Utkarsh Sinha

Google shaped the internet.

You’ve probably heard this before. Let’s try and analyze, how Google did that.

Before Google, the internet was a mess. Random links here and there, with pretty weird means of finding what you wanted. Once Google went online, you could search for whatever you wanted, and get relevant and helpful articles.

This was neat. Something people hadn’t experienced earlier. The internet marketeers figured out that Google was the next big thing. They had to make things “searchable”.

Search Engine Optimization became extremely important. People actually designed sites that were made to be found (keyword spamming, etc). But Google found ways to filter those spammers. The spammers found some more ways, and then Google found even more ways.

The “race” to the Google rank #1 is still one that people actually pursue.

But a more general thing was going on. Internet was taking shape into a text based media. That continues even till today. Most websites are textual in nature… because they can be “found” by Google. Their crawlers cannot understand flash, video, audio, and images.

Video, audio and other media based sites exist, but they do not form the bulk… even though we have enough bandwidth to support such websites now. Just because we can’t “search” video like we search “text”, internet marketeers figured out that such sites cannot have much traffic. There can be just a couple of massive video websites, the rest won’t count much (because they cannot be “found”).

That was until recently.

Now, it is the people who do the “searching” for their friends. They “like”, “share” and “retweet” things that their friends might enjoy.

That is social media in action: people linking to things they like the most. And inbound links is what Google’s entire algorithm depends on.

And Google recognizes this. It has identified the “massive link base” that Twitter is. It even wants to buy Twitter, but the creators of Twitter won’t sell it even for $1 billion (so says this post: Twitter wouldn’t sell for 1 billion, says source).

Combine this with the fact that Twitter is working on a contextual search ads. And certain ideas become obvious. Google’s downfall is here. Atleast it is for Google Search. And very likely even Google AdWords (the ads you see on the right when you search).

To prevent itself, Google has been doing a lot of work in the Social Internet arena: Orkut, FriendConnect, buying Aardvark, Reader, and more recently Buzz.

But Neither of them seems to hit the sweet spot. The one which people will embrace wholeheartedly. Just like they accepted Google Search. Could this be the beginning of the end of Google Search?