As I read this NYT story on JC Penney’s black hat link farms, I felt like I was in a way back machine – I mean, five solid pages of copy about … old school low-rent link-spam sites? Really?

I dunno, if this is news, the news is getting stale. The never-ending battle between Google and link-buying outfits is as old as search itself. The story told in the Times’ piece sheds absolutely no new light on the tale, despite leading with lines like “the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue.”

I read the piece eagerly, expecting that it would turn up a smoking gun – proof that either someone at JC Penney knowingly paid black-hat search optimizers, or proof that someone at Google knowingly looked the other way as JC Penney, a major Google advertiser, employed these tactics. Either would have been big news.

But nope, nothing like that. Just yet another story about tactics that have been around forever, and rounds of denials that anyone knowingly did anything wrong. I do find it rather odd, given how unsophisticated the tactics were, that Google didn’t catch such an obvious and widespread link farming operation, but the Times’ didn’t push into that angle, essentially giving Google a pass (citing the “Web is really big” defense).

Sure, the web is really big, but that’s pretty much the reason Google is so valuable – it figured out a way to make the web come to heel. I am surprised that Google didn’t catch this story before the Times did. There was nothing particularly sophisticated in the approach JC Penney took to get highly ranked, and it’s certainly embarrassing for Google that, in essence, all JCP had to do was hire someone to populate a few thousand spam blogs to get the job done.

I’m going to guess that more than a few folks are feeling the wrath of Larry Page today. I’d sure love to read the memo he must have sent around….

I did a short bit on Bloomberg (they have some amazing studios in SF on the water, had not been there, good to see my old pal Cory, who is now working there). Here’s the video:

This just in…via WSJ:

Google Inc. said co-founder Larry Page will replace Eric Schmidt as chief executive, a surprise change atop the Internet giant.

Mr. Page will take charge of day-to-day operations as CEO starting April 4. Mr. Schmidt will become executive chairman of the company, focusing externally on partnerships and government outreach.

Moments after Google announced the change, Mr. Schmidt sent a message to his Twitter followers saying, “Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!”

Here’s the tweet.

Old timers will recall Larry ran Google before the founders brought in Eric back in 2001. Wow. More on this as it develops.

Update: Here’s Eric’s post announcing the change. From it:

For the last 10 years, we have all been equally involved in making decisions. This triumvirate approach has real benefits in terms of shared wisdom, and we will continue to discuss the big decisions among the three of us. But we have also agreed to clarify our individual roles so there’s clear responsibility and accountability at the top of the company.

Larry will now lead product development and technology strategy, his greatest strengths, and starting from April 4 he will take charge of our day-to-day operations as Google’s Chief Executive Officer. In this new role I know he will merge Google’s technology and business vision brilliantly. I am enormously proud of my last decade as CEO, and I am certain that the next 10 years under Larry will be even better! Larry, in my clear opinion, is ready to lead.

Sergey has decided to devote his time and energy to strategic projects, in particular working on new products. His title will be Co-Founder. He’s an innovator and entrepreneur to the core, and this role suits him perfectly.

As Executive Chairman, I will focus wherever I can add the greatest value: externally, on the deals, partnerships, customers and broader business relationships, government outreach and technology thought leadership that are increasingly important given Google’s global reach; and internally as an advisor to Larry and Sergey….

… We are confident that this focus will serve Google and our users well in the future. Larry, Sergey and I have worked exceptionally closely together for over a decade—and we anticipate working together for a long time to come. As friends, co-workers and computer scientists we have a lot in common, most important of all a profound belief in the potential for technology to make the world a better place.

And here’s live coverage of the earnings conference call, where the three are talking about the changes.

So what does it all mean? Well, I have to say that upon reflection, I’m not all that surprised. Eric has been at it for a decade, a very long time to be running a company, particularly one that has very headstrong founders in key positions of power. It’s quite interesting that Google did not look outside its ranks for a new CEO, instead doubling down on one of its original founders. I think it’s fair to say that Larry Page will not be a conventional CEO – he’s not been much of a public figure for the past ten years – Sergey is the more gregarious and press friendly of the two. It will be interesting to see if that changes, or if Page chafes at the relentless public demands of running a massively scrutinized public company.

It certainly makes for an interesting comparison to Google’s two other main rivals – Facebook and Apple. CEO questions have loomed large for both those companies – Apple’s Steve Jobs recently took a third leave of absence for health related reasons, and many have questioned whether Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was mature enough to handle the job of leading a high-flying public company.

