Google and the Implications of Ownership of Information
May 24th, 2007 by msdanielle
My mentor is a very savvy SEOer. He has a theory that one day Google will no longer use links as a means to measure site value, that instead the value of any page on the internet will be determined by user-generated data. Now let’s all think about this notion for a bit. Imagine if one day Google wiped out their page rank algorithm as it currently stands and replaced those measures with user and client data gathered from their various properties. Links don’t carry weight, anchor text means nothing, and internal vs. outgoing link ratio are completely insignificant. Manipulating the system by means of buying, selling, trading, acquiring, and begging for links would cease. What would happen? Furthermore, what are the implications of ownership by one omniscient entity? Google may control the information, but they are by no means its creator.
At this point, Google dominates organic search and PPC search advertising, they now own DoubleClick (a publisher and advertiser exchange market), and also, just announced, FeedBurner (RSS media distribution). They practically own the delivery of web-based information that we’re seeking, the advertising that’s displayed, how advertisers and publishers interact in the marketplace, and the means by which all of this information is distributed. Would it be that unheard of for them to use all of this data to completely overhaul their algorithms (which would change the landscape of search as we know it)?
I think my mentor is right. Why wouldn’t they make this change? Manipulating the search engine results as it is could merely involve purchasing X number of links from X number of good sites for X number of dollars, which fly under Google’s radar of course. Do it enough times and you could easily rank, if done correctly, for various niche markets.
TechCrunch congratulates FeedBurner for landing such an amazing deal, nothing less short of $100,000,000 for that matter. But for some reason when I heard the news, images of toasting champagne didn’t immediately come to mind. This step puts Google that much closer to dominating nearly every channel of information sharing. My first thought was, So now what? I suppose we wait and see. But remember, he who holds the key to knowledge holds the power. Google is undoubtedly the Keymaster — let’s just hope they remember to keep the door unlocked for us.
[Note: Please keep this conversation going by leaving your comments and feedback to this post for others to share. I feel strongly about this and would love to hear your thoughts.]
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Yeah, I have found the recent buyouts by google kinda scary. From youtube to feedburner. Googles aim is to compile and organise (Control) the world’s information to make it easier for all of us to access. This is a great responsibility and gives them a ridiulous amount of power, which if not managed well can be really dangerous.
If not Google then who? Would somebody else be more appropriate? I think it’s going to happen one way or another whether through the failure of net neutrality, mergers ala ma bell, or somebody with a large enough bank account. How would you feel if AOL or MS did such a thing, not that they aren’t trying? I guess it comes down to (for me at least) relief that it’s a company that has a better (albeit not perfect) record then some of the alternatives. Disclosure: I use tons of Google products from gmail, code, reader, domains, etc and have had nothing but good results. They give my business an infrastructure that I could not afford otherwise.
shaun, thank you very much for your feedback. i wish i felt the relief that you feel, i really do. but i’m not sure i’d feel comfortable if all the information were to be controlled by any one company, regardless of who it is. i want everyone from all sides to leave commentary to help open up the discussion and understand. of course i use google’s products as well. but google is a corporation, not a non-profit. just hoping that all this information will stay in the right hands.
I would congratulate Google as well since they’re taking aggressive steps in solidifying their goal to organizing the world’s information. And before you say that they’re going to take over the world once they have all the information, stop and think if they really have a bunch of evil masterminds in a room somewhere plotting out how to annihilate everyone on this planet. Their search engines are still controlled by algorithmic machines which has as much bias as any other search engine out there. Anyways, I think this is a great move for Google since it gives them another tool to measure the worth of blogs, which in turn helps them fight all the spammers out there creating worthless scrapper blogs or arbitrage blogs that are soley designed to make money and offer nothing to the public.
“annihilate”?? huh? i’m not calling them hitler. i said they’re in control of a majority of the flow of information. you make them sound like dr. evil
can you explain how it measures the worth of blogs? i know you already mentioned it to me, but i’m sure others would like to know.
basically subscriptions would count as much as backlinks these days . . . . . . it’s going to be pretty hard to spam that . . but you never know . .
It will help them combat spam in the short term, but over the long haul it will simply change the spammers’ strategy.
While I can’t pretend to be a Google fan, they certainly know what they’re doing, and they’re doing it well.
