With the emergence of Google less than a decade ago, no one could foresee its present success. It has even been punned—“Googleplex”. This is more than an appropriate play on words with googolplex meaning 10^10^100, which is essentially just a colossal number meaning “a lot”. Back in the tech arena, Google may be googolplex’s parallel. Due to the specifications of each branch of Google, Google has extended itself beyond just a search engine. With an extensive and impressive list of desktop add-ons and web products, we must question how and if Google is able to efficiently maintain them while still rivaling its competitors. While Google may be the top Internet search engine, other companies that specialize in specific queries sometimes outperform Google’s streamlined, but general search.
There are two ways sites such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft enable their search engines through controlled vocabulary and keyword searching. While there may be advantages and disadvantages to both, Google has fine-tuned its use of keyword searching to provide more accurate results. Aside from the actual query, the system that Google utilizes to display each result depends on five different aspects: popularity, relevance, ranking, metadata and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Google’s ranking structure of popularity and relevance is largely inspired by citation analysis of academic papers, which ranks papers based on how many other papers link to that paper through citation. Though there are inherent problems within this process such as “citation inflation (long-winded, pointless citational throat-clearing) as well as citation log-rolling (I’ll cite you if you cite me)”, it is still an objective and concrete way to rank pages. Some search engines rely solely on metadata, a string of information regarding the website as inputted by the creator through keywords and descriptions. Although Google incorporates metadata into its search results, it is not dependent on them. This allows Google to preserve the integrity of each webpage and make sure it is relevant to your keywords. SEO is just a system that attempts to recognize patterns in search results and develop a means to improve those rankings. For instance, the earlier a site is ranked and listed, the more sequential visits it will have—this is a form of “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. This process, like all the aforementioned can be skewed and manipulated. As a result, many firms try to exploit this by boosting their client’s site as the first search result. However, due to Google’s highly secretive logarithm, they have been able to continually counter these attempts. “Google retaliated with ever more sophisticated algorithms, and the spammers counterstruck, blow for blow”. As a search engine, Google is solid; it is in the human-generated links and metadata that skews the search results.
Despite Google’s success as a search engine, its ambitions to extend beyond that, while ambitious may be too spread out. With services such as Google Images and recently purchased YouTube, Google seems to have successfully ventured past being just a search engine. However, as their new programs such as “Google Uncle Sam” and “Google Product Search” began to emerge, the focus was still on achieving optimal search results, but it became increasingly difficult because “writing the code was unlike many other Google projects, since it did not fit in the mode of PageRank”. Google Uncle Sam’s main objective is to allow search of government documents and primarily to rival FirstGov.gov, another website with a similar objective. The most glaring difference between the two is Google’s inability to search all US Federal government information, like those sites that aren’t on .gov or .mil domains. Also, there is no Advanced Search function in Google Uncle Sam. However, FirstGov, in the end, is not Google with its relevance ranking. On the other hand, Google Product Search, while allowing a multitude of sorts: by price, product or vendor rating or even relevance and still providing quick search results; it does not exactly parallel Google as a search engine. While it does offer a wide array of choices, this, like PageRank is heavily relied on user submission of the items creating a more limited search of the web. It heavily promotes Google Checkout, their new online payment processing service. It is currently free for merchants until December 31, 2007; after that, there will be a 2.0% plus $0.20 per transaction. Although Google Checkout was intended to rival PayPal, its scope is very limited in comparison to PayPal. Overall, there are positives and negatives to both.
Two services that were released not too long ago, Google Uncle Sam and Google Product Search are two examples of Google’s ability to continue to branch out, but in doing so, they sacrifice as much specification and focus as their rivals. In the end, “Google [was] not just a search engine with a neat culture and an impressive business model, but quite possibly this generation’s next great monopolist—first IBM, then Microsoft, and now Google”. However, before it can begin, or rather, continue to monopolize the tech world, Google must assess the power of relevancy ranking and utilize it in their projects.