But all three companies have the DNA of being founder- and product-driven entities. With this move, Google is confirming what many already knew, and preparing for the battle ahead.

Seems so. I’ve written about this a lot, so much that I won’t bother to link to all the stuff I’ve posted. It was the basis of a chapter in the book, where I pointed out that (at the time) Google claimed algorithmic innocence, and Yahoo, on the other hand, was cheerful in its presumption that Yahoo services were the best answer to certain high value searches (like “mail”).

Now comes this study, from Harvard professors no less, which pretty much states the obvious. Check this graph:

It’s clear that in some cases, one might argue that Google services should win (maps, for example). But for “chat”? Or for “mail”? A stretch.

Here’s the paper’s authors general conclusion: “Google typically claims that its results are “algorithmically-generated”, “objective”, and “never manipulated.” Google asks the public to believe that algorithms rule, and that no bias results from its partnerships, growth aspirations, or related services. We are skeptical.”

So am I.

Update: Danny has, as always, a more nuanced point of view. Thanks, my always smarter commentators.

Over the weekend, as I pondered an eMarketer report estimating Facebook’s advertising revenue at $1.86 billion (seems low), I wondered to myself: When will Facebook start to drive the kind of widespread graymarket activity which proved Google’s immense worth? Or will it ever?

Allow me to explain. Back in the days when Google and its rival Overture were on the rise (this would be pre-IPO for Google, so around 2002-3), an army of small time arbitragers were gathering, leveraging Adwords (and in 2003, Adsense) to make money in any number of ways. But the basics were pretty easy to grok: Say you could purchase a click on Adwords for the term “cute kitty” for fifty cents. And say further that when someone clicked on your Adword, they’d show up at a third-party site, and 10 percent of the time, they’d follow instructions to fill out a mortgage application. And say that further, you could sell that filled-out application to a lender for $15.

If you do the math – ten clicks costs you $5 on Adwords, but you make $15 for selling that lead, which converts one in ten times – it explains why a huge business sprang up around Adwords and Adsense. If you are paying attention, redirecting attention from cute kitties to mortgage brokers will pay extremely well. The same proved true for all manners of lead generation, from cel phone plans to life insurance to automobiles.

It’s legal, but it leaves a kind of queasy feeling in your stomach, don’t it?

Now, just that feeling has risen up around Facebook advertising in the past (in particular around social gaming), but I was waiting for it to break out full blown into the “real world” outside of Internet ponziland. When would Facebook become a hotbed of affiliate arbitrage across the board? To me, that would be a sign that Facebook was breaking out just like Google did in 2003.

So it’s funny how this story from RWW breaks just this weekend. And funnier still how it’s all about Google’s competitor, Bing, which has changed the economics of the Internet advertising ecosystem by pricing conversions well above previous floors. It’s all just too rich. Literally. (Google’s Matt Cutts points this out in his own way right here).

The details: RWW found the fact that a random website called “Make-My-Baby.com” was the third largest advertiser on Facebook in Q3 2010. Turns out, it’s an affiliate play driven by Microsoft Bing bounty money. In short, Microsoft offers a certain amount of money, per user, to anyone who can convert that user into a Bing customer. The company behind Make My Baby, Zugo, seems to be a vintage arbitrageur. In fact, Zugo hasn’t even updated its terms and conditions, which date back to 2009 and seem cut and pasted from a program they ran in England doing for Ask.com that they are now doing for Bing.

Clearly, Zugo has found that buying ads on Facebook pays well. The question remains, however, whether that is true for a whole new class of arbitrageur.

Ah, me loves me some Interwebs.

Update: Bing has terminated its relationship with Zugo, SEL reports. And Zugo was using MySpace inventory, NOT Facebook….

I was just reading this piece from Fast Company: Top Google Engineer: Google Instant Has No Brand Bias, and this quote struck me:

“What we do at Google and what we’ve done for years is to not inject any subjectivity into these algorithms,” says Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and head of the company’s search quality, ranking, and algorithm team. “We didn’t want to introduce any bias into the mathematical modeling–our modeling is predicting, given a letter, what’s the probability of completion.“

Singhal is speaking about Google Instant, which has apparently accused of bias in its suggested search algorithm. I believe he’s speaking the truth – that when it comes to whatever is suggested, it’s pretty much all math, save a few human-coded exceptions around porn, etc.

