Comments on: Why Publishers Don’t See Google As A Friend

By: Willem-Jan

Willem-Jan — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 05:09:12 +0000

Great observations, Daniel. The same principles apply to classifieds and other (online) marketplaces: as long as all content owners hold out to Google et al, it will be hard for the aggregators to gain foothold and commoditize the market. As soon as one defects, others will feel forced to jump too in order to (re-)gain traffic. Ultimately the aggregator becomes the go-to destination and wins the game…

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 17:40:31 +0000

In fairness to Google, they don’t just use links. They also use traditional information retrieval metrics, like tf-idf, and that they don’t just use link as described in the original PageRank paper, but also use the anchor text on those links.

That said, I agree that Google doesn’t seem eager to relinquish more of the relevance determination process to users. I don’t think that’s so much about their wanting monopoly control over distribution as their being convinced, like Apple, that they know best.

But of course it is a benign side effect (for them) that their mechanism of controlling relevance often inspires zero-sum SEO games where they get to play the house.

By: Joel Amoussou

Joel Amoussou — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 16:24:50 +0000

Jeff Jarvis also wrote in the same post:

“Google’s algorithm is based on reading “links” as votes for content. Every time a website links to another website, Google reads that link as a vote.
…
But without those links, without those “votes,” Google has nothing.
…
The key to Google’s monopoly control over content distribution on the web is its ability to judge what’s most relevant in an increasingly large sea of content.”

In short, Google uses links to determine relevance. Structured data (XML or RDF), and Semantic Web technologies are the game-changer. No wonder Google is not too enthusiastic about those technologies.

Joel