Google – Internet Democracy?
Is Google, as its creators (Larry Page and Sergey Brin) claim, ‘uniquely democratic’? Well, it is certainly unique, or at least it was when it was founded. However, its claim to be democratic is extremely questionable. If it is indeed a democracy, it is one comparable to 19th Century Britain, where only the rich had any real vote, some people had multiple votes and bribery was rife.
Google works on the assumption that by putting a link on your page to another site, you are casting a vote for that website. However, is this assumption a reasonable one to make? The short answer is…no. The primary, and perhaps most fundamental flaw in this is that people can put more than one link on their page. If some people have more votes than others, then surely this undermines the democratic fabric on which Google is said to be based.
Furthermore, people often pay for links on high ranking sites – we call this advertising. Google reads every link on a page, it has no way of knowing whether it was paid for or not. Can a system where votes can easily be bought, ever be described as democratic, even in the loosest sense?
“If some people have more votes than others, then surely this undermines the democratic fabric on which Google is said to be based.”
Another crack in Google’s claim to be democratic is the fact that some votes are worth more than others. The higher a site ranks on Google, the higher the value of its votes. This seems reasonable, a high ranking site must have useful content, (to have been linked to by other sites, although this page may, indeed, have purchased these links!) therefore it is likely to link to another site with valuable content. However, it is not the fairness of Google’s system that this article is questioning, it is its claim to be democratic. Weighted voting cannot exist in a truly democratic system.
Overall, Google’s system is indeed ‘uniquely democratic’, in the sense that is unique compared to any democratic system I know of. With; multiple voting, some votes being worth more than others, buying votes and more, it is extremely doubtful that Google is indeed the democracy of the Internet.
Guest Commentary by Thomas Jenkins. Mr. Jenkins is the owner of www.JKomp.com Web Design company.
Link Popuarity was essential for alleviating SPAM in SERPs,
then Popularity of Links became essential for alleviating SEO’ed Link Popularity…
Now, LATENT SEMANTIC INDEXING may be the next step in alleviating the exploiting of Popularity of links…
The bottom line is a noticeable improvement in SERPs across ALL search engines in the past few years, by those following Google’s lead and implementing link analysis into their SERPS
eco sensitive
Did the person that wrote this article have any clue at all?
5 paragraphs of tripe around the premise that being able to add more than a single link to a page is somehow undemocratic.
So… anyone can vote as much as they want for whoever they want… but because some pages will inevitably have more links than others than that means the system is unfair and undemocratic. Right. Good solid logic there.
And you gotta love the quote halfway through that is just an earlier sentence in quotation marks! Er.. wtf?
it would be awesome if search engines could take into account the internet populations book marks, favourites and url sharing instead of just looking at backward links!
Loving the article. Some gr8 points, obviously Google doesnt need to be democratic to work but they shouldnt claim that they are democratic if they’re not. Right?