John Battelle posts about the New York Times story - The Human Touch That May Loosen Google’s Grip - about Google's lead in Search Engine Technology and Market Share; Matt Cutts chimes in as well, and I'll cover that later in this post.
Interesting comparison in the NYT article:
"...Profit margins in the search business are mind-boggling, and cannot be obtained in other segments of the technology world. Google’s net profit margin last year was 29 percent. Amazon’s was 1.8 percent — yes, that is a “1” followed by a decimal point. Which business would you rather be in?"
I also wrote about Don Dodge's assertion at each percentage of search marketshare is worth 1 billion dollars, last month and the NYT article references Dodge's assertion search share market value:
"...Even gathering the crumbs of business left behind by Google could generate a lofty market capitalization. Don Dodge, a Microsoft manager who works outside of the company’s search group, made this argument in a post on his personal blog last month: “Why 1% of Search Market Share Is Worth Over $1 Billion.” Mr. Dodge reasoned that 1 percent of the 7.3 billion searches performed in the United States in March, multiplied by 12 cents in advertising revenue per search, would yield annualized revenue of $105 million. Assuming a market cap that is 10 times revenue, his arithmetic leads to a billion-dollar company."
But the thing is this: Search Engine Algorithms can't determine a page's value and that's why some element of a human interaction is needed; search engines that add the human editorial content (choice) are trying to take some of the "Google's scraps" of search share:
"..Last month, another company, Mahalo (Hawaiian for “thank you”), inaugurated a search service with manually edited results. It started with several advantages: venture capital backing, 30 editors, systematic focus on the most commonly requested search terms, and the added idea of supplying Google’s search results for any search not covered by its own best-of-the-best lists.
Mahalo now has pre-prepared pages for 5,000 terms related to entertainment, travel, health, technology and other subject areas. The company plans to expand its coverage to 10,000 terms by year-end, and eventually to provide results for one-third of the most common search terms. "
Biggest issue - don't know how often I'd use www.Mahalo.com or any other of these alternative search engines.
"..By using its own editors as the final arbiters of what goes in, Mahalo cuts off access in its listings to Web sites that confuse a search engine’s algorithm with advertorials that commingle advertisements with noncommercial information. To those in the trade, outsmarting the algorithm is called “search engine optimization.” For the rest of us, it produces Web pages littered with spam."
Ha!! So the New York Times, or at least, the author of this NYT article, is calling "SEO"...Spam! Hmm.. now I get it. Businesses what to use Search to get more monetized traffic and that's called SEO when it works, but the same businesses, and the people who work in them (plus everyone else) who searches is sick and tired of all the lousy results they get when then search on something - due to the same optimization.
It seems to me we can't have it both ways. But it sounds like Google is getting ready to evolve into a search engine that will use humans to rank Search Results, as well:
"...Even Google is interested in exploring “human powered” search. “I don’t think we’re ideologically bound to only computers, only algorithms,” Mr. Cutts said. In fact, he said, Google has combed through its own Web pages to remove all references to “automatic ranking” to prepare for the possibility of relying on user feedback to improve search results or other approaches that are more directly “human powered” than the algorithm."
Matt Cutts implies Google's Algorithms reflect human choices that have been incorporated into the Algorithm - sorta the "automation of human choices"..if you as me:
"...- PageRank is fundamentally about the hyperlinks that people on the web create. All those people creating links help Google formulate an opinion of how important a page is.
- Google News looks at a wide variety of news sources; the decisions of human editors at thousands of news sites help Google estimate whether a particular story is significant.
- Google introduced voting buttons on the toolbar back in 2001. They look like happy/frowny faces and they let regular people send thumbs-up or thumbs-down votes to Google.
- Google has allowed users to remove results that they don’t like from Google.
- For more than five years, we’ve allowed users to report spam to Google. We’ve said for years that we reserve the right to take manual action on spam (e.g. if someone types in their name and gets off-topic porn as a result)."
My feeling is that Google will need to incorporate people ranking URLs more directly and transparently than it has - ie: there's so much spam in top categories like travel and health...it's time for the search engine to actually show how many times a URL has been clicked on in the search results (say over the last month or year) as a way to know how popular it really is.
In fact, I know that major Search Engines, in general, have avoided being that transparent - because it might interfere with it's own advertising base.
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