Google Doesn’t Care About Social Networks

And that’s really not a good place to be, or, if it’s a rumour, not a good rumour to having going around, with little to no rebuttal to be found.

Across the board, for me at least, social networks have almost entirely replaced my google searches. When I have a question, instead of googling the answer, I ask Twitter.

Nine times out of ten, someone in my network knows the answer, and frequently, more than one person knows and they’re all willing to share that information. With that kind of knowledge base at my fingertips, what happens to Google going forward?

Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield has issued a report, primarily about Google and MySpace. In the report, Greenfield reiterated a contention he made last July that the underperformance of search ads in MySpace is not simply a product of the non-responsive nature of these sites’ users. Rather, according to Greenfield, Google’s algorithm isn’t well-suited to social-networking sites — and that’s something Google isn’t necessarily concerned with. [source ]

It got me thinking, because while the report was about MySpace in particular, I think this is bigger than one social network. If the Google Algorithm isn’t playing nicely with MySpace, and we hear about how much trouble Facebook is having with monteization, not to mention Twitter’s issues around that, can we expect the algorithm to work with other sites?

The remainder of the article is here . I wasn’t able to find the actual report Greenfield produced, so I’m at a loss for more information. I’ll do some more digging later and see what I can find. (Maybe Google’s algorithm doesn’t play well with Greenfield either! Or, it might just be Pali Research’s walled garden stopping me.)