But the problem Google has is that when it says one thing about one algorithm, it resonates around all others. This is the curse of PageRank – one ring to rule them all, at least in the minds of most consumers. And in that sense, it directly contradicts Google’s take on the “objectivity” of algorithms, as I discussed here. In short, it’s in Google’s interest to say algorithms are protected speech (opinions), and therefore protected by the First Amendment.

Apparently, that doesn’t apply to Google Instant. Hmmm.

This past week I spent a fair amount of time in New York, meeting with smart folks who collectively have been responsible for funding and/or starting companies as varied as DoubleClick, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, Federated Media (my team), and scores of others. I also met with some very smart execs at American Express, a company that has a history of innovation, in particular as it relates to working with startups in the Internet space.

I love talking with these folks, because while we might have business to discuss, we usually spend most of our time riffing about themes and ideas in our shared industry. By the time I reached Tumblr, a notion around “discovery” was crystallizing. It’s been rattling around my head for some time, so indulge me an effort to Think It Out Loud, if you would.

Since its inception, the web has presented us with a discovery problem. How do we find something we wish to pay attention to (or connect with)? In the beginning this problem applied to just web sites – “How do I find a site worth my time?” But as the web has evolved, the problem keeps emerging again – first with discrete pieces of content – “How do I find the answer to a question about….” – and then with people: “How do I find a particular person on the web?” And now we’ve started to combine all of these categories of discovery: “How do I find someone to follow who has smart things to say about my industry?” In short, over time, the problem has not gotten better, it’s gotten far more complicated. If all search had to do was categorize web content, I’d wager it’d be close to solved by now.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Our first solution to the web’s initial discovery problem was to curate websites into directories, with Yahoo being the most successful of the bunch. Yahoo became a crucial driver of the web’s first economic model: banner ads. It not only owned the largest share of banner sales, but it drove traffic to the lion’s share of second-party sites who also sold banner ads.

But directories have clumsy interfaces, and they didn’t scale to the overwhelming growth in the number of websites. There were too many sites to catalog, and it was hard to determine relative rank of one site to another, in particular in context of what any one individual might find relevant (this is notable – because where directories broke down was essentially around their inflexibility to deal with individual’s specific discovery needs. Directories failed at personalization, and because they were human-created, they failed to scale. Ironically, the first human-created discovery product failed to feel…human).

Thus, while Yahoo remains to this day a major Internet company, its failure to keep up with the Internet’s discovery problem left an opening for a new startup, one that solved discovery for the web in a new way. That company, of course, was Google. By the end of the 1990s, five years into the commercial web, discovery was a mess. One major reason was that what we wanted to discover was shifting – from sites we might check out to content that addressed our specific needs.

Google exploited the human-created link as its cat-herding signal. While one might argue around the edges, what Google did was bring the web’s content to heel. Instead of using the site as the discrete unit of discovery, it used the page – a specific unit of content. (Its core algorithm, after all, was called PageRank – yes, named after co-founder Larry Page, but the entendre stuck because it was apt).

Google search not only revolutionized discovery, it created an entire ecosystem of economic value, one that continues to be the web’s most powerful (at least for now). As with the Yahoo era, Google became not only the web’s largest seller of advertising, it also became the largest referrer of traffic to other sites that sold advertising. Google proved the thesis that if you find a strong signal (the link), and curate it at scale (the search engine), you can become the most important company in the Internet economy. With both, of course, the true currency was human attention.

But once again, what we want to pay attention to is changing. Sure, we still want to find good sites (Yahoo’s original differentiation), and we want to find just the right content (Google’s original differentiation). But now we also want to find out “What’s Happening” and “Who’s Doing What”, as well as “Who Might I Connect With” in any number of ways.*

All of these questions are essentially human in nature, and that means the web has pivoted, as many have pointed out, from a site- and content-specific axis to a people-specific axis. Google’s great question is whether it can pivot with the web – hence all the industry speculation about Google’s social strategy, its sharing of data with Facebook (or not), and its ability to integrate social signal into its essentially HTML-driven search engine.

While this drama plays out, the web once again is becoming a mess when it comes to discovery, and once again new startups have sprung up, each providing new approaches to curate signal from the ever-increasing noise. They are, in order of founding, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, and oddly enough, while each initially addressed an important discovery problem, they also in turn created a new one, in the process opening up yet another opportunity – one that subsequent (or previous) companies may well take advantage of.

