Google Is Lame

While I am venting about Google this morning, I may as well share a feeling I've had lately about Google.

They are lame.

Not in their core search product which remains the single greatest web service in existence.

But in many of their recent initiatives, Google has introduced a delay between submit and display.

And that's just lame in this day and age of instant recall.

Here are some examples of their lameness.

When I first uploaded a video to google, it just vanished.  Poof. Gone. I had no way to see it and no idea where it had gone to.

I put Google Analytics on my blog on Monday.  I still don't have any data.  The service tells me, "Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being gathered now. Your first reports will be ready within twelve hours."  Not exactly.

I submitted a theater review to Google Base this morning.  And it took ten minutes to be processed and displayed. Does it take Craigslist that long to post a listing?  No way.

Posting stuff to the Internet has to be instantaneous.  What if wrote this post on Tyeppad and it took me 10 minutes to see the result?  What if I posted a photo to Flickr and it took a day to see it? What if I put sitemeter on my blog and had to wait three days before seeing my traffic?

I would stop using all of those services.  Fortunately, they don't do that to me.

Google does. Is it arrogance that they think they can get away with it while others can't?

Are they so huge that their vaunted data centers can't process the posts quickly enough?

Who knows?

But I know this.  Google is lame.

Comments

[J. Thomas Duffy]

Fred

Nice Vent ...

I've had a few hits on them, latest below

Peace
JTD

Google May Come To Terms With Publishers; Will Digitize Cliff Notes Only
Response To 'Bazooka Joe' Strong; Customers Want Shorter Read, Synopsis Over Full Text

Blog: The Garlic
Post: News In Brief 15 November 2005
Link: http://puregarlic.blogspot.com/2005/11/news-in-brief-15-november-2005.html

[jackson]

Kettle, this is Pot. It takes ages for my comments to go up on your blog. I get stuck in a blue hole of purgatorial waiting every time. At least a whole minute!

[Hooman Radfar]

It seems that many of the recent additions to the growing Google service package are not quite as slick as people expected. One service that everyone should take another look at from a strategic perspective, is GoogleBase. Specifically, take a look at Googlebase in the context of creating a Semantic Web. If their stated mission is to organize the world's information, then moving towards a Semantic Web makes complete sense. Our guys predicted that the creation of a global repository would be a logical first step if they were moving towards a more this vision. They have taken that step. Some other facts of note, they hired Guha--a Semantic Web ninja-- as a Chief Scientist in May. Also, take another look at Google Sets. Semantics are intrisically set-theoretic in nature. What are the boys at Google REALLY planning?

[Andrew]

Think thats lame? I checked my adsense account from the other day and it says 200 impressions, 89 clicks = $7.00.

Something isn't right.

[Jason Gill]

In Google Analytics, try viewing the report -- it seems like in the last few hours (at least for the sites that I set up in it on Monday) the reports have started showing up, but the "you still need to wait" error is still appearing. They did remove the "site overlay" function that graphically showed the most popular links on your pages, which is unfortunate.

[Daniel Nerezov]

too right! $10 says Google is gonna catch an antitrust case within 5 years - now that'll be lame.

hey, I'm not finished!! these guys go around releasing all sorts of pointless software like GOOG Reader, when hundreds of thousands of their customers are getting defrauded everyday.

what's lame, is Google not fixing click fraud.

P.S. I got the same thing with GOOG Analytics. It says the data isn't ready yet, but if you click, the reports actually show up (might be different for you).

good post

[greg]

I added a comment to Jon Fine's Knight Ridder piece over at Business Week and got this response: Your comment will be reviewed and posted within the next few days.

Are they kidding?

[Dave!]

I'll agree with you on some points... if they promise 12 hours, they should deliver in 12 hours, or adjust their claims. However, saying that a service like analytics should be "instant" is foolish. If I hand you my financials for a potential deal, your analysis should be instant? Bah.

That said, I think Analytics (so far) is pretty weak...

