The Buzz

Source: Wikimedia Commons

There’s been quite a bit of discussion on the blogosphere about Google’s recently launched service, Knol.

Basically, Knol is meant to be a Wikipedia-like site where users post articles. The difference is that these articles feature authors (who have a persistent identity on the site) prominently—thus encouraging authorities on various subjects to write about them.

However, the current complaints about Knol have primarily been some variation of these two:

1. Knol is a Wikipedia killer, and is meant to start knocking wiki results off of Google top searches.
2. Google is attempting to self-promote and is placing its own Knol content above other, longer-standing, and more authoritative content in searches.

I have little doubt, personally, that the first point is true.

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted.

This is a direct quote from Google’s official blog post about Knol. More or less, the comment is aimed straight at Wikipedia, where article authors are anonymous, distributed, and almost always unattributed. While Knol’s official, stated goal is certainly noble, I don’t find it very hard to question the motives for launching the service.

This brings me to the second point.

It’s hard to say whether or not Google is strongly favoring its own content, but based on some tests run by Aaron Wall on SEOBook regarding Knol’s page rankings on Google, it does seem to be very possible. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, Search Engine Optimizers, or SEOs, are individuals who help clients appear higher on search results—the term can also refer to taking steps to appear high on searches. Regardless, SEOs are understandably angry about this, since ranking is their livelihood and Knol seems to undermine their profession and their current way of doing things.

However, SEOs adapt. It’s part of their job, and if Knol has some algorithmic preference over other content, they’ll figure out a way to game the system, as they always do. I’m not really worried about SEO’s ability to put food on the table. I expect they’ll manage.

Instead, what I’m more concern about is the dangerous attitude that Google has taken towards web content, and its proven willingness to leverage its near monopoly position on search for its own benefit.

Google Doing Evil

I think it is generally accepted—for those who actually stop and think about it, anyway—that Google holds a very powerful position, which can easily be abused, given its influence over web traffic and habits. It’s this recognition, after all, which is the source of their famous motto, “Do no evil.”

However, one should note that this is not the first time, if these allegations about Knol are true, that Google has targeted a popular service with their own counterservice, or that Google has boosted the rankings of its own content.

For the latter, take YouTube. It’s been so long that I expect many have forgotten that YouTube was, in the past, not owned by Google. It was already popular before Google. But after Google bought the site, it seems that YouTube videos suddenly skyrocketed in Google results. This one, while still controversial, was relatively well-documented in Google’s aggressive push to promote the site and make good on their massive investment of $1.65 billion. Maybe it was simply that the site was made more optimized and therefore there was no (unfair) boost to YouTube in Google’s search results. But then again, maybe not.

As for launching counterservices, there are actually multiple examples of Google doing this. One of the more recent one was Android, which almost seemed to be meant to counter the sudden popularity and buzz around the Apple iPhone.

The other one, which is far more near and dear to Google’s financial heart, was Facebook—which was challenged with Google’s OpenSocial push.

The Walled Garden vs. Google’s Open Web

Don’t get me wrong—competition in these realms is, in the end, a good thing. But one should realize that all of these pushes are ultimately in Google’s self-interest.

The case is point, as said, is Facebook.

Where does Google’s money come from? What is their business plan, at the end of the day?

It’s ultimately getting people to use their search service, and selling statistics about search, along with, most importantly, selling targeted ads via their Adsense program.

With the widespread popularity of Adsense and the dominance of their search engine driving people to their adsense-enabled sites, you can say that Google’s “turf” is almost the entire internet. People searching and browsing the web, on an aggregate, make Google money—thus, as expected, Google wants as many people as possible searching and browsing the internet.

That is, of course, why Facebook is such a danger to Google. It’s a site where many users spend a great deal of time, purely inside of the facebook.com domain. No Google ads, little outbound traffic, and no searching on Google.com. It’s basically a nightmare scenario for Google. Hence, enter OpenSocial. If users can pick up their information and go anywhere, it destroys concentration, and it forces them to have to use a third-party tool to try to navigate this now extremely distributed network. By definition, these third-party tools for navigating the wide expanse of the web are search engines—which mostly means Google.

At the end of the day (or fiscal quarter), despite all of the hype and protestation to the contrary, Google is looking at it’s own bottom line.
If you need even more evidence of this, you just have to look at Google’s counter to Yahoo.

Yahoo’s primary strength, ever since Google eclipsed it as a search engine, is its portal functionality. A portal is start-site where you can see news, weather, and whatnot, and where you can then browse further into the web—but in a rather controlled fashion by the portal. Yahoo is the biggest web portal and has extremely valuable web real-estate on its network to keep it afloat.

One day, relatively recently, Google suddenly started popping up some sort of “iGoogle” page for its users, where you can “Create your own homepage in under 30 seconds”. Maybe it’s overkill to mention the even older occurrence where one of Yahoo’s most valuable portal elements, Yahoo Finance, suddenly found itself facing “Google Finance.” In any case, I think we can see the trend that’s been established here.

From “What You Want to See” to “What WE Want You to See”

I’m not blaming Google for paying attention to their bottom line or for competing against other services. As a company, and especially now as a public company, that’s actually what they should be doing.

However, Google has two things that worry me in their calculated conquest of the entire web.

First is that Google has a fundamental conflict of interest as a publisher of content and as a search engine. If it publishes its own content (like now), Google has an obvious incentive to abuse its position as the dominant search engine—pushing its own sponsored content above everyone else’s. This particular worry is the one behind Google’s insistence that it isn’t a media company. But ultimately, with Google books, scholar, etc. it had already become one. Now, with Knol, it is even more of a media company and publisher of content.

The first is already treacherous waters, with how reliant the internet is on Google’s search—simply witness the transformation of “google” into a verb. The second, however, is even more critical for the web as a whole.

I credit, in large part, Google for cleaning up the web. In the past, there was a veritable menagerie of useless content from Angelfire, Geocities, FortuneCities and whatnot flooding the web, and for many search engines, their results.

Google changed that.
With its algorithm actually being very good at figuring out what was quality and authoritative content and what was junk, most of the “trash” sites were cut off from traffic and slowly died a well-deserved death.

Now, however, with the internet being used for so many purposes, and with Google becoming even more influential, it has, perhaps, moved from the stage of providing, “What you want to see” to instead providing, “What WE want you to see.”

Imagine if all content that you could find and could see on the web was owned, or affiliated (through their paychecks from ads) with one single company. One can, I expect, imagine that the freewheeling spirit and entrepreneurial expansion would at least slow down if not stop. Google is the one company, by virtue of their position, which has the potential to make that scenario into a reality.

With network effects in effect on the web, where users tend to use the service that has gained the most users, whatever Google actually ends up controlling more totally won’t actually have any significant competitors.

However, it seems that so far, at least, Google has shown little restraint in lashing out against potential reductions of its own influence. Usually, I’m not against companies expanding into other industries and economies of scope—again, as said, it’s what they should do. However, I’m not sure how comfortable I am with the concept of something that is now as crucial to free expression, commerce, and daily life as the internet slowly falling into the hands of one single controlling party—no matter how much they claim to “Do no evil.”

Addendum: I found an interesting satire about the same topic from someone else who seems to have views similar to mine on the matter.

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Posted on August 8th, 2008
Filed under: Science & Tech by James Wang