Google is to the Internet as Microsoft is to PCs. Before Google there was Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, AskJeeves and a bunch of other ugly, ad-plastered search engines that returned a billion results for every query, with 90% of these results being somehow related to porn. Just like Microsoft did for the PC, Google offered us a very simple and very powerful way to use the Internet as a tool rather than an “expensive toy” (as my parents used to say). And, just like Microsoft once did, Google is picking up companies that offer similar or extended tools in an effort to become the Go-To company for our needs.
Eventually Google might get hit with multiple anti-trust lawsuits or government-enforced organizational splits but, regardless of what happens in the future, they’ve made themselves indispensable.
I’ve written lots of integration software for companies that are now using Google almost exclusively to hold all their customer data, calendar information, email, source code and just about everything but accounting data. We have effectively given Google the keys to our success, and we are at their mercy. If many of the free Google applications were to become subscription-based, we would complain, but we’d also quickly start paying.
The only difference between a possible Google subscription model and Microsoft’s failed software subscription models is that Google already has our data, and the noose around our necks. I’m forever reminded of the small wisdom of “There’s no such thing as a ‘free lunch’”
I doubt Google would take such a stance to effectively “own†the internet, but we’ve certainly empowered them enough to make it possible.
you’ve pretty much said in better terms
what i was trying to convey. there are implications and such that can be extracted — all speculations of course. i am in no way trying to accuse Google of any wrong-doing or abuse of our information. but you hit the nail on the head, that the possibility of what they can do is endless. we have definitely empowered them, which is exactly what i thought about when i first started using analytics (after coming from a company that used WebTrends). i thought, It’s free?? how?? and google will know our data?? we’re giving it to them?? they’ll have every company’s information that uses this “free” service?? those were all the thoughts that ran through my mind. so i didn’t think it was free, considering we’re trading the service for access to our data. thank you so much for your insight!
Ah, the Anti-Trust suits begin: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/technology/29antitrust.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Certanly is scared. The real problem I see is how to make a more free internet and I know google doesn’t help.
Let’s see what’s happen when a people wnat to search for something.
We all know that internet is virtualy infinite, but for a user is only the first 2 pages of a google search. So if they want to hide something, they can and easily.
Another question, Why google has such nice image arround the communty? if they aren’t too different from Microsoft?
Really a shame..
Anyway, nice post
thank you brutuscat. hopefully they will use all of our data responsibly. they have a good image because they have a quality service and so far haven’t done anything to bring negative attention to the company. it’s still a lot of speculation
Alexa Linky Love…
Thanks for tagging me, Heather!
</start copying here>
Copy all the things listed without removing the links (Of course, the train would be no use without those links).
Move all the sites labeled “Enjoyable finds†to the list labeled “…
Takeovers are always intimidating. Recently a lot of big-name Canadian corporations have been getting bought-out by US and European firms/holding companies, and a lot of Canadians are uneasy about this.
Yes, the immediate effects is that the stock value goes up but in another sense the infrastructure is being eaten away.
The similar sentiment can be found with Google buying out everything. They already own so much, and with the additional acquisitions as well as data pooled in from all these sources, Google will be a mega-machine.
Google will probably have, if they don’t already have, the best data and trend tracking for consumer activities in the world. It’s a huge asset on selling just about anything. At that point they can start determining the trends, sort of like how the spring fashion magazines say they “predict fashion” but in a sense, the “definte” the next trend as the spearhead of the industry.
Why do I feel Google’s going to eventually stop being innovative and just start buying everyone else that is being innovative? They’re expanding…heavily. They need to be less compartmentalized and more of a cool Web start-up.
While I agree that it’s absurd to think that Google would ignore the traffic patterns that they have access to, the move to a traffic based algorithm is a significant one. One on a generational scale for search engines. Here’s the kicker though. We won’t notice.
It will (has been?) slowly be rolled into the algorithm, one additional minor factor amongst hundreds of others, slightly altering the SERPs. As they trust the measure further, they’ll turn the knobs to their desired weights. We’ll still have hundreds of variables at play, but traffic patterns will have become one of the major elements. Whether or not the SEO community will even realise this has happened is hard to say since the elements are so very complex already.
It’s going to happen if it hasn’t already, but it’s not going to come out in a grand Google 2.0 extravaganza. It will sneak in from the shadows slipping by all but the most attentive of SEOs.
@jeff - interesting analogy. they will be able to determine trends based on current activity and data, and shape the industry…
@daniel - they’re definitely past the start-up stage, but if they’re able to hold onto that spirit that drove them in the first place, then they’ll have the potential to continually crank out quality products. at the very least, they’re continuing to better their search algorithms and weed out bad sites, which is where they started out — in search…
@mark - where do you think the weight is now on links, and how much could we try to predict that it will change?
