Why #Google, as it stands, is doomed

[D]espite being a page-level metric, homepage PageRank is actually a fairly good predictor of many important domain-level variables relevant to SEO, social media, and website traffic.

via SEOmoz | What is PageRank Good for Anyway? (Statistics Galore).

Google, like Apple, is a company that splits people’s opinions. One night after a presentation, I was talking with some very smart people who felt that Google’s ascent had been masterful. Not necessarily disagreeing, I told them about a convincing article I’d read that said that Google’s real innovation was its real-time bidding system, but they maintained that it was all about search. Perhaps it’s the same conclusion or perhaps it doesn’t matter either way: fact is, Google has known how to deliver eyeballs.

I was not an early adopter of Google search. I far preferred Yahoo!’s human-powered directory, at least till it wasn’t human-powered anymore. I also liked HotBot, mostly because you could do complex searches, but at least a little for its fluorescent colors.

That said, eventually, like everyone else, I went to Google. As I think back , I think the change mainly had to do with speed, simplicity and comprehensiveness. Yahoo! was slow to load that many times in a day. It was hard to find things on its pages. Eventually, it just didn’t have as many pages in its index (or so it seemed) or as quickly.

That said, I went to Google almost despite the search, which has never been great. It’s very good at finding what you would expect to find, which is to say, it’s great when you know what you’re looking for. But most of the time, you don’t know! Add in the fact that its search functions are actually pretty paltry (anybody speak Boolean?) and it’s clear: Google just isn’t a great search engine.

Still, I, like everyone, stuck with them. Why? Because they kept layering on stuff I wanted. Email. Maps. News. It was all in bits and pieces, but each piece was better or more convenient than the other pieces available at the time. Again–not about the search. The search was more or less incidental–it worked well enough that I didn’t bother to load up some other engine.

Now, however, we live in a world where the pieces are quickly getting better than Google’s. Part of it is because Google has commoditized the pieces. By making it clear what works without owning any of it, they essentially do vast quantities of R&D for upstart competitors. Thus, Facebook may be about to eat Google’s lunch on email. Note that switching costs are essentially zero for online services. I myself float among many of them and use some redundantly so that I can quickly jump ship if the time should come.

So let’s assume that Google doesn’t come through with a Facebook-killing social network. And really, how likely is that? Google’s been foundering lately with a string of scattered and lackluster products and offerings. After Buzz and Wave, should we really have much confidence in Google’s abilities to design complex customer-facing enterprises? GMail, for all its strengths, is only marginally great. It remains absurdly complicated for what should be easy tasks. (Good grief–I’m an above-average computer user, and I can’t remember the two dozen keyboard shortcuts and idiosyncratic search operators I’d need for it to be easy.)

Even in the mobile space, Android is gaining ground, but not necessarily to Google’s advantage. We’re starting to see Android phones with Bing as their default search engine. What’s Google’s strategy here? (I say that even as an open-source champion.)

What Google really has is a golden goose: Search. People come to Google to search, so advertisers will pay for the eyeballs. Google is very efficient at capitalizing on the advertisers, but without the eyeballs, Google has a very efficient machine without any fuel.

Facebook is beginning to eat Google’s lunch on eyeballs. It has become the No. 1 traffic referral site in the U.S., the most visited site in the U.S., and its advertising setup is lucrative and growing. Google is and should be petrified.

Google search is a victim of its own success. The problem with Google search is that it can be gamed. If I do a search for “New Mexico Consultants,” I will see a fair number of irrelevant entries and, worse, consultants who may not have anything to do with New Mexico beyond having created a web page with those words on it and, through keyword research and linking strategies, have bumped it to Google’s front page.

Look at what Google has made here: A large-scale distributed system that provides feedback in real time on an almost uncountable number of events and then optimizes the system and provides what in economics would be approaching  “perfect information.” Everyone knows what everyone else pays. We know what’s being bid upon. Moreover, it’s a system with enormous monetary incentives. Winning means getting paid. You are providing motivation to others to improve the system–for themselves.

There is one Google. There are millions of gamers. Google exerts huge amounts of energy for increasingly less improvement in its search results. The gamers have won: Google search sucks.

This is why we’re increasingly searching at Facebook. Just tell me what my friends are looking at. Let my friends bubble the information to the top for me. It’s not a more effective filter–it’s just that it is effective at all, whereas Google search rarely is.

By creating an incentivized, self-optimizing system, Google is engineering its own doom. Gamers will continue to reverse engineer, model, and guess at Google’s algorithm until there’s no more point. How could Google make its results better? What Google is really doing is providing information that helps gamers create content that Google likes. Google has created the most massively parallel supercomputer ever built–composed of millions of brains and devoted entirely and singlemindedly to erasing its advantage.

A searcheris looking for information that can’t be gamed. Otherwise, it’s worthless or, worse yet, actually costs us in time or opportunity. Where people want to look–that’s where the money is. Given that, is Google reaching a tipping point? Is spam the real challenge facing Google? Is Google doomed? I hope not, as Google is actually a very cool company. It has lived, it seems, by its own creed of not doing evil. And yet, I don’t see how Google will win this short of creating an effective Facebook competitor.

Facebook and Skype between them have a billion users. Google owns capacity in both of those areas. The stakes are large.

I look forward to your thoughts.

Thank you to Benson Hendrix for spurring many of these thoughts in a recent conversation. Benson is a savvy thinker on technology!

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