The Future, Mr. Gittes

Is bloom off G's rose?

[royalelephant]

John Markoff, a technology reporter for The New York Times, has an interesting web presentation on the future of Google, and as one who was recently whacked by G's September ranking changes, I was wondering if the predictions Markoff makes hold water or are just all wet. I guess, if some other search engine, like MS or (unknown quantity) come along, will the competition level the SE-traffic playing field and G's former-traffic be replaced by some other SE.

Markoff.... (was a sidebar to the "Google Introduces Search Program for Hard Drives" story)
[nytimes.com...]

[Liane]

PR hasn't been an indicator of quality for a long time.

Quote of the month right there! As soon as people started building link farms and then later selling PR ... that was the kiss of death. Linking for the intended purpose of voting for a web site became a farce.

Google can't judge quality

True. Only relevance can be calculated by a robot and sometimes ... a robot doesn't even do that very well.

Is that an indictment of PR I hear?

I think its and indictment of robots! :)
This is the reason why DMOZ is still so important to Google! Certain things which humans can do (although subjectively) cannot be accomplished by robots.

Agreed, which kind of answers the original question "Is bloom off G's rose?"

Google has evolved (and so it should) since its infancy. PR calculations have been through many permutations and nobody (other than Google) really knows what the calculations are based upon or what they reflect. Many no longer care. Many more seem to care too much.

But the point is that as long as Google continues to deliver good, qualified traffic to my site, I will continue to believe the bloom is still firmly attached! ;)

When Y or MSN or whomever catches up, then I think it will be safe to say the bloom is off the rose ... until then, I think Google is relatively safe. MSN bears watching though! :)