In a cruel twist of fate, mighty Google may end up struggling against yesteryear’s Yahoo. Sound preposterous?
Not when you consider that Yahoo originally burst into the public consciousness by organizing the web’s links by hand. In other words, your web experience was improved by human mediation. Google’s innovation was to mediate the web by software algorithm, and has run away with the market since then.
But trouble is brewing in Googleville. As savvy entrepreneurs and shifty consultants learn how to take advantage of Google’s search algorithm, a cat and mouse game has emerged between Google and the so-called “Search Engine Optimization” industry. Each time Google improves its algorithm, the SEO industry figures out new ways to game it. A history of these battles is cleverly charted here.
The net result is organizing the web by algorithm may not be as useful – or as trustworthy – as you’d like. But what’s the alternative? One answer has already become clear: Wikipedia’s steady climb up the traffic rankings, to #5 according to Google itself or to #7 according to Alexa, suggests that there is clear demand for human-mediated content.
And friends are even better than a generic human, which is why former Google CEO Eric Schmidt admitted on Tuesday that his biggest failure was a lack of strategy to engage Facebook, the second most popular (and quickly growing) site on the web that does not give Google’s search engines much information to categorize.
To be sure, Google has a huge lead, and not all information is best organized through friends. But Google’s shareholders have hefty growth expectations, and even a moderate dent from human-mediated information networks such as Wikipedia and Facebook could cause Google some healthy trouble.
No comments:
Post a Comment