[Jarid]

Dave,
Having web analytics data in real-time isn't foolish and it's already being done by several Google competitors in this space (i.e. WebSideStory). Having real-time data enables real-time decisions. Your analogy is off, since Google isn't doing ANY analysis. They're just collecting the data.

What if you were buying a PPC ad on Google that you were spending a lot of money on, yet wasn't converting traffic to sales on your site? Wouldn't you want to know that right away to be able to turn off the ad, or adjust your bid, or change your landing page, etc? The point is you don't want to have to wait 12 hours for this data. You want/need it now.

If Google is to become a serious threat to WebSideStory, Coremetrics, Omniture, WebTrends, et al, they need to offer a more reliable service.

[Chris]

This is a launch early launch often learn along the way company. Calling them lame is a little harsh. Particularly from a guy who invests in startups who likely espouse the same philosophy.

Lame is being a spammer. Lame is not respecting your privacy. Lame is writing flame posts.

Simply being buggy or slow doesn't add up to lame in my book.

[Chris]

This is a launch early launch often learn along the way company. Calling them lame is a little harsh. Particularly from a guy who invests in startups who likely espouse the same philosophy.

Lame is being a spammer. Lame is not respecting your privacy. Lame is writing flame posts.

Simply being buggy or slow doesn't add up to lame in my book.

[TDavid]

Google itself is far from "lame" so easy on the sensationalistic titles, but they do certainly need to improve the quality of most their recent launches. Remember Google Accelerator? Terrible. Google Blog search was splog city and forget about Google Reader.

As for Analytics, last night stats started showing up for us and I like the level of detail. Let's not forget that they were charging $200/month for this recently. I've never spent much time with Urchin but I like the stats I'm seeing so far. Yeah, it sucks that it is slow and overloaded but Google's history indicates that this will improve over time when all the bandwagon jumpers move on and the serious businesspeople are left to actually use the tool.

One thing about Google is more often than not they will make these tools better. Look at Gmail? When competitors started getting close on space, they put in a dynamic increase so space is always increasing.

Search, which you also noted above, isn't a contest yet. Some 75% of our search traffic across our websites is coming from Google. We're seeing some good movement from MSN though, so maybe someday Google will have more serious competition on this front.

Adsense has competition in YPN and soon from MSN AdCener, so they aren't the only game in town there.

Orkut? That was always a pretender, not a contender.

As for this new Google Base thing? Some time for that to season is in order too.

BOTTOM LINE: posts like this one and the commenters playa hating seem to have had no negative impact on the stock price (it is nearly $400/share as I write this). Being a GOOGle shareholder, I find it interesting how insigificant the blogosphere has been in impacting Google's financial portrait negatively. It seems the cliche: laughing all the way to the bank comes into play here.

So keep those missiles flying ;)

[Anti]

I knew we were star-crossed lovers in a former life, Fred. Google is overrated. Root causes: internet lemming mindset, fond recollections as Google as that friendly upstart, rampant Microsoft loathing, core sheepism that causes us to do things like vote for morons, etc.

Google: Search is good. Maps are good. We haven't screwed up Dejanews either. Blogger might be good, who cares, non-strategic, billion blog engines/services in the sea.

GMail blows, I don't care what technorati says, give me a real client anyday, give me Outlook Web Access, give me Yahoo! mail for the love of God. Froogle used to be good, it's been completely neutered with the categories and hoop jumping they've added.

Picasa, desktop search, toolbars, blog search, messenger, aggregator... all of these products make me yawn so hard I may have distended my jaw.

Google has two things that matter: Search and its ad network. Not insignificant things, but whatever. Hardly innovative at this point.

Here's the punchline: Yahoo! Yahoo actually has good enough products that people pay for them on their direct merits.

Go figure.

I turned around last week and realized I had independently grown to value Yahoo Music Unlimited, Yahoo Mail Plus and Flickr Pro. Huh, who knew, I turned around and had paid Yahoo +100 bucks for a year of these services. The only thing I would pay for from Google is Search.

I don't get why the market values Google at such a premium to Yahoo. Google's rolling out core things Yahoo's had several years later and in a much more lackluster fashion.

