stuff that works, and they make stuff that looks really really sleek. On the front end. Apple's got you know, got that. On the back end, Google's got

the infrastructure. They know infrastructure, they know cloud computing. Except that that was right around the time they became enemies, and and and and we had Eric Schmidt on the board yeah Apple, Eric Schmidt, who at the time was the CEO of Google. Yeah, he was on the board of director for director for Apple. Because originally you would say, like, well that there's not really a conflict there. Yes, Google is a huge technology company. Apple is a huge technology company,

but they both serve different markets, and everything changed. Yeah, and then once they both entered that smartphone market, that

really made things complicated. And there were some pretty nasty kind of digs going on, although you could argue on the surface that they weren't necessarily digs, that you know, everyone had sort of valid excuses for what they did, but you felt that deep down there was really more of a how can we get these guys kind of thing going on, and I should also say that even if this smartphone thing had not happened at that time, I still find it hard to imagine at Google bowl

cloud computer. And the main reason for that is because I think that Apple and Google have fundamentally different philosophies when it comes to the openness of technology. So Apple is all about creating a really lockdown, closed system, the benefit of which is that you know what's going to work because you've locked it down and you're not allowing people to come in there and mess with it. And

Google is not totally open and free. It's not like it's Lenox or something, but it's there's like that less there is a perception that Android is completely open, which is not true. It's not true. No, it's not true. Android is more open than other smartphone operating systems out there, or most of them anyway, but it is not truly open. Yeah, and the Mac os is also somewhat open, but not as it's not as closed as Windows. It's not black

and white, it's not black and white. But Apple is definitely further along the closed part of that spectrum, and Google is closer to the open. And so yeah, you've got uh two thousand seven. That's when both the iPhone and Android phones launched. Now, Android at that time was it had a huge uphill battle, which eventually it managed to to wage uh successfully to the point now where you depending on whom you read, you'll see that the

Android has the dominant market share in smartphones right now. Um, there's some reports that say that goes back and forth, and it all depends on how many consumers you have who are using old smartphones and how many of them are still Android versus Apple, and etcetera, etcetera. But the main argument is that Android and Apple are the two big players in this space, and everyone else is kind of, you know, on the boundary. Yeah, and and the other. The other interesting thing to note is too in the

world of apps, Google had difficulty breaking into Apple's app store. Yeah, that was one of the digs I was talking about. The you know, Google Voice app. Yes, took forever to come out. Well, it was originally rejected by Apple and then the and Trust's two thousand nine July two thou Apple rejects the Google Voice app from the app store.

In September two tho nine, Eric Schmidt steps down from the board of directors from Apple, which some said what might have been at least partially in response to the app being rejected. Now Google and Apple both say that that's not the case. There were there was the antitrust concerns and things of that nature that we're really playing into it. But you know, people will talk, right. And then in November of two thousand nine, Google purchased a

company called ad Mob, which a mobile advertising company. Right, so you've got this mobile advertising company and no one argues that mobile is the next really, I mean, it is the big thing. It's not the next big thing, it is the current big thing in web based technology. Everyone is grabbing onto mobile devices to access the web, whether it's an MP three player that has WiFi capability, a smartphone, a tablet, uh, you know, the that's or

where it's really going. Even netbooks, you could argue, kind of fall into the mobile category just because they're small enough that people take them everywhere. Um. So, yeah, the mobile web is really a huge, huge thing. So purchasing this this ad mob mobile advertising platform was like a shot across the bow. And and plus Apple had been interested in ad Mob and had made an offer to purchase the company just before Google actually did purchase it, Yes,

then they countered with another purchase their wireless yes. So and and now, as anybody who has seen both in uh an Android device and an Apple iOS device, they have similar styles of advertising in the applications that you see on there. So they are they're turning that into a source of revenue. And now you know, I've seen the bing app show up, and I don't remember there being any controversy about Apple and Microsoft, uh, you know,

putting a bing app in the app store. The It's just funny to me after all the years of Microsoft versus Apple. But we'll talk about that later. We should talk about let's just take this up plus one plus one plus one, Google's plus one right where you can

like anything on the web. Well, before we get to that, I mean, I know we're running out of time and we're gonna have to rush through this last one, but there's still some other stuff I want to talk about really quickly about Apple on Apple and the reason is that there are a couple of other fronts where they are they are competing. Again, You've got the chromos coming out, so you've got Google potentially competing against Apple products. And when you talk about that that's a huge thing because

