Sunday, April 3, 2011

Google and the social experiment

Now that they've cut off the Knol thing, I am wondering what Google will keep.  I just did their new thing with www.haroldasmis.ca  but I don't know what to do with it.  It appears to be a tightly controlled web site by Yola, and you fix it up with their tools.  I think Google does the storage, but I don't know what the limits are, and I don't know how this relates to Google Sites, since they are calling it the same thing.

But then I realized that Google has been a social network all along.  They make their money serving up sleazy "Rent a Girl" ads, but how did their search algorithm actually work?  It depended on the hard work of others who put up 'thoughtful' links.  G depended on the whole universe of blogs, web sites, and Wikipedia.  When I wrote an article, I carefully scanned everything and came up with a few good links, and G snatched those up.  Now that everybody wants to play the system, they rely on this content creation more and more.

I've concluded they have a very heavy weight on my stuff, and will want to keep Blogger and Sites up, at least.  When I could never see anything from my knols, I just put in a link, and poof! the next day it was at the top of a search.

G has a serious threat from 'walled gardens' such as Facebook.  If those people do all the hard work of vetting links, who can G sponge off of?  So, I think for a while, they will be putting billions into content creation that they  can scan.

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