Posts tagged “search engines”

The rumored Microsoft/News Corp deal to de-index from Google and go Bing-exclusive is dead on arrival. No single publisher has enough leverage to make users switch search engines, and News Corp especially doesn't. This would be a lose-lose-lose for everyone involved, News Corp most of all.

Google's PageRank dominance is crumbling as conversation shifts from blogs to Twitter, Facebook, and other real-time streams it can't effectively index. Whoever figures out how to measure authority across all these channels, not just the web, will have a shot at unseating Google in search.

Google Knol gives its own content unfair PageRank advantages over competitors, which is an abuse of monopoly power. Google has crossed the line from organizing the world's information to stealing traffic from better sources and monetizing the theft. This is evil, plain and simple.

Neither company will "win." Google and Yahoo are like Toyota and Honda, doing essentially the same thing with the same fundamentals. Google executes better on ads right now, but the market values us equally. Competition makes both better. That's good for everyone.

Google appears to be hitting fundamental scaling limits, producing bizarre results and workarounds instead of a painful full recode. We've grown dependent on its godlike ability to find anything. What happens to how we use the web if Google simply doesn't scale?

Catching up on a backlog of links: everyone copies search engine winners (now Google), the Google Dance explained, IQ tests during exam revision are a bad idea, the Daily Mail is racist (shocker), rebranding the Tories, barcodes as art, X2 beats Matrix Reloaded, and more.

Google knows too much about me. Searching my name with friends' names pulls up surprisingly accurate photos of them. Oddly, Mikey keeps appearing alongside my romantic interests. I also tried "Seldo next" to predict my future entanglements. The results were alarming. Watch out, boys.

Google has indexed my entire site, including blog entries. Amusingly, it will now also index this post about being indexed, creating a hopelessly reflexive loop of links.