Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

John The (Google) Search Battelle is not inordinately impressed by 23 year old Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook phenomenon. In typical Battelle blogging fashion he weighs in, succintly: “Facebook $6 billion? Nah.”

Apparently, Battelle does not have a “The Social Network: How Facebook and its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Community and Transformed Our Lives” sequel in the works to “The Search”!

What’s more, Mark Zuckerberg’s “Social Graph” is no Sergey Brin & Larry Page PageRank breakthrough, Battelle implies.

WHY does Battelle hone in on PageRank as the lynchpin to the Google $169 billion market cap sensation? What about the Google money making machines, AdWords auctions and AdSense distribution? Perhaps because while Google is 99% AdWords and AdSense monetization pure, the advertising services are not pure Google productions; Google AdWords is “inspired” by Overture products and Google AdSense is “inspired” by  Applied Semantics products.

Battelle is off the Google mark in any event, as PageRank is not only fundamentally flawed, it is decreasing in importance at Google.

WHY PAGE RANK IS BIASED & INHERENTLY FLAWED

Contrary to Google’s lofty mission statement, PageRank does not insure that the “world’s information” is “universally accessible and useful.” Why not? The PageRank concept and Google’s specific implementation result in arbitrary, pre-determined exclusions and/or low rankings of “relevant” Web pages within Google SERPs.

At its core, PageRank is fundamentally flawed. By requiring that Web pages have inbound links from third-party Web sites, the PageRank based algorithm may result in automatic exclusion of the most relevant pages for a given query simply because no other Web sites have linked to them.

Google’s PageRank = “I am linked to, therefore I am.”

Page’s and Brin’s core assumption that a Web page can not be the most “relevant” if no third-party Web site links to it is not a defensible position, philosophically or scientifically.

Google’s “sandbox” also may result in automatic exclusion of the most relevant pages for a given query. Google’s exclusionary sandbox rationale is based on arbitrary, human-derived notions of “aging.”

If Google was indeed a public service, as many believe it to be, its sandbox could theoretically be disallowed due to age discrimination.

HOW GOOGLE’S UNIVERSAL SEARCH DEEMPHASIZES PAGE RANK

In one fell Universal Search swoop, Google has wreaked havoc not only on searchers and Websites, but on the entire multi billion dollar search marketing industry.

Think the almighty Google PageRank was an impossible organic nut to crack? Even fearsome Matt Cutts can’t finessse his way through the Sisyphean search engine marketing challenge that is the “new and improved” Google.com.

Google has turned its back on its core tenet of purported organic search democracy on the Web and in its wake has dealt two major blows to Webmasters and search marketers the world over:

1) Google top ten organic SERP result set is gone,

2) Google pits Web pages against other types of media content (including Google content) in a perpetual SERP smackdown.

Vice President Adam Bosworth says that for Google, fuzzy problem resolution “works really well” in search because “imprecision is better than nothing” and searchers ”don’t know if we are right.” We make educated guesses and people are pretty forgiving, Bosworth happily underscores.

So, now that searchers and Webmasters are faced with even less rhyme or reason to Google SERPs, is Google organic search worship worth it any more? NO.

Facebook worship is not recommeded, either. Is Facebook the next Google, though? it already is, but not in a good way. SEE  How Facebook IS the Next Google

ALSO: Facebook Advertising: Rumors of Its Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated and How Google Snares AdWords Billions

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN