Google PageRank - innovation, albatross or just plain evil?

One issue not addressed in the recent New York Times article on Google SEO woes is whether or not PageRank is simply no longer credible or useful. Sure, when it was first introduced it provided an additional dimension to refine search results beyond keyword density, but back then sites only linked to other sites because they had meaningful or relevant information.

There was simply no other reason for linking.

PageRank provided that reason -- and single-handedly created the SEO industry (though the abundance of marketing folks that popped up during the bubble had to find something to do for a living, at least until Facebook and Twitter came along), resulting in the never ending game of one-upmanship between Google geniuses and SEO hacks.

So here's the really interesting question -- if PageRank went away, would search results become better or worse? Would diminishing the impact of the massive quantity of link and content farms allow for organic, useful content to percolate to the top like the good old days?

I think the answer is yes, particularly if the holy grail of search, the search box, were improved to help searchers write better queries.  No matter how smart search algorithms may be, the better the query, the better and fewer the results.

Another issue, beyond whether or not PageRank is still useful in improving search results, is whether or not it is actually becoming dangerous and detrimental to intellectual discourse and society as a whole. PageRank encourages the promotion of new and frequently linked content regardless of how credible the source may be (such as the non-existent link between autism and vaccines) so it will continually rank high, while older, more credible content on the same subject (but less linked to by blogs, media, etc.) gets pushed down far enough to where no one will ever bother to find it.

The result? The self-perpetuation of ignorance. That's sure evil in my book.

Must a user experience be "positive?"

User experience is an important dimension of software development, but it is not the entire thing. 

Sure, a "positive" user experience can increase adoption, but if the business requires things to occur in a precise way at a precise time, then the software has to enforce that, even if it means incorporating unpleasant and unnatural methods to ensure it happens exactly the way it must. 

Accomplishing this means you need to be agile in your thinking, able to see connections and intersections in new and different ways, and not be constrained by conventional thinking.

Would you pay for great search results?

In our experiments at Emantix with automating search queries, we discovered something really curious -- the longer and richer the query, more often than not the top result was very, very good. But the following results were not -- at all.  In fact, in our experimental search engine, howdoya.com, we had to tune down the richness of the query so that, at a glance, the entire results page looked good, giving the user an overall perception of quality.  And of course, when we tested with organically occurring ads, the same was true. Really great queries -- fewer, if any, ads, mediocre queries -- more ads.

So the question is, do more relevant search results diminish the quantity and quality of ads displayed? And if so, what are the implications of and opportunities in removing the obligations inherent in a paid advertising revenue model?

Why not an ad-free, fee-based search engine?  A low annual fee that is painless to an individual, but collectively, on a web-scale, could be a highly profitable enterprise?

Would you pay a nominal fee for better results and less visual clutter?

I would like to propose a word, a verb, to describe this opportunity  -- to "craigslist" -- or to disrupt an entire industry by eliminating a critical source of revenue.

The fundamental human benefit of the Web

As a follow up to the previous posting:

The Web empowers individuals to rapidly achieve innovations while reducing dependencies and removing barriers.

And while this may not encourage "team spirit," what it does do is free innovators, creators and thinkers to move at speeds previously unimagined. No longer constrained by middle managers who covet information as means of consolidating power; weighed down and slowed down by forced collaboration with mediocre performers (when was the last time you were in a brainstorming session where no one played devil's advocate and everyone offered real ideas and suggestions without fear of being ridiculed?); managed by superiors who either claim credit for efforts not their own or who claim vast improvements of quality by making trivial changes, the Web removes market boundaries, provides access to highly skilled but reasonably-priced resources, and allows for entire companies and brands to be built overnight merely by creating a well designed, thoughtful and information-rich online presence.

Now this may lead to more frequent job changes for these folks, expected or unexpected, but in the long run, a small price to pay for great leaps in innovation.

There is another risk — just because something is innovative is no guarantee that anyone will want it enough to pay for it. But I'll save that topic for another day.

A passion for process

Business process is something I have been fascinated with for some time now. And, while it may not be obvious at first glance, my current venture, Emantix, is simply the latest evolution of my fascination with and thinking on business process. After all, business processes are really nothing more than words organized in a such a way as to achieve consensus between two people or more as to what it is they do. Nothing more than words. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, interrogatives, prepositions, interjections... antonyms, synonyms, hyponyms, troponyms, hypernyms, meronyms... make a sentence with me.

But I digress.

In the last company I started, Contextware, I reinvented the mechanisms, the tools, of business process, as well as the output, or interface. But I did not go far enough. Truly reinventing process requires much more than mere functionality, buttons to push, true reinvention demands a greater and more comprehensive understanding of information and the rules of language itself, as that is where business process knowledge lives and breathes, and hides.

And the biggest challenge of all is whatever form the answer takes, if it isn't easy as hell to do, people won't do it, use it or buy it. So while my postings on this blog may cover many things, I apologize for how often I keep coming back to the fundamental business benefits of — and imperative for — reinventing business process.