Google's Future
Posted on 01. Feb, 2010 by Brad in Science and Technology | Twitter: @bradhart |
TechTrader.com recently had a rather popular article on Digg declaring this and that about Google’s future. It was mostly a fluff article about how important Marissa Mayer is at Google. That article could have been a very different story and probably more inspirational to a lot of women if it focused on her achievements and how to succeed in the geek garden. That said it could have been a lot more inspirational to men if they had her strip. She is a blond beauty who would have no problems raising capital and well… if her job at google ever goes away. I am sure Hef would be more than happy to have her on the cover of a Geek Girls or From Silicon Valley Without Silicone Implants issues of Playboy. Geek girls tend to be smart henceforth the name and that is most definitely a turn on for me.
Now that I have gotten off the beaten path and talked about what would have made the article better and called it nothing but fluff for the Digg Good ‘ol Boy Network let me tell you what I see in the future of Google.
First, I see a huge antitrust lawsuit looming in their future. If it doesn’t come from the US, it will come from the EU. Google has simply gotten to big and aggressive for anyone to like them. They are the biggest search engine in the world and that is a good thing in many respects, but it has its downsides too. being the biggest means they control the results. While they claim you can’t buy the number one ranking for any given search (the one ninety percent of people click on) I have to disagree. You can most certainly buy it for the right price when you use Google adwords and other rumored Google marketing products that are coming in the future. The problem is they tend to penalize people who buy the same sort of products from anyone else effectively removing from first page search results contention. They have effectively said use our products and only our products or we may very well hurt your business. For regulators who might see this, that sort of behavior sounds an awful lot like good old Mafioso extortion.
The second place I see their downfall is with Adsense itself. As the biggest search engine serving up billions of searches each and every day more often than not the first page is started off with links to their own pages with Adsense advertising. This not only cuts into the pockets of individual publishers using Adsense, but it also smacks publishers with just as relevant of content who don’t use Adsense where it hurts most. At the very least this is a conflict of interests that reeks of potential abuse. At worst this is a direct manipulation of the market in ways that are illegal in most countries.
Moving down the list of potentially fatal programs is their highly secretive PageRank Algorithm. The refuse to disclose the methods that they use to calculate PageRank, and change it often. While there is no doubt that PageRank and thus search results based on that PR would be manipulated or content would be written specifically to meet any stated PageRank guidelines, the fact that the biggest search engine sells advertising and claims to have the best system of saying how good a publishers content brings them back into a huge conflict of interest. Not only are publishers and companies wishing to advertise with those publishers put at odds with The Google Money Machine, but the end user making searches may find themselves done a disservice.
In the end Google will be forced to change if they want to stay in business. It isn’t going to happen today, and most likely won’t even begin to happen this year. Mark my words though it will eventually happen and when it does the little empire that they have built will fail.
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