Google’s Demise
Friday, August 8th, 2008...11:51 pm
No it hasn’t happened yet, and it might not soon, but I think the founding basis for Google’s search technology is becoming less relevant.
In the good ol’ days, you could just do a simple search for the page with the best keywords. Then people got wise and we had pages full of irrelevant keywords just to attract viewers. Google’s revolutionary PageRank algorithm uses the links made to a website to provide a metric for how interesting/authoritative that site is. It’s based on the idea that getting someone to link to your site was hard and therefore those links were valuable. However, these days it’s very easy to create fake blogs, leave comments on other blogs, post in forums or tweet about your sites which all provides the valuable links Google is looking for. To combat this loophole, Google suggested (and web developers implemented) the nofollow link so now any link marked as rel=”nofollow” is ignored by Google.
Here’s the weakness: Links have stopped becoming a good indicator of popularity/relevance because they are no longer rare or hard to obtain. They’ve lost their meaning. Also, most of our links are now being published (and followed) on social media sites (digg/reddit, comments, forums, social networks, etc) but are being ignored by Google due to the nofollow attribute. Google is only using a small part of the web to provide their rankings.
Yeah, I know. This is all random, untested, unverified, unproven thoughts coming hot off my brain. So I’m probably wrong. And Google is far from dumb/ignorant about this and is highly unlikely to rely soley on PageRank. But I still think there’s a 1990’s-Google-like revolution in search technology waiting to happen using something other than links
3 Comments
August 9th, 2008 at 12:08 am
1) I thought you were going to bring up Cuil (not worth linking to). Thankfully you didn’t. If there is a google killer out there then that’s not it. But a bit of competition wouldn’t hurt.
2) If google got surpassed in search is that the end? They do a lot more than search - they’ve got their bases covered, me thinks.
August 9th, 2008 at 9:17 am
Indeed google do alot more than search but search is what pays the bills.
Googles search results are becoming less relevant all the time. They’re great if you know what you’re looking for and are very specific about it otherwise you just get half a page of adds and you tube and wiki fucking pedia links.
I have my search page set to 100 cause you never find what you’re looking for on the first one or two.
August 9th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Yeah, the title is pure bait but I wrote it off the top of my head late last night. It’s just as likely that Google will come up with something new. They’ve got plenty of smart people. This was just my observation that a) links are no longer rare and therefore have lost a lot of their value and b) the links people are actually using are the one Google is now ignoring. That doesn’t bode well.
The recent Cuil fail was particularly fun to watch though. Even more interesting was Yuil/4hoursearch: a Cuil-clone built upon Yahoo! search results (in 4 hours apparently) which was far superior to Cuil’s results.
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