Hi, thanks for the question
Google's advantage is more of a company philosophy than a technical
advantage. Thus far they have simply remembered what works on the
Internet. Some history.
Back in the days of Yore, (lets see that was a whole 8 years ago
maybe), search engines weren't very good. They were better than
nothing, but trying to find things took quite a bit of skill or a
large sense of humor. You could put in a query and almost anything
would come up, and that anything would number in the 10,000's. A
Researcher on the web could use plus and minus signs, quotes and AND
OR logic to wade through the results, getting a bit better listings
for his query, but for the average user, it was still a mess.
META keyword tags were then used, because the thought was "You know
what your page is about, so you tell us" and that worked a little
better for a while until the marketing people got a hold of the idea.
Any marketing person will tell you that it is better to have your
company name show up as much as possible, than to only show up when
it's relevant. "Keep your product in view" is the thought there, so
webmasters started putting all kinds of keywords in their META tags,
and descriptions. Not based on the contents of the page but on the
popularity of the keywords used for searches.
Google Press Center: Zeitgeist
://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
What People Search For
http://searchenginewatch.com/facts/searches.html
So, if we were a Webmaster back then, we would change our keywords to
include "sniper, the ring, bob crane, Halloween costume ideas, world
series tickets". And thus have a chance to show up more often. This
helps us, but of course it doesn't help the search engines or the
users of those search engines very much. The late 1990's showed that
businesses didn't care if helped the search engines at all, because
this type of marketing was rampant.
About this same time Portals such as AOL and MSN decided that if a
company or website wanted to show up on top, they would have to pay
for that privilege. This was rather profitable for them, but again,
not the users of the search engines, who wanted the most accurate
pages for their search, not the most profitable results for AOL and
MSN.
Pages called MetaEngines began to show up, such as dogpile.com, which
produced the top 20-30 results from several search engines and these
became popular for while, because at least they were different results
most of the time, and the top listings. While not perfect still, it
was better than using the single search engines.
Then Google showed up. Google doesn't use META keywords and doesn't
have "Pay for Placement", what they do is Rank a Page, and index the
entire page looking for keyword sets, giving it a Page Relevance.
Basically they took the opposite view of all the other engines, they
decided the searcher was the driving force of what a page has on it,
not the owner of the page. And that's what I mean by "they remembered
what works on the Internet".
Most people want information when they come to an Internet Search
Engine. At this point in time, information is best shown in text, not
pictures or sound. So if a page doesn't have any text on it, or has
less than 300 words, it's probably not a page someone is looking for.
The averages are high anyway.
You can read about Page Ranking at on these pages.
Google Information for Webmasters
://www.google.com/webmasters/4.html
Google Technology
://www.google.com/technology/
Google's PageRank and how to make the most of it
http://webworkshop.net/pagerank.html
Google Under the Scope
http://www.searchengineworld.com/spiders/google_faq.htm
PageRank: Bringing Order to the Web
http://hci.stanford.edu/~page/papers/pagerank/
Goggle also makes use of the efforts of DMOZ and Yahoo Business. Both
of these sites have real people and several levels of editors looking
at the pages submitted to their listings. Yahoo for instance says that
you can pay $300.00 for them to look at it sooner (because it can take
a very long time if you don't), but they are not under any obligation
to list the site, even with payment, if it doesn't meet their
editorial standards. So sites that make it on these pages have been
looked at and categorized by humans.
Add your URL to Google
://www.google.com/webmasters/1.html
Google Information for Webmasters
://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html
This puts the pressure on the Webmasters to create informative and
searchable sites, as well as sites which will make a profit. It's a
lot of work, but it works. The amount of one page "Bill boards on the
Information Highway" have dropped considerably in the last few years,
and people searching for things on the Google engine, may not always
find exactly what they are looking for, but at least they find
reasonable results for their queries. For instance you aren't sticking
a query in like "Facts about Unicorns" and coming up with Disneyland
and "Top Ten Christmas Gifts", filling the first page of results.
://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=Facts+about+Unicorns
http://search.dogpile.com/texis/search?q=Facts+about+Unicorns&fs=web&geo=no&top=1
(Faith Healing?)
So the technology is based on the view point of the company, and in
this case it is far superior than anything else out there at the
moment. Can they keep it up? Yes, as long as they keep their eye on
what it is that works, instead of what will make the fast buck. The
Internet is people, not companies. And as long as other companies stay
with Pay for Placement and don't create a full page ranking system for
websites, then Google will remain the only ones doing this level of
service, and thus the one most people use to get their results.
To your question "Is it possible for IT (information technology) to
provide a sustainable competitive advantage at all?" The answer is
obviously yes. I would point to Microsoft for the last 10 years and
several others who have done just that. I am sure that, even though
Google keeps their PageRank algorithms a secret, others could come up
with a similar system. That's really not an issue, Google knows it,
and so does everyone else. The trouble here is, are they willing to do
everything else that goes with it, to compete with Google? Right now,
that answer is no, though I'm sure it will change in a few years.
Thanks,
webadept-ga |
