Sullivan responds to Scoble's attack: Google's just fine
On Monday, we covered a talk by Robert Scoble (pictured bottom) about how Google will get “its butt kicked” by companies like Facebook, Mahalo and Techmeme. We were charitable in our coverage, saying his point about using personal filters (via the “social graph) to remove spam was a solid one, though we mentioned a few big caveats.
Search expert Danny Sullivan (pictured top left) has responded to Scoble’s argument, however, and tears it to shreds. Sullivan is as lucid as anyone when it comes to search (see profile in USA Today), and we’ve been following him closely for years as a result. We’ve never seen him as worked up about something as he is in this post. Get past the emotion, though, and you’ll center on a core paragraph (see below) summing up how Google is responding to new personalized and social technologies. It’s a great piece, providing valuable insight into where search is, and where it is headed.
In particular, Google has been talking about how personalized search allows for creating personalized PageRank (and see here for a patent look), a way where rankings revolve around what you personally like. It’s not a hard leap to extend that into a “social network PageRank” model, where if you define a social network, the collective interests of that network could be used to model the rankings. Google’s not doing that now, but to suggest that the mechanism are somehow impossible from either a company attitude or technological model is simply being ignorant of Google.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