Apple does these high end computers. Right. They're expensive, but they're gorgeous and they work and they're you know, but it's it's almost like a boutique kind of purchase, right, because they're there. It's almost like an exclusivity sort of thing. Google is doing the Chromos where all the hard heavy lifting is going to be on the the the back end side, so you don't need a really powerful machine. So in theory you can buy a pretty cheap computer

running the Chrome os. So that's an opposite approach from what Apple takes, so that they're going to compete in that space. You've also got Google where they launched the Chrome web browser, yes versus Safari, right, and Chrome already has I think, depending again upon whom you read, Chrome has a higher market share than Safari does in web browsing. I mean, I know people who have Matt computers who they were so happy when Chrome came out for the

Mac because they were not huge Safari fans. I'm one of them. And then then you also have YouTube that's renting movies now, which looks like it's competing against Apple iTunes. And then there's Google Music, which will be competing with the Apple Music Service as well as the Amazon Cloud Player. So yeah, you've got we We're not going to talk about Google versus Amazon. We could. We can also talk about Google versus Netflix. We can talk about Google versus

just about anybody. We only have one other company we want to talk about. We're gonna go really fast because this episode's going long. Yeah, it was. It was earlier

this year, not so far before we recorded this. Yeah, when they announced the well, I was thinking about the plus one feature, and this is I think this sets up what we're about to talk about because suddenly, you know how Facebook a few years ago one because it was maybe a couple of years ago, came out with the ability to use their APIs, their application programming interface, and you could install it on your web browser and have people like stuff on Facebook on your own web

page if you wanted to. Well, that was pretty cool, right, So if you had a Facebook account and more than five million people do um probably more than that. Now I might be able to make that six million, But you incorporate that into a web page and then suddenly someone from Facebook says, oh I like this, they like it, it shares it on their wall and then all of

their friends can come and read your page. It just meant that there was an additional way to funnel people in to see your content, which is interesting because previously the way that people would come and see content there are two main ways. Right, they would come to some sort of homepage to a site where they visit over over and over again, or they would use search. Well, now you've got a third way, which is socially driven

of avenues to get to content. So either you share it on Facebook where you say, hey, there's this great website, go here, or you go to a website that has that incorporated like button and it does it for you, and then your buddies all say, oh, well, Jonathan liked this one website, we should check that out and see

what that's all about. So, in a way, that was a shot across the ballot, across all the search engines, because now you're saying, you, guys, used to be relevant, but now we're going to take that away from you, because we're going to have it where people find information organically through their their social connections, not through just going

to a search engine and typing in some words. So that was a yeah, that was a wake up call UM, and Google answered, you know, you can do that when you have deep pockets and your employees can all spend their time working on UM with the plus one system. Uh So suddenly now Google was competing because you can you know plus one basically me, Hey, I like that too, Yeah,

that link, that link is really useful. So I'm going to say that out of all the search results I got for this particular query, this is the one that I think is the best. I'm gonna plus one that. And then when one of your friends comes on, someone who has a you know, who's one of your contacts, comes on and does a similar search, they're going to see that if they get their search result page up, they're going to see the search results that got the

most plus ones from their friends. And again it's kind of like a socially driven thing, and they can even see like which of their friends plus one did, so they'd say, oh, what, you know, Jonathan was searching for uh fluid dynamics and so that this one video on non Newtonian fluid was really cool, So I wanna I want to check this out, and then you could plus

one it and then it again it's socially. Yeah, it's socially driving up the search is Now someone else coming in and searching that same query may not see that because they're not your contact. So it's it's it's not it's not like wild wet out there. It's not gonna completely uh game the system for Google search results, because that's one thing Google does not want to do is mess with their algorithms so much that it becomes useless.

But it did. Um you know, people were saying, some of the tech journals were saying, look, this might be uh something that will play into Google's maybe possibly finally announced social networking tool. I mean, you had or Cut, but it really didn't take off like you thought, and people have been waiting for this thing for I don't know years. I would say, yeah, Ork it was a social network like Facebook. Actually it is a social network.

