The Google PageRank

As you all know, more than 10 years ago, Google solved the problem of indexing the Web in a relevant way with their PageRank algorithm. It was sure a clever idea, but when you really think about it, that is how life works everyday: you become an expert in something when people begins to call you an expert. Well, it’s the same for websites: your website becomes important the more people link to it. That is all based on credibility.

The first metric was clear: backlinks.

Social media equivalent to PageRank

The real time web is synonymous with social media. Real time web exists because we create content in real time mainly though social networks like twitter, facebook and friendfeed. While backlinks is a very good metric for a website’s credibility, what is a good metric for content produced by individuals?

This is going to be the next challenge as we will want to search the real time Web at some point. Google admitted that they’ve done a poor job when in comes to creating stuff that works on a per-second basis and that twitter is clearly leading the way. While twitter index things in real time, I don’t think they’re doing a very good job at the moment when it comes to providing quality search results: spam is still a problem and anybody can appear in the search results for a trending topic just by mentioning a popular #hashtag.

We are exactly where we were 10 years ago, it is possible to appear in search results just by using certain keywords. So, how to index the real time Web in a way that is relevant and provide accurate search results?

This is a fairly complex problem because the real time Web doesn’t just involve websites, it involves people. We need an equivalent to PageRank that work just as well, but for content produced by individuals on personal profiles.

Moving towards a PeopleRank

Whether it’s going to be through OpenID or a unique profile service, there will be a need for a single identity online. Just like you build your credibility in real life, building your credibility online will be just as important. If we want to index the real time web and people’s conversations, then index it and make it searchable, we need metrics to decide what content is really relevant and what content might be spam or just plain irrelevant.

I used the term PeopleRank here and I know it’s scary to rank someone on a scale from 1 to 10, but that’s not what it is. I’m referring more to a way that could take various forms and that would allow us to filter information based on people’s credibility and reputation.

Breaking the platform barrier

This has to go beyond the twitter reputation or Facebook reputation, if we really want to build something as useful as the current Google Search but for real time Web, we have to break the platform barrier. In fact, this is where the real challenge is: breaking the platform barrier, linking different profiles together and establishing metrics to rank these profiles.

What do you think? What are the big challenges when it comes to real time Web and how would you solve them?

Let’s do a quick breakdown of this search.

First of all, it’s a search for the keywords “Google killed my business“, from kumo.com. You guys will ask, what the hell is kumo.com? Kumo is actually a new version of Microsoft’s search service, only available internaly at the moment. If you try to reach kumo.com, you will be greeted with a blank page. At the moment, Microsoft is redirecting internal live.com traffic over to kumo.com to test the site.

The user’s IP address is also a Microsoft Corp IP address from Redmond, which confirm it’s coming from Microsoft. On top of that, the search was done on Windows 7 & Internet explorer 8. Any more doubts this search comes from Microsoft’s office in Redmond?

Google killed my business

Why would an employee search for “Google killed my business”? That I don’t know and there’s probably a thousand different reasons why someone would search for something like that, but coming from Microsoft, it’s particularly funny. Could this be an employee thinking Google killed Microsoft or could this be an employee searching for examples of businesses that got hurt by Google’s business model? We’ll probably never know, but I like to think it’s the first option.

Your searches are tracked

To me, this is just one more example that a lot of things you do and a lot of things your employees do online is tracked. Some of this information can seriously hurt your business if you’re not careful and it is particularly important to educate employees that whatever they do while on the company’s network can hurt the business in many ways.

Your thoughts

Again, share your thoughts, it’s always appreciated and I really want to hear what you guys think of this.