So what Google did was to crawl the whole web and count the votes (links) each page had. The more votes a page had, the more relevant it became for the users. Another important twist, for that matter, is that not all votes were equal. Some votes were more relevant than others. This made sense if you think of peer-reviewing: a recommendation for a medicine is more relevant if it's made by a doctor than by a post-officer. In the same way, a link coming from a highly ranked page was more relevant than a link coming from some ad-hoc comment in some lost forum.
Because of the PageRank, Google's results were far more superior in quality than any other search engine around. If you add the fact that Google proposed a clean, ad-free, "don't be evil", white and pure background, it soon became one of the most popular sites. Since every web-session starts with a search, Google quickly became the nr.1 site in traffic in the world. And the rest is history (I won't talk about scaling and the gfs here)...
However, the democratic rank may still be strongly present in Google's ranking algorithm but now, Google has harvested a HUGE amount of data coming from registered individual user accounts at Google. There goes the implicit, yet very important, anonymousness of "voting"...
Do you have a Google account? You do? Have you checked lately on how Google keeps ALL your web-history? Do you use gmail? Do you know that Google keeps a record of ALL the people's email-addresses with whom you got in touch with. And that it encourages you to keep all of your email history?
Wow! I wonder if they don't already know who killed JFK, and what color were his shoes that day?
Plainly, Google keeps a "safe" record of every click, link, bookmark, search, contact and email I made on the Internet since about a year and a half. And this data is quite transparent for me to peruse it too. Here are my personal stats! They pretty much define who I am on the web.
Google started to leverage on that data and tried to suggest me stuff that I might be interested in. This algorithm, rather obscure, is yet unknown, but it did suggested me a very interesting documentary on the open-source (note the irony) movement which, by the way, I heartily recommend.
Another feature of their leveraging of such data is with the gmail text-ads. I noticed they were dependent on a combination of mail-content / my recent web-history / my gmail contacts (recent?) web-history. A clear cut example is when I got an ad about a genealogy site whom I'd recently registered. I never click on ads, but this time, this time it was different: in the mail, my friend was asking me something about my relatives (disclosure: upper in that thread). I got the answer right there by clicking on that paid link (that's an extra cent for Google)!
Furthermore, on some other junk email, gmail suggested me to look up a street address contained in my email. Wow!! Soon I'm going to be suggested to look for gift-shops nearby the street-address on my brother's email on my dad's birthday.
Boy, talk about trust. Google is like my best confident in whole world! I wouldn't use it if I wouldn't blindly trust it. And I'm not ironic, I do trust Google. A LOT!
But beware, cuz that's what it takes to accept to use its services (don't want another facebook mess around). If you don't trust Google ALOT, then I REALLY suggest you not to use it! (Disclosure: I'm also known for being a heavy-risk taker).
So my motto for 2008 turns out to become
God is Love, and Google is Trust
My point is: They started with a democratic, peer-reviewed ranking where individual user's votes were anonymous and they stated a "don't be evil" motto. At this rate how long will they stay clean, white, pure and incorruptible? How long will I feel I can trust them? How long will you feel you can trust them?
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