Google Taking Over the World

When Microsoft promotes its search engine and its web browser inside of its 80%+ market share operating system, that’s a violation of antitrust laws. So when Google uses its 80%+ market share search engine to promote its content, what is that?

Jason Calacanis has rightly been raising a stink about this. I was trying to link to him but confusingly he is “retired from blogging” so I can’t link to his comments. I guess he is too cool for his own blog but not too cool for twitter and friend feed?

Anyways Jason has a good point. He is complaining, of course, out of self interest. His “human powered search engine” Mahalo is in essence a one-source wiki or a MFG site = “Made for Google.” I wonder what their ratio is of page views from their search box vs. page views from google. At any rate, Jason is understandably upset at this knol development, since they will be taking up a lot of room in the SERPS that probably used to belong to Mahalo. And the big elephant in the room, will Google the search engine give preferential placement to Google the content company? Jason has taken three steps to handle this. 1) Complain to his sizeable audience - loudly 2) complain to Matt Cutts - repeatedly 3) create a bunch of his own Mahalo pages on knol. Not a bad strategy, just like Jason: intelligent and shrewd.

So combine that with Aaron Wall’s breakdown on knol. Aaron does some more tests with knol, and pretty much proves Google is giving itself priority placement in its search results. Well, kind of. It’s not ranking #1 for anything yet, but compare that to a site you start 3-4 days after launch. You won’t even rank for your own name. Danny Sullivan did some tests for knol SERP results and found it was “giving pages an advantage they might not get if they’d been hosted on some other brand new web site.”

My thoughts? Well, everyone is making this big fuss just a few days after they launched. We all know that Google’s algorithms can take hours, days, or months to decide what they want to do. Also, everyone is comparing knol to a brand new site. Yeah, a brand new site on a domain with a pagerank of 10. The domain that INVENTED pagerank. Nevertheless, Google moving into content when they promised us they would only be there to ‘index the world’s information’ is a disturbing development, and certainly has a lot of potential for abuse.

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