Don’t get me wrong I am not against google in anyway. I use alot of their stuff too. Im just not happy our world is set up in a way that allows a company control such amount of information just becasue they have money. BUt I agree i prefer it be google than anyone else right now
as jason says, most of us are giving google this information willfully. i mean, how many of you here in this discussion are tracking your data with analytics? how many are using adsense on your sites? and how many have dabbled in adwords? the data is all there at their disposal. it’s not free by any means to us — it’s barter. google controls what we allow them to control… yes, it is intimidating.
[…] would go away completely. Instead, this appraisal would be determined by user-generated data. As Google’s data minefield expands, so does the likelihood of this […]
I think this is possible, but the moment they do that and some other company with the right timing comes out with a more reliable and open ranking system…..i dont see why the internet will not accept it…we have every right to start worrying now…the search, the feeds, the video share, the mails, the desktop, the social community and more….I think I need to find out alternatives for all of them!
Danielle,
I said the same exact thing! When a company holds so much control over the information everyone uses on a daily basis … it’s a bad thing. Like the power companies … if you don’t like your bill … you have no other options. They just come and turn your power off … no alternatives … no choices … this is potentially what could happen!
And this is why someone needs to step up to the plate and tack back some control. However google is now strong enough to do whatever they want! Lets say there is some other tapped market that google wants to get into and everyone in that market decided not to sell … google could potentially just create and move foward.
Something for us to all recognize and think about. We are not safe, and all the eggs are in Google’s Basket right now!
Darin
I would like to hear more about the theory of “user-generated data”, no one has seemed to ask yet.
Where would it be generated?
How would it be captured?
What would it be?
speaking for myself, i’m referring to existing products that google has either created or acquired. for instance, with Adwords, they know what advertising strategies will work, what people will click on, what industries are more likely to get sales per search, how much advertisers are paying or willing to pay (bids), etc. for AdSense, they know what types of content rich sites have the highest eCPM, how much publishers are earning, publisher site data (impressions, etc), and so on. if you use Analytics, they know pretty much all of your site stats: the referring source, where users leave your site, how long they’re on your site, what country they’re surfing from, etc… if you have a blog using FeedBurner, they know your subscription stats. any private data that we provide to them that they can collect, analyze, and use to shape and mold (optimize) their products. all of the above services are of no monetary cost to us provided that they are given full access to this statistical data.
oh and the point of all this is that the way that sites rank highly in google now is through linking. they could one day have gathered enough user data to do away with linking to measure site value. they could say, “hey, all of these sites with [this data] are good.” [this data] being whatever they’ve deemed as high quality using their products. right now a site with no back links (publisher-generated data) is like a lonely island, it has no value (at least to google). the same could be said about a site that gets no traffic (user-generated data). the only hole is that they can only measure most of the traffic, not all of it. that’s also why i asked Marc above about how much he thinks linking could change as an influence. for the time being, they’ll have to have a significant amount of weight. but they can tweak their system slowly with the data they currently have.
It could well happen. Let’s also remember Google Analytics - this could be used to further determine the value of a website based on visitor behaviour.
- Martin Reed
One could only hope that with the things google has they will actually do some good with it. Yes it seems like they are trying to ‘take over the world’ but they may have a plan we don’t quite know about, what that plan is who knows. It seems to me that every company that gets large, microsoft, google etc, as soon as they get there they become the bad guys all of the sudden and we think the worst of them. WHy is that? When they were little and starting out we supported them, but now those same supporters are turning against them, why exactly I just don’t know. It sems we always look for the ‘little guy’ to root for, and automatically turnt he ones that made it big into the ‘evil empire’ . why do we have to try and make something out of possibly nothing? So what they bought Feedburner, they bought YouTube, I say more power to them, if I could I would too. The trend is people are trying to read into these acquistions a bit to hard, they are looking for things that just might not be there. Google is trying to better itself as a whole, why is that bad? You or I would do the exact same thing in their position…
the little guy doesn’t stand much chance of posing a threat to anyone. once the little guy becomes dominant in every area of any industry, they form a monopoly, which reduces market competition. i wouldn’t agree that google dominating the flow of information in every sector online is “nothing.” and speaking for myself, no i don’t think i’d aim to do the same thing
I don’t like the Google purchase of Feedburner burner much either. A little competition and diversoty is good for business. Google gets closer ever day to the domination that a lot of people criticize Microsoft for. I see anti-trust suits in their future.