Google Economy
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia, by MultiMedia
Google Economy identifies the concept that the value of a
resource can be determined by the way that resource is linked to other
resources. It is more complex than search ranking, and broader than
interlinked web pages, though it draws meaning from both.
The Internet and World Wide Web have emphasized the role of the citation
as a means of identifying the value of a resource. The structure of the
print publishing world imposes strict limits on what information is
promoted and distributed, but the web imposes much lower barriers to
'publication,' eliminating the old-media filters that information
consumers once depended on to identify worthy information. Internet
Search engines were developed to help
navigate the growing number of web pages, but their results could not
represent the value of individual pages until Google's Larry Page and
Sergey Brin started to apply the concept of citation analysis that was
developed in the 1950s by Dr. Eugene Garfield at the University of
Pennsylvania. Today, Google's PageRank
weighs heavily on citation analysis among the more than 150 criteria
evaluated.
The result is that the PageRank of any
single web page is highly dependent on the number of web pages that link
to it (and their PageRank). The highest
ranked pages appear at the top of the search results page. The financial
implication for commercial web sites are obvious (and often exploited),
but there are serious implications for non-commercial content as well. A
person doing any research on the web will find his or her results
heavily influenced by PageRank-style
ranking. Accurate and correct information that is poorly linked will
have lower ranking than incorrect or misleading information that is
better linked. Because many of the most authoritative information
sources -- examples: medical journals, the Oxford English Dictionary --
are subscription
services,
their content is not available for indexing by
search engines, and by extension, to
those using search engines for
research.
Even among free
services
-- many library catalogs, for instance -- it can be difficult to index
the information because of technical obstacles like dynamic URLs that
make it difficult to deep link to content or explicit prohibitions in
the robots.txt. The result is that a person searching for a book is far
more likely to find the Amazon.com catalog page or blog posts discussing
the book long before they will find any library offering the book for
loan.
As with market economies, the Google Economy is subject to
uncertainties, fluctuation, and occasional manipulation. Manipulators do
so, however, at serious risk, as search
engines have been known to blacklist them from results pages.
Further, search engine engineers
continue to refine ranking criteria to deliver quality search results.
In general, however, there are three rules for full participation in the
Google Economy:
- Linking must be possible
- Linking must be desirable
- Linking must be measurable
External links
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