SES Talk with Brin

Danny Sullivan talks with Sergey Brin

[xcandyman]

Just released the SES conference day 3

Danny Sullivan talks [seotoday.com] with Sergey Brin.

Sullivan asked Brin to elaborate on the work that goes into the constant development of the famed PageRank system. Brin said that it was still very much an important part of Google's ranking system and that more than half a dozen new ranking technologies are tested each month, with roughly half of these being integrated into Google's PageRank algorithm.

No wonder the SERPS changes all the time

Sullivan asked whether Google had given any thought to offering some form of "paid support" to allow webmasters a faster and easier way of communicating a problem with Google engineers. This was also a "no go" as far as Brin was concerned, as he believed that by offering this type of premium support would sap resources and "slow down [Google's] pace of development."

I didn't think it would happen!

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 2:11 pm (utc) on Aug. 26, 2003]

[jeremy goodrich]

That all makes sense, if Google offered paid support for stuff...they would have to charge a lot, to make it worth their while.

And, they would be competing with the optimizers who offer much the same service ;)

[Bottler]

Brin made a point of clarifying his dislike of introducing paid inclusion. "I don't really believe in it," Brin said, adding that he wanted to "keep any kind of payment from objective search results." With "objective search" meaning the very thing that has made Google popular, explains Brin's reluctance to tinker with its formula for success.

What made Google so popular was essentially three things

1. Leeching the intellectual property value of non-affiliated human-edited directories by crawling them and developing a simple system of weighting their influence highly.
   
2. Webmasters who raved about Google on their various websites while Altavista and others became increasingly weighed down by their marketing people's initiatives.
   
3. Cosmetic niceties of being able to see your keywords in the TITLE of a page by weighting visible on-page criteria highly, thereby being attractive to the impatient masses.
   

Mr Brin not surprisingly still has significant influence at Google. Google's momentum in the SE market is still strong but there are indications this is becoming increasingly driven by ideological hubris rather than by technical superiority. To maximize longetivity of their market dominance, the influential people at Google need to acknowledge the above three factors as primary to their current success, and that none of them provide any protection as competitive barriers going forward without significant commercial risk.

Mark my words, any future announcement by Google to go public should be interpretted as Board assessment of weakening in the marketplace and as an indication of the diminishing influence of their ideologues.

[HitProf]

Mark my words, any future announcement by Google to go public should be interpretted as Board assessment of weakening in the marketplace and as an indication of the diminishing influence of their ideologues.

I agree. Going public will mark the end of Google's heyday.

[JonR28]

There was an interesting article today in the front page of the Life section in USA TODAY. Might wanna give that a read too, [usatoday.com...]

[creative craig]

That was a good read :)

[Kackle]

Here's a better read [theregister.co.uk] on that same talk by Sergey.

[JonR28]

Crazy british and their sarcasm, we don't have sarcasm in America.

I was actually taken back by the fact that Google employees are allowed to spend 20% of work time playing out side or napping in a hammock rather than working. I want to work at google too, can I be the hammock inspector?

[Brett_Tabke]

> What made Google so popular was essentially three things

> 1) Leeching the intellectual property value of non-affiliated human-edited directories

Interesting take - and true - but I wouldn't put it #1. I would put marketing and branding ahead of everything else.

2) The branding cache. I've always said:

"take 3 billion pages of everyone elses content and show them from your website with a nice advertisement at the top, and you will have the highest name recognition since Yahoo".

> 3) Webmasters who raved about Google on their various websites while Altavista and others

Yes, never underestimate the power of the backlash!