Let me try to explain, starting with Facebook. When Facebook started, it was a revelation for most – a new way to discover not only what mattered on the web, but a way to connect with your friends and family, as well as discover new people you might find interesting or worthy of “friending.” Much as Google helped the web pivot from sites to content, Facebook became the axis for the web’s pivot to people. The “social graph” became an important curator of our overall web experience, and once again, a company embarked on the process of dominating the web: find a strong signal (the social graph), curate it at scale (the Facebook platform), and you may become the most important company in the Internet economy (the jury is out on Facebook overtaking Google for the crown, but I’d say deliberations are certainly keeping big G up at night).

But a funny thing has started to happen to Facebook – at least for me, and a lot of other folks as well. It’s getting to be a pretty noisy place. The problem is one, again, of scale: the more friends I have, the more noise there is, and the less valuable the service becomes. Not to mention the issue of instrumentation: Facebook is a great place for me to instrument my friend graph, but what about my interests, my professional life, and my various other contextual identities? Not to mention, Facebook wasn’t a very lively place to discover what’s up, at least not until the newsfeed was forced onto the home page.

Credit Twitter for that move. Twitter’s original differentiation was its ability to deliver a signal of “what’s happening”. Facebook quickly followed suit, but Twitter remains the strongest signal, in the main because of its asymmetrical approach to following, as opposed to symmetric friending. Twitter is yet another company that has the potential to be “the next Yahoo or Google” when it comes to signal, discovery, and curation, but it’s not there yet. Far too many folks find Twitter to be mostly noise and very little signal.

In its early years, things were even worse. When I first started using Twitter, I wrote quite a bit about Twitter’s discovery problem – it was near impossible to find the right folks to follow, and once you did, it was almost as difficult to curate value from the stream of tweets those people created.

Twitter’s first answer to its discovery problem – the Suggested User List – was pretty much Yahoo 1994: A subjective, curated list of interesting tweeters. The company’s second attempt, “Who To Follow,” is a mashup of Google 2001 and Facebook 2007: an algorithm that looks at what content is consumed and who your follow, then suggests folks to follow. I find this new iteration very useful, and have begun to follow a lot more folks because of it.

But now I have a new discovery problem: There’s simply too much content for me to grok. (For more on this, see Twitter’s Great Big Problem Is Its Massive Opportunity). Add in Facebook (people) and Google search (a proxy for everything on the web), and I’m overwhelmed by choices, all of them possibly good, but none of them ranked in a way that helps me determine which I should pay attention to, when, or why.

It’s 1999 all over again, and I’m not talking about a financing bubble. The ecosystem is ripe for another new player to emerge, and that’s one of the reasons I went to see the folks at Tumblr yesterday.

As I pointed out in Social Editors and Super Nodes – An Appreciation of RSS, Tumblr is growing like, well, Google in 2002, Facebook in 2006, or Twitter in 2008. The question I’d like to know is….why?

I’m just starting to play with the service, but I’ve got a thesis: Tumblr combines the best of self expression (Facebook and blogging platforms) with the best of curation (Twitter and RSS), and seems to have stumbled into a second-order social interest graph to boot (I’m still figuring out the social mores of Tumblr, but I am quite certain they exist). People who use Tumblr a lot tell me it “makes them feel smarter” about what matters in the web, because it unpacks all sorts of valuable pieces of content into one curated stream – a stream curated by people who you find interesting. It’s sort of a rich media Twitter, but the stuff folks are curating seems far more considered, because they are in a more advanced social relationship with their audience than with folks on Twitter. In a way, it feels like the early days of blogging, crossed with the early days of Twitter. With a better CMS and a dash of social networking, and a twist. If that makes any sense at all.

Tumblr, in any case, has its drawbacks: It feels a bit like a walled garden, it doesn’t seem to play nice with the “rest of the web” yet, and – here’s the kicker – finding people to follow is utterly useless, at least in the beginning.

Just as with Twitter in the early days, it’s nearly impossible to find interesting people to follow on Tumblr, even if you know they’re there. For example, I knew that Fred Wilson, who I respect greatly, is a Tumblr user (and investor), so as soon as I joined the service, I typed his name into the search bar at the top of Tumblr’s “dashboard” home page. No results. That’s because that search bar only searches what’s on your page, not all of Tumblr itself. In short, Tumblr’s search is deeply broken, just like Twitter’s search was back in the day (and web search was before Google). I remember asking Evan Williams, in 2008, the best way to find someone on Twitter, and his response was “Google them, and add the word Twitter.” I’m pretty sure the same is true at present for Tumblr. (It’s how I found Fred, anyway).

