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About three years ago I remember having a conversation with a close friend about Google and its dominance of the search engine market. I said at the time that I believed that Google would be replaced within 5 years by another innovation. We still have two years for my prediction to come about but I am starting to see the cracks already.

Google has created a ‘link culture’ where everybody wants to link everything to everything with good reason or not. This has meant Google have had to try harder and harder to keep their page rank relevant based upon a massive amount of irrelevant links and in a lot of cases damn right dishonest linking. Google have been very clever keeping up with the dishonest attempts to fool its ranking mechanism, but for every compromise they have had to make in fixing these issues they have moved further and further away from the core of what made the page ranking the massive success that it is.

A good example of this is the George Bush Link Bomb which made the words ‘failure’ & ‘miserable’ point at the white house website. This is an extreme example requiring a concerted effort to affect Google’s search results. It was a major success and even thought Google have again made changes to try and counter it they have not been 100% successful.

Flaws in the page rank

I believe Wikipedia is a prime example of what is wrong with Google ranking right now. You type in the name of any famous person and what do you find? Wikipedia as the first result. Although I am huge advocate of Wikipedia and use it a massive amount. But anyone who thinks that Wikipedia has the best answer to everything is sadly mistaken. I will give an easy example. I want to find out about banana’s. I type in ‘banana’ into Google and I get as the first result Wikipedia and the second result banana.com, now Wikipedia does have a reasonable entry (as it does for lots of things) for banana’s. But banana.com is a whole website dedicated to all subjects regarding bananas. So why is banana.com second?

Google’s page rank does distinguish between the sites (Wikipedia rank is 9) and a subpage (the banana article within Wikipedia is rank 6). But Google biases the sub-page rank on the overall site rank. So even if nobody links to the banana article it still gets a good ranking. Banana.com is rank 4 but in its own right has plenty of links to it and is in fact a much better resource of information than Wikipedia on this subject.

Social Ranking

The increase in popularity of social sites has spread into the search results business. Things like stumbleupon, del.icio.us and others are showing that people can find what they are looking for outside the standard single form entry field search system that Google makes so much of its money from. To me the future of search engines is not to have search engines or not what you imagine as a search engine. We already have forms of integration between search results and social ranking in ’stumbleupon’s’ firefox plugin that allows you to view the rating of a site alongside a search result.

We also have sites such as technorati which are amalgamating tagging, categorisation and Google style link relevance to build up search results. Although technorati applies only to blog’s right now its not difficult to see the same set of techniques being applied to the whole of the internet.

And finally we have Digg which is an amazing piece of social engineering that once discovered becomes a vital source for finding anything that is new on the internet.

So where now

I started this article with a key thought in mind ‘the death of google search’ now I am sure that Google are constantly striving to make that next big leap but as Joel Spolsky has written about Microsoft in the past that its very difficult as a company grows to bring out true originality. If there is one large corporate that is capable of this kind of innovation it is Google but in comparison to the million upon millions of innovators out there right now trying new ways to interactive with the internet I would put a wager on it being another two man team who makes the next step.