Philip Wen's //

Google`s stock plummeted this year

News have been traveling around the circles recently that Google is looking to shave down some expenses.  Today, this article floated up to the top.

Considering the rate that Google have expanded over the past few years, this one wouldn’t sound too surprising to me.  The way they would go about those lay offs don’t sound too far fetched either.  Google has accrued an army of System experts, whether Computer Systems or the Legal System.  But to think that they would lay off approximately half of their workers is a hard to imagine– the Google today is an Android compared to its RoboSapien past. Having ½ of Googlers running the show would be a bit too skeletal.  Then again, with GOOG losing more than half of its Market Cap over the past year, only the brainiac Googly bean counters would know best just how many heads would need to roll.

Internet Ad spending has been contracting at a rapid race, not just because of the economy, but the direction that the ‘net is going toward. (I will talk about this topic some other time)  I wonder if Google Trends is picking this up?

Regardless of its validity, it will be interesting to see how Eric, Larry and Sergey have in store to steer the Googlybot through this downturn.

Jerry Yang and David Filo - at Stanford in 1994

Jerry valued his prized brainchild a little too high initially and is now paying the price for it.  See the posts here and here.  This is a classic case of the endowment effect- it is sad that the passion that Yang had for the company is also the one that is bringing him down from the top post.

What can we learn from this?  Once the company goes public, it belongs to the public.  And that no matter how much of a brainiac you are, you can’t escape the boundaries of human psyche.

Endowment effect is a double-edged sword.  Wield it wisely.

As for Jerry – I am sorry man.  Sometimes popular consensus is more important than having “the passion” and doing the “right thing”.  Just ask Galileo.  Or not.

If you run decent sized websites, this will probably be of interest to you.  Google is announcing an on-demand feature to call out their bots whenever you are ready to a re-index.  So instead of working on the bots’ schedule, you can now index on demand.

Here is a youtube vid pumping the new feature.

Here’s another from Adobe pumping site search in general.

For a webmaster dealing with ~ 5000 pages, $100/year may not be a bad deal for this new feature alone.

To find out more about Google’s Site Search, head over to their site.