It's not gone now. ORC It's very popular in places like Brazil and India, but never got widespread global adoption like Facebook did. So. Google has already had a history of competing with Facebook with things like orch It, but it was Ork. It was such a tiny blip on the radar from most of the world that we don't even really think about them competing because there was no competition, right, you know, if you've got someone who has the followers,

you don't think of it as competition. Well I didn't, but apparently Facebook did because there again, as as Jonathan mentioned, right, not right before, but shortly before we recorded this, a scandal came to light. Yeah. Facebook, Um, it turns out Facebook hired a PR firm called person Mars Stellar, a very well known and and pretty well respected firm. Yeah, well, used to be respected. Yeah, it was still well known, might be even better known now. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, the

PR firm. Facebook hired this PR firm in order to pitch stories to bloggers and newspapers that would put Google in a bad light, specifically with this socially motivated um search and social circle services that Google's pushing. Uh. They wanted specifically respect to privacy and how Google handles privacy

and talk about pot calling the kettle black. We've got Facebook, which is not known for being a great protector of privacy, saying hey, Google's really you know, putting your privacy at danger. We want these stories to get out there. So this PR firm started to approach various people. One of the people had approached was Christopher. Uh uh, oh gosh, I don't even know how to say his last name. I'm gonna say Safoyan, but it could be totally wrong. It's s O G H O I A N. So that's

an interesting Chris, if you're out there, let me know. Anyway, the Christopher had received a request from the PR firm about this, and instead of running the story that the PR firm wanted them to run about Google's uh social uh social circle invading privacy, he ran the email that the PR firm sent him. He published, he published it on his blog, showing that this PR firm was trying to engineer this this smear campaign USA Today, same sort

of thing. USA Today got a request for a story pitch about a similar kind of thing, and instead they decided to publish a story about the smear campaign. And that's when the story really broke across all channels. And uh then later on the PR the PR firm itself was caught removing negative comments from its own Facebook page

and that helped spurn the the scandal even further. And uh, you know, if you're wondering about the social circle thing, it's kind of this way that Google shows the people you're connected to through various means like Twitter and and Google Contacts and all this kind of stuff, and then it shows the larger circle that you're connected to from people who are connected to the people that you're you

that are in your your social circle. So, for example, one of the people in my social circle, and it's only because I follow her on Twitter as far as I can tell, is Felicia Day or actually Google Buzz. I think it's because I follow her on Google Buzz is Felicia Day. But because it's Felicia Day, that means that that extra that next step in the social circle is enormous. But has lots of people follow Felicia Day, So that means that my information is also on display

for all those people. But this is information that is public. It is information that you have willingly shared and allowed to be public on whatever network like Google Buzz or whatever. So in other words, it's not like it's digging up information that is behind some sort of security. It's just stuff that's already out there. So that that's the argument that other people have against uh Facebook's approach was that, well, Google is just sharing stuff that you've already opted to share.

It's not like it's sharing information that you didn't you know, you said do not share this. So um, yeah, it's definitely a big, big, explosive problem. And you know what, Facebook and Google have had a long history of struggles. I mean there's none of them were direct struggles like open i D. Yes, Google backed open i D and open i D was this idea of creating a single log in kind of account and you would use that

across multiple websites. Facebook at the same time was pushing Facebook Connect, which is similar except it wasn't based on open standards like open i D and it was into Facebook. Yes, so it benefited Facebook, but it would also benefit any site that used Facebook Connect because it meant that you were tapping into a social network that had over five

hundred million users. So it's there's no there's really no surprise when Facebook Connect came out on top, because even if you argue that open i D was the better choice from just a consumer safety standpoint or from a kind of a disinterested objective standpoint, from a let's get business done standpoint, Facebook Connect made all the sense in the world. Alright, Well, we have gone forty minutes with this podcast, so I suggest we wrap it up now.

We again, we could have talked about lots of other rivalries Google has going on, and we probably will do another episode at some point just about Google, although I would suggest our next tech rivalry episode, b face, you know, focus on a different company entirely. Um, and we we've talked about similar rivalries in the past, like I said, not just Tesla and Edison, but things like you know, we've done Microsoft and Apple, and we've done a few others.

But I think that this is a fun kind of thing to talk about, really look at the two sides and kind of see what their strategies were and their their motivation for acting the way they did. Yeah. I think, well it's one of those central points in uh in any story, as you need some kind of conflict. So I think that's one of the reasons that we find this so fascinating. Yes, now that we've reached the Danu law, Yes,

let us conclude. Here is our epilogue. If you would like to hear about a specific tech rivalry, let us know. You can send us an email. That address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or contact us on Twitter and Facebook are handled. There is tech stuff H. S W and Chris and I will talk to you again, possibly about a rivalry really soon. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising

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