Not merely content with indexing the web in all its forms (and serving applications to help people work online, tell other people where they are in the world and what they’re doing, creating a platform for mobile devices, and … God, is anyone keeping track of this stuff?), Google is now making a run, as you may have heard, to start populating its own search results by itself.
Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch poses the question of whether its going to far, and I think its a good one.
Because think of it this way — as I’m sure many of you already have.
- Google derives the majority of its income through serving ads.
- Google serves a great deal of those ads in its search engine results pages, where they bracket organic search results. Above them and to the right of them.
- It doesn’t directly derive income from any organic SERPs unless those pages are also filled with Adsense ads.
- Therefore, to maximize revenue, Google must logically populate its organic SERPs with pages filled with Adsense Ads.
Even if we remove our tinfoil hat for a moment (and I have a few), and suppose that Google Knols won’t intrinsically rank higher in its own SERPs, all we have to do is look to see how fantastically well Wikipedia ranks in its own SERPs to see that the *potential* is already there.
Couple the fact that Google is danging the opportunity to derive revenue from said pages (and if you want to place a twist on it, allow people to do a kind of “reputation management” with Google’s stamp of approval, since it will be placing such a high premium on the identity of its authorship), and you have the potential to create a powerful loam for Google Knols to grow for real.
What’s the flipside to this?
I’m going out on a limb, by saying it might “Google’s total and utter destruction”, and I am only being mostly facetious here. Let’s all think about this for a second. What happened if most of the knols were utter rubbish *and* they were achieving high organic rankings on Google?
You would have a situation where it would get most people thinking — and it would be ordinary folk now, not just geeky tech bloggers — “why search on Google when all you get is Google results? (and some of them aren’t even very good)”
Which of course leads to a subtle change in perception about how Google does what its meant to be doing best — which is indexing the web. Perceptions power all kinds of things, including stock prices, which many people believe is vastly over priced in Google’s case, anyway.
Long story short?
Google’s Knols sound like a way for Google to fiddle with its Golden Goose, so that it can maximize how much it can milk it for its Golden Eggs. Its got to be very careful, however, with how sharp its trying to be with this new experiment (particularly as there are no editors and no obvious sense of quality control), lest it lop off the head of said goose.
December 14th, 2007 at 4:26 pm | Permalink
I had a similar reaction when I heard about this announcement. It’s bad news for Google. It means either (or both):
1) The PageRank-based algorithm is broken
2) No one will trust Google anymore
Neither’s a good scenario.
December 14th, 2007 at 4:31 pm | Permalink
Well, Richard, its hard to really know what PageRank *is* any more … so people could argue its kind of broken anyway.
As for the trust issue, that’s, perhaps the trickiest thing Google has to manage with Knols. None of its other ventures / experiments have come this close to diddling with its main source of revenue.
Taken another way, its almost shakespearean about how Google could ruin itself with its newest “beta”.
December 14th, 2007 at 5:31 pm | Permalink
Well said, Tony. No matter what Google says, if the new Knols start out with high SERPs people are automatically going to suspect Google of gaming their algorithms.
Google caught on because people liked and trusted their search results. If they start losing credibility on that, their whole applecart starts looking shaky.
December 14th, 2007 at 6:29 pm | Permalink
[...] without the massive can of worms that is the conflict of interest issue here (although I think Tony is spot-on in his take in that aspect), I think this has the potential to be very, very [...]
December 14th, 2007 at 7:21 pm | Permalink
I don’t really see this as a big deal, Yahoo has their directory to fall back on, Wikipedia is essentially big enough to become a SE if they ever want to. Jason C. is trying his end run with mahalo.
IMHO this is simply a way to democratize and scale the Mahalo business model.
Everybody is trying to get into le web trois why shouldn’t google get in the pool.
December 15th, 2007 at 8:33 am | Permalink
[...] on knol and Google’s expansion in other markets, Ars Technica is a must-read. I also like Deep Jive Interests‘ take on how Google is treading on dangerous group with [...]
December 17th, 2007 at 4:53 am | Permalink
hi, the next step then will be to call for people to remove google as their default home page in their browser. perhaps it is time to call for a funky contest: what do you think is the best alternative to http://www.google.com? another topic, of course, is how people could get off gmail in a decent way.
ciao, geert