Is Google Painting Itself into a Corner?
Search has become vastly less important to Google financially than its role as an advertising broker (see my blog entry about this). But search is still crucial to Google's ambitions to become the information portal to the world. I'm afraid that Google's search is facing three very serious problems, and the problems are only getting worse.
Before I get to the problems, two caveats. Google is still my favorite search engine, and I use it all the time, even though there are reams of other options. Google employs legions of very smart people, many of whom probably spend a lot of time thinking about the problems I am bringing up. They may have thought of some answers that I haven't.
The biggest problems with Google's search, as I see it, are:
(1) Spam search results. These range from paid placement advertorials (which may actually have a bit of decent information) intended to direct surfers to a specific merchant to absolutely heinous junk.
(2) Flaws in the PageRank algorithm, which cause the rich (popular sites) to get richer, but make it hard for newer sites (even those with quality content) to get ranked high enough to draw any traffic.
(3) Longer and longer waits before sites and pages are added to the index. This wait time has become as long as two or three months in some cases. The wait for cross-corellation using incoming linkage to assign a rank can be even longer. This creates a static index, inappropriate for a medium as dynamic as the Web.
Of these problems, only the third, long wait times for indexing, seems solvable to me with a scalable technologic solution. (My thinking is that if you throw enough processing power at it, and engage many parallel spider bots, you could probably reduce the wait.)
With the spam and PageRank issues, Google has partially become the victim of its own success. It's so important to get good placement that it is worth thinking up any number of clever tricks to get there, or even to invent spurious content just to improve search placement. Google and the SEO webmasters are engaged in a furious arms race surrounding these techniques, and Google is losing, resulting in the arteriosclerotic condition of your search results.
I don't think that there is any good solution short of hiring human editors to evaluate content. When Google starts hiring people to categorize and evaluate Web pages you'll know they agree with me, and have thrown in the towel on finding a scalable high-tech solution.
Related link: Building Reseach Tools with Google companion web site
Posted by Harold Davis at March 18, 2005 09:00 AM
