Better than Google

It's all about finding information where it didn't exist before. That's why Google has been successful enough to be used as a verb in the most recent novel by William Gibson. Yeah, the same guy who invented the term "cyberspace". Back in the days when the web kept growing in a chaotic way, giving life to thousands of meaningless pages and a few useful ones every day, only Google figured out how to create information where it didn't exist: by analyzing the links a page had and creating a global ranking among them, they were able to extract the hidden formula to the real popularity of a page. Actually, it's not that simple. It's better explained by Ian Rogers in his "Page Rank Explained".

So what's next? How do we create information where it didn't exist before? How do we take advantage of it? Well, Google may already be planning to offer something better than Google... Or maybe they are not, but by looking back at the press about Google's move to buy Blogger a bit over a year ago it seems some journalists had strong opinions about what kind of synergies this merge would create.

The domain in which Google operates is quite abstract, it's based on the links pages have to other pages. Just like in this brief comment there are a dozen links, the indexing operation would figure out that this author values such links equally and would give them my vote (which incidentally weights proportionally to the popularity of this page) helping them get a higher ranking. Once all pages have their calculated popularities, the question is how to interpret a simple query in the best possible way to show not just those pages with the higher ranking, but also those that are the most meaningful to the intended search. I believe that the activity of creating a blog with tons of links, gives Google the opportunity to leverage the "opinion" of humans about certain links as a mechanism to determine relevance in a particular context. Suddenly the domain is not abtract anymore.

So, when Google finally finds a way to rework their engine to leverage the blogs of millions of people, it's possible that your search for "what kind of synergies google blogger" not only will you get a list of pages that rank high, but will also have a list of opinions extracted from blogs that linked to those particular pages. Even better, the list of pages should be influenced by the opinions of those bloggers who ranked high.

And then you'll probably see a reference to this same comment.