Clark - 9:08 pm on Feb 4, 2005 (gmt 0)

You seem to think the laser focus was a long-term reality rather than a short-term goal/marketing tool. The idea behind that slogan was to differentiate google from altavista and yahoo. THOSE guys were trying to do too much. Shopping engine, email, news. WE on the other hand will have a very simple look and feature. Enter a keyword and click on search. But NOW that they have the money to do what the others are doing, and don't need to differentiate anymore, that slogan refers to the NEXT search engine wannabe. Their focus is all over the place, very unlaserlike. Ask them about it and I'm sure they'll say who cares.

But I do agree that they love to collect datasets. Brett, while your point about firebot makes sense, don't you think they'd want even MORE data than a mere toolbar? Just IMAGINE the data they'd get with millions of users using their BROWSER. The toolbar was just a preview.

By the way, with all this talk of Sandbox, while typing I just got a theory. They had no way around those sites that scraped content and slapped on adsense (or other affiliate program). There was a specific date that the app to do it became widespread (an assumption). They are building their index to sites around before that date, slowly adding in new sites with new unduped content. And trying to solve the problem. I haven't seen fresh results on google. Haven't seen great results either. But I also haven't seen much of those scraped sites either. This goes along w/ the Google is broken theory.

If this was mentioned somewhere in the thousands of sandbox threads, sorry to repeat it.