Wait a second though--they are *Google*, and we totally love them and that explains it...

[Philipp Lenssen]

"Ten minutes" for Google Base? My data wasn't showing on Google Base for hours. I haven't seen it yet! Your criticism is absolutely justified. I do have a feeling this didn't happen with Google products 2 years ago, but that might be nostalgia...

[Bob Visse]

Google Base is lame. Not only for the good reasons you mention. Their UI on Google Base is lame. It is warmed over AdSense UI. I am surprised that they did nothing around reputation here. It shows that Google plans to be judge and jury on all posted web content. They do nothing to harness community - unless you want to count the spam reporting system they have.
How do I know if a recipe is good here, how do I know if the remote control plane I found in classifieds really works as described? etc etc.

http://belikedilbert.blogspot.com/

[rossit]

oh how horrible for you.

Do you throw a fit if you get a tiny food stain on your clothes?

The only thing lame is your blog. Start posting up something worthwhile.

[notany]

Below all products google puts on the web are it's most innovative and advanced systems. All the data is saved in gfs (google file system - gigantic distributed file system). Data is processed using clever ideas like MapReduce. If these technologies live up to their promise, Google will be able to scale up it's services more cost effectively and more reliable than it's competition. For those who don't know, google is actually gigantic distibuted computer. Thay have the base technology up and running (google search) , now they just add more applications that run inside the google machine.

The reason Google is so slow might be that it can't build it's hardware base quick enough. Or it might be that it's software model is not really that scalable. If reason is in software they are in trouble. Otherwise its just momentary slowdown until they get their 100 000 new servers shipped and installed.

[charlie crystle]

Salesforce.com is lame.

Click and wait. Click and wait. Click and quit.

We're moving off Friday. blogged about it here: http://charliecrystle.blogspot.com

[Ruchit]

Not just that, Gmail is also breathing hard. See one of my posts http://siliconverse.com/blog/?p=56

[BookBoy]

I think your comments on Google being lame aren’t warranted. They are releasing a new product weekly which is why they aren't in tip top shape. Now some may say they should test their products more before releasing them, but I don't mind being a part of the feedback loop in their product development. I guarantee you their products improve as time passes. Most important of all their products are FREE!!!

I'm sure you don't think they are lame when your site returns on a google search!

[Stan]

Mayebe it isn't google that is lame. Maybe it is you guys who are.

There is a reason their newly released products are called "BETA" after all. The imperfections have to be worked out. They don't expect their entire user base to begin implementing them. By the time that happens, they hope to have worked the quirks out. Of course there is a select population of users, such as yourselves, who are the first ones to try any new thing that comes out.
Google may not be ready for you, but given a reasonable amount of time, it will be ready for the general populace.

[P-Air]

Get used to the latency in content being uploaded to public spaces. With the laws and regulations that are making their way down to web sites under the guise of kiddie porn laws, every site will need to review content being uploaded for fear that either a picture w/a model whose age hasn't been verified or words that are considered of a lascivious nature, have been uploaded on to a service. Google, as well as any other self-publishing platform will be at risk for this sort of thing, and it's damn shame. One of those cases where a noble cause has been mutated into draconian laws.

[bronxite]

Nivi mentions that Google are now paying people to "evangelize" web surfers into ditching IE for Firefox. A focused view of this effort is given here.

The funny thing is, CustomizeGoogle , a plug-in for Firefox lets you disable all of the ads from Google. I wonder if the next version of IE will be set by default to disable Google ads?

[chickun-wing]

well at least they learned something from microsoft. make your first product sucky and then try to pull the market in.. froogle is still terrible.

i like clusty.

[Mike D.]

It's interesting that Google, of all companies, is having these issues because this sort of latency is something you generally induce intentionally if you're not able to handle real-time dynamic processing on the server side. Basically, companies decide in advance they will process requests lazily on the back-end and return you to what you're doing before those requests go through.

Shocking though in this case because Google is legendary for their scaling abilities.