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Why Google is ditching search

January 16, 2012 | Online Marketing

The most interesting aspect of Google integrating Google+ into its search links is its tacit acknowledgement that its stalwart search links are largely irrelevant and might as well be replaced with social results.

The search results that we supposedly value so highly are themselves paid placements, just like Google’s keyword ads. It’s just that in the case of search results, link owners have paid for SEO (search-engine optimization) to get Google’s attention instead of paying for SEM (search engine marketing) to make Google give their links prominence. Either way, though, searches are mostly just producing ads by any other name.

In addition, Google’s famed PageRank algorithm carries less and less weight these days, since fresh news and results inherently don’t have as many inbound links as older content. (If it helps, you can think of PageRank as a kind of paleo-social search–just one that moves way too slowly for the modern Web.)

Google well knows that its search results suck, and over the past few years, it has started to short-circuit those results by putting more and more direct “answers” at the top search pages. That, of course, makes the search results themselves less and less important.

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