The Search by John Batelle – Thoughts on Search Rankings

John Batelle’s search provides several surprises. For one, it tells you how this business survived without a model to monetize itself for so long. When it did get on the path of monetizing itself, it adopted a path that, on the face of it, seems to contradict all that it stood for.
But first lets go to www.goto.com. Did you click on the link? Don’t for it will take you to a site that you are not interested in visiting. This business, founded by serial entrepreneur Bill Gross, focused on fully commercialized search. i.e. the founders believed, that if some entered cars in a search engine, they were interested in buying cars. Thus, very simply, Goto would list all people in an order depending on how much they were willing to buy for their space.
Google’s ranking concept was the completely different. Google ranked pages based not on its direct commercial value to them but in terms of an intrinsic value that has been the mechanism used to value academic research. Academic research has traditionally been based on peer reviews.  The more papers you referred to and the more papers that referred back to you, the more valuable you become. There is a quality weighting to the whole process too. It isn’t just the number of papers that you are linked to you that matters, it is also the quality of the papers that refer to you.
By 2001, Google had become the number one search destination but wasn’t making any money. This continued till Google used the same idea that Goto initially had. But it was careful not to commercialise its original search. Instead it introduced “Adsense”, a methodology through which small text ads would appear depending on what information you were perusing or searching for.
More importantly, it was careful to separate for the user the results which were commercially driven and those based on peer valuation. This ability to separate, the commercial from the real is critical for any organization. Goto and its later avatar, Overture remain lost as divisions within other internet behemoths.