Continuing the echoes of past approaches to the same problem, Tumblr currently provides a “suggested users” like directory on its site, highlighting folks you might find interesting. I predict this will not be around for long – because it simply doesn’t solve the problem we want it to solve. I want to find the right users for me to follow, not ones that folks at Tumblr find interesting.

If Tumblr can iron out these early kinks, well, I’d warrant it will take its place in the pantheon of companies who have found a signal, curated it at scale, and solved yet another important discovery problem. The funny thing is, all of them are still in the game – even Yahoo, who I’ve spent quite a bit of time with over the past few months. I’m looking forwarding to continuing the conversation about how they approach the opportunity of discovery, and how each might push into new territories. Twitter, for example, seems clearly headed toward a Tumblr-like approach to content curation and discovery with its right hand pane. Google continues to try to solve for people discovery, and Facebook has yet to prove it can scale as a true content-discovery engine.

The folks at Google used to always say “search is a problem that is only five-percent solved.” I think now they might really mean “discovery is a problem that will always need to be solved.” Keep trying, folks. It gets more interesting by the day.

—

* I’m going to leave out the signals of commerce (What I want to buy) and location (Where I am now) for later ruminations. If you want my early framing thoughts, check out Database of Intentions Chart – Version 2, Updated for Commerce, The Gap Scenario,and My Location Is A Box of Cereal for starters.

Yesterday’s post on Google having an algorithmic “opinion” about which reviews were negative or positive sparked a thoughtful response from Matt Cutts, Google’s point person on search quality, and for me raised a larger question about Google’s past, present, and future.

In his initial comment (which is *his* opinion, not Google’s, I am sure), Cutts remarked:

“…the “opinion” in that sentence refers to the fact our web search results are protected speech in the First Amendment sense. Court cases in the U.S. (search for SearchKing or Kinderstart) have ruled that Google’s search results are opinion. This particular situation serves to demonstrate that fact: Google decided to write an algorithm to tackle the issue reported in the New York Times. We chose which signals to incorporate and how to blend them. Ultimately, although the results that emerge from that process are algorithmic, I would absolutely defend that they’re also our opinion as well, not some mathematically objective truth.”

While Matt is simply conversing on a blog post, the point he makes is not just a legal nit, it’s a core defense of Google’s entire business model. In two key court cases, Google has prevailed with a first amendment defense. Matt reviews these in his second comment:

“SearchKing sued Google and the resulting court case ruled that Google’s actions were protected under the first amendment. Later, KinderStart sued Google. You would think that the SearchKing case would cover the issue, but part of KinderStart’s argument was that Google talked about the mathematical aspects of PageRank in our website documentation. KinderStart not only lost that lawsuit, but KinderStart’s lawyer was sanctioned for making claims he couldn’t back up… After the KinderStart lawsuit, we went through our website documentation. Even though Google won the case, we tried to clarify where possible that although we employ algorithms in our rankings, ultimately we consider our search results to be our opinion.”

The key point, however, is made a bit later, and it’s worth highlighting:

“(the) courts have agreed … that there’s no universally agreed-upon way to rank search results in response to a query. Therefore, web rankings (even if generated by an algorithm) are are an expression of that search engine’s particular philosophy.”

Matt reminded us that he’s made this point before, on Searchblog four years ago:

“When savvy people think about Google, they think about algorithms, and algorithms are an important part of Google. But algorithms aren’t magic; they don’t leap fully-formed from computers like Athena bursting from the head of Zeus. Algorithms are written by people. People have to decide the starting points and inputs to algorithms. And quite often, those inputs are based on human contributions in some way.”

Back then, Matt also took pains to point out that his words were his opinion, not Google’s.

So let me pivot from Matt’s opinion to mine. All of this is fraught, to my mind, with implications of the looming European investigation. The point of the European action, it seems to me, is to find a smoking gun that proves Google is using a “natural monopoly” in search to favor its own products over those of competitors.

Danny has pointed out the absurdity of such an investigation if the point is to prove Google favors its search results over the search results of competitors like Bing or others. But I think the case will turn on different products, or perhaps, a different definition of what constititues “search results.” The question isn’t whether Google should show compeitors standard search results, it’s whether Google favors its owned and operated services, such as those in local (Google Places instead of Foursquare, Facebook etc), commerce (Checkout instead of Paypal), video (YouTube instead of Hulu etc.), content (Google Finance instead of Yahoo Finance or others, Blogger instead of WordPress, its bookstore over others, etc.), applications (Google Apps instead of MS Office), and on and on.

