Swanson - 10:28 pm on May 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

Brand loyalty on maps, video earth etc. is like saying MSN brand loyalty like Hotmail equals a better position in the search market.

What Google is doing apart from search will not help them achieve market share and revenue from their core product - and their core product is their only differentiation from their competitors - search. Take away that and its nothing but a bunch of experiments supplemented by an ad company that gets to distribute it's ads on the biggest search property in the world.

ogletree - we agree then on the fact that Google needs to concentrate on core product. We disagree on how much space it takes to store the index and cache - what I am saying is that Google is storing each and every crawl of every page forever, yes compressed - but think about 10 crawls of 1 page in 10 days that uncompressed is 100k (if you multiply that out by a few billion pages every few days then it outnumbers the other content massively)

What I am saying is that Google had this problem a few years ago and everything they have been doing since has been with an eye on this scenario - big daddy being the implementation of a year or two's work.

And yes, storage does not explain everything - but implementing such agressive dupe filters affects a lot of things - especially the calculation of link patterns and page rank as suddenly links disappear.