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The Republic of Google
The founding principal of all search
engines is that they intend to provide us with the most relevant
information to our keyword search. To do so, they’ve developed
those tricky algorithms that SEOs spend the better parts of
their lives trying to break down. These algorithms are
mathematically based on the principal of collective
intelligence, which assumes that the group best understands what
is best for the individual. The principal is democratic, and
search engines are designed to assess the collective ‘vote’ of
internet users. However, SEOs are well aware that search
engines do not tally a democratic vote, rather, they tally a
republican vote based on the vote of ‘elected’ sources. It is
generally the most popular websites that are ‘elected’ to the
top Search Engine Results Page (SERP) positions. You may ask,
“Isn’t that ‘election’ based on a democratic vote?” The answer:
not exclusively.
The concept of the Google Republic appears
in James Surowiecki’s book
The Wisdom of Crowds, which explores the relationship of
crowds and decision making. As it turns out, and perhaps much
to Aristotle’s chagrin (Aristotle considered Democracy a poor
form of government), the average of a crowd’s collective
decision is almost always nearly as accurate as that crowd’s
most intelligent individual’s decision. This means that
collectively we are extremely intelligent when it comes to
non-emotional decisions. It can be inferred, therefore, that
the best keyword search result should also be based entirely on
the ‘vote’ of the public. Instead, Google places a substantial
amount of weight on links.
Links are the political equivalent to the
electoral college, meaning they are votes from select
individuals (webmasters) whose votes are considered more
important than those of the common individual (websurfers). In
recent years, the concept of the electoral college has come
under attack, and approximately seventy five percent of the
American public now questions the presidential decision made by
the 2000 electoral college, which, incidentally, went against
the collective intelligence of the public.
What more republican concept than Page
Rank? A hierarchical system designed to give seniority to the
eldest, most popular websites. Well, I’ve been to a few nursing
homes in my day and I can tell you that the eldest does not
always make the best decision. I also attended high school and
can tell you that the most popular is generally not the most
intelligent decision maker. So why should Google’s ‘democratic’
process give weight to these websites, which represent only a
small portion (the old and the popular) of the public as a
whole? Given the democratic principle that all sites are equal
and the knowledge that the collective decision is generally the
best, shouldn’t all links be equal?
The unfortunate answer is no. The reason:
people will and have abused the principal of link equality.
Although Google, as with all hopeful ruling
bodies, set out to create a true democracy, they’ve discovered
what all ruling bodies eventually discover: when given the
opportunity, some individuals (black hat SEOs creating link
farms, for instance) will always manipulate a democratic system
for their own gain. So why not eliminate the ‘electoral
college’?
To some extent, Google already implements
the practices necessary to eliminate the need for links (the
‘electoral college’ of search engines). Aspects of their
algorithm qualify a site’s relevancy based on contextual results
and a page’s bounce rate. If we are to assume that a page with
a bounce rate of 100% scores a ‘not very relevant to the search
phrase’, then can’t Google just rank a site based on its bounce
rate for a specific keyword? A page with a bounce rate of zero
would be ranked highest for a specific keyword phrase; a page
with a bounce rate of one would be ranked second, and so on and
so forth. That would, after all, be the most democratic method
of providing results and measuring the ‘vote’ of the public.
Unfortunately, it would also result in an internet riot, with
sites shuffling so rapidly from one position to another that
SEOs would never sleep again.
What Google has learned is what history has taught us: all
intended democracies eventually become republics. And,
although they’ve done their best to integrate a democratic
system into their republic, until someone solves the
quandary of how to create a true democracy, we’re stuck with
the Google Republic.
Geoffrey Hoesch is
the owner of
Dragonfly SEO.
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