I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a prediction. Perhaps I should call it wishful thinking, but I’m not sure whether I really would like this to happen or not. First, some background.
Google is King
Google is the dominant search engine. With this power has come great responsibility to continue to innovate, return better results, etc. Unfortunately, their fame has come at a great cost. Realizing the massive number of eyeballs that Google has captured, spammers and legitimate businesses alike have flocked to Google, doing their best to show up in the results with relevant looking content. To be fair, many businesses and marketers do this legitimately, through White-Hat means which Google encourages. However, many have not.
Enough!
The result of all the “Google-gaming” is that some of the public is getting tired of seeing the same e-commerce sites and adsense publishers show up in the results when they run a search. Take a site like GiveMeBackMyGoogle.com which appends filters to your queries to try and filter out comparison shopping engines.
Let’s face it. Lots of people use Google to search for information. Many people (often the same people) also use Google to search for goods to buy. And while these sometimes overlap, most of the time if you are looking for pure information you don’t want to be hassled by salesy pages trying to convince you to buy! buy! buy! So what’s Google to do if they want to please the info-Googlers so they’ll stick around when they actually want to buy something?
Gasp!
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Google Knol. What if (big if) Google made this not just to compete with Wikipedia, but to compete with itself? What if the future of search took on two distinct shapes? Google Knol for information, and plain old Google Search/Sponsored search for merchants? That way merchants who wanted to contribute valuable information on a subject would be forced to have their submission reviewed and rated by guess who! The users! Let’s look at some of the implications of something like this. First the potential positives, then the drawbacks.
Benefits:
- Spammers would be more easily buried when they tried to pass off a sales pitch as “helpful information.”
- Google would still have sponsored ads on Knol articles just in case a user felt like switching over from info to purchase.
- People would (theoretically) trust Knol more, then trust Google more, and might trust shopping from sites listed on Google more.
Drawbacks:
- As with any social network, good information has the potential to be buried. If everyone has rights to moderate, and a lot of people are greedy and mean, then good content could get buried and forgotten.
- Google would be leveraging their fat market share of searching eyeballs to, in a way, monopolize knowledge.
- This would leave out a third crucial search market, searching for media. I suppose Google could just split into three, who knows?
- And lastly, it would probably never work and likely isn’t their intention anyway.
But isn’t it fun to think about? I mean, there has to be a solution out there. The problem is that people are complicated. Some people who would say they are looking purely for information might not realize that they actually would in the end buy a product. And vice versa. People don’t always know what they want, so why not just leave search a blank slate and have people do the filtering for themselves?
What other potential drawbacks/benefits could this have? How likely is it really? These are questions to which I would like to know the answer.
2 Responses to “Will Google Split?”
An interesting idea. It could work. I’m convinced, however, that they will find a way to squeeze ads into everything eventually. Probably even my morning shower before long. *Sigh* It would be nice to surf for info without being haggled.
Great Post. Allow me to rant a bit.
I don’t like the idea of Google separating the Internet into two mutually exclusive groups. The reason is that I don’t feel it is up to Google to determine what is information about commerce and what is information designed exclusively for reference. Consider the fact that they finance their operation by giving advertisers opportunity to “buy” the most visible of their search results.
How would Google know whether or not my information searches are part of a longer buying process? If I’m going to buy something expensive and complicated, say a central air conditioning system for a multi unit building, I’m going to do a good bit of information gathering as part of my buying process. I’ll need information about those systems such as differences in brands, specifications, and prices and buying options. The specific air conditioner manufacturers must have the right to offer in depth information about their products in addition to offering the ability for a visitor to click “order now.” True, not a lot of people shop for industrial air conditioning over the Internet, but that doesn’t change the point. Information and commerce are often one in the same. If Google split the Internet into “information” and “commerce,” would that mean that creators of a certain product not be allowed to provide information on that product? If Trane air conditioners wrote a detailed, factual knol about their product, then wouldn’t it be inherently “salesy?” They are, in fact, the top authority on the subject. It wouldn’t be fair to them, or the searchers, if they didn’t have the chance to present their information.
Google’s function is to scour the Internet and return a list of sites with content relevant to my search query. I feel that Google’s Knol is quite simply an attempt to introduce more relevant content into the Internet that they could monetize with Adsense. Google already has a “shopping only” service in Froogle, Google Base or Google Product search or whatever the heck they call it.
Actually, I’m shocked Google is doing this Knol thing in the first place. They have to be really careful about how they position Knol results in users searches. Are they going to have their own box, further crowding their page? Are they going to include them in the organic results and raise concerns of them playing favorites with their own content?
Okay, I’ve been sitting at Bread Co a little too long. The free wi-fi is great, but these chairs are built for eating sammies, not surfing the web.