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So as the author, I'll try to clarify. The article isn't about Google's influence on the web, as a whole. Google has had a huge influence on the web in many ways, from making it easier for people to locate information to sites considering how to speed up their content, to become mobile-friendly or to use secure connections, because Google rewards such things with ranking boosts. The article was specifically about PageRank's influence on the web, in terms of link brokering and link spam. Before Google released PageRank scores, some of this happened. It would have happened even if scores had never been released, because it was well-known that Google leveraged links and thus, links had value. But PageRank scores were an accelerant. They allowed people to use Google's own scores to assign value to pages, value that could be translated into monetary value. It really did reshape the link economy, to the degree that we had a court case with a First Amendment ruling on Google's search results (amazing, when you think about it) as well as an entire new standard to restrict the credit links could pass, nofollow. I doubt Google anticipated this. Showing the scores, as the article explains, was meant as an incentive for Google Toolbar users -- "Hey, enable this feature, and we'll show you how valuable a page is deemed to be." Google's gain, of course, was that anyone enabling this sent their browsing patterns back to Google, so it better understood what was happening on the web outside of its own properties. The unintended consequence was that PageRanks scores fueled an explosion in link buying and selling, as well as link spam. Also, I didn't say the web was better before Google. It had plenty of problems, though it wasn't "pretty much un-navigable pre-Google," as you say. Many people used many of the search engines that were bigger than Google successfully for years. If it were really that bad, by the time Google came along, people would have given up on the web. Google, of course, was a huge improvement in search and for the web as a whole. The article wasn't that Google was bad for the web. It really was just focusing on one aspect that didn't help the web, how releasing PageRank scores ironically fueled some of the spam Google has to fight (and which it fights well) as well as the spam third-parties have to deal with. |
It's nice of you to say, but Google has many very smart people who spend all their time thinking about search. I would be surprised if they failed to anticipate this outcome. Maybe they thought it was worth the cost, especially as a company that values openness.