That is a very tricky question. After all, aren’t those “search results” also? As I wrote eons ago in my book, this most certainly is a philosophical question. Back in 2005, I compared Yahoo’s approach to search with Google’s:

Yahoo makes no pretense of objectivity – it is clearly steering searchers toward its own editorial services, which it believes can satisfy the intent of the search. … Apparent in that sentiment lies a key distinction between Google and Yahoo. Yahoo is far more willing to have overt editorial and commercial agendas, and to let humans intervene in search results so as to create media that supports those agendas. Google, on the other hand, is repelled by the idea of becoming a content- or editorially-driven company. While both companies can ostensibly lay claim to the mission of “organizing the world’s information and making it accessible” (though only Google actually claims that line as its mission), they approach the task with vastly different stances. Google sees the problem as one that can be solved mainly through technology – clever algorithms and sheer computational horsepower will prevail. Humans enter the search picture only when algorithms fail – and only then grudgingly. But Yahoo has always viewed the problem as one where human beings, with all their biases and brilliance, are integral to the solution.

I then predicted some conflict in the future:

But expect some tension over the next few years, in particular with regard to content. In late 2004, for example, Google announced they would be incorporating millions of library texts into its index, but made no announcements about the role the company might play in selling those texts. A month later, Google launched a video search service, but again, stayed mum on if and how it might participate in the sale of television shows and movies over the Internet.

Besides the obvious – I bet Google wishes it had gotten into content sales back in 2004, given the subsequent rise of iTunes – there’s still a massive tension here, between search services that the world believes to be “objective” and Google’s desire to compete given how the market it is in is evolving.

Not to belabor this, but here’s more from my book on this issue, which feels pertinent given the issues Google now faces, both in Europe and in the US with major content providers:

… for Google to put itself into the position of media middle man is a perilous gambit – in particular given that its corporate DNA eschews the almighty dollar as an arbiter of which content might rise to the top of the heap for a particular search. Playing middle man means that in the context of someone looking for a movie, Google will determine the most relevant result for terms like “slapstick comedy” or “romantic musical” or “jackie chan film.” For music, it means Google will determine what comes first for “usher,” but it also means it will have to determine what should come first when someone is looking for “hip hop.”

Who gets to be first in such a system? Who gets the traffic, the business, the profits? How do you determine, of all the possibilities, who wins and who loses? In the physical world, the answer is clear: whoever pays the most gets the positioning, whether it’s on the supermarket shelf or the bin-end of a record store. ….But Google, more likely than not, will attempt to come up with a clever technological solution that attempts to determine the most “objective” answer for any given term, be it “romantic comedy” or “hip hop.” Perhaps the ranking will be based on some mix of PageRank, download statistics, and Lord knows what else, but one thing will be certain: Google will never tell anyone how they came to the results they serve up. Which creates something of a Catch-22 when it comes to monetization. Will Hollywood really be willing to trust Google to distribute and sell their content absent the commercial world’s true ranking methodology: cold, hard cash?

…Search drives commerce, and commerce drives search. The two ends are meeting, inexolerably, in the middle, and every major Internet player, from eBay to Microsoft, wants in. Google may be tops in search for now, but in time, being tops in search will certainly not be enough.

Clearly, as a new decade unfolds, search alone is not enough anymore, and my prediction that Google will protect itself with the shield of “objectivity” has been upended. But the question of how Google ties its massive lead in search to its new businesses in local, content, applications, and other major markets remains tricky, and at this point, quite unresolved.

Wow, I’ve never seen this before. Check out Google’s post, responding to the New York Times story about a bad actor who had figured out a way to make a living leveraging what he saw as holes in Google’s approach to ranking.

How Google ranks is the subject of increasing scrutiny, including and particularly in Europe.

From Google’s blog:

Even though our initial analysis pointed to this being an edge case and not a widespread problem in our search results, we immediately convened a team that looked carefully at the issue. That team developed an initial algorithmic solution, implemented it, and the solution is already live.

What I find fascinating is the way Google handled this. Read this carefully:

Instead, in the last few days we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience. The algorithm we incorporated into our search rankings represents an initial solution to this issue, and Google users are now getting a better experience as a result.

What word stands out? Yep, “opinion.”

Think on that for a second. If ever there was an argument that algorithms are subjective, there it is.

(Oh, and by the way, the last paragraph in the blog post clearly is directed at the regulators in Europe, if you think about it….)

I found myself really engaged with Robin (CEO, Baidu) in this conversation, and I found his answers to some difficult questions – like doing business under the Chinese government’s rule – to be refreshingly honest.