Google VP evangelizes for relevance
New Zealand recently had the honor of hosting Internet legend Vint Cerf, currently Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist of Google. While he was here, had a chat with my friend Steve Ballantyne, who in turn obligingly published large chunks of it in the National Business Review.
As the guy who led the development of TCP/IP protocols, and someone without whom the Internet as we know it would not exist, Cerf tends to have a few wise comments about the direction of the web. Here’s one of them:
Now I think Google is very definitely the place to be. Google swept its competitors aside very quickly – I was a big user of AltaVista until the Google page-rank algorithm showed up.
There’s still a problem with finding the information that is relevant. My guess is that the next step in search will require making things more relevant, which may require things like the semantic web that Tim Berners-Lee has been working on.
That was great to hear. It’s great that he’s got such a clear understanding of how the Internet is not yet satisfying all of the needs of its users. Obviously, it’s also great that Cerf is saying the same thing that we’ve been saying here. VortexDNA’s purpose in life is to be a Universal Measure of Relevance (and, yes, fellow Lynne Truss devotees, that title deserves proper noun status).
But it’s particularly great because Cerf is a Google guy, and what he’s really saying is this:
“Google’s page-rank algorithm is good, but it’s not enough.”
Assuming you know a bit about Google’s page-rank algorithm, you could also interpret his comments as follows:
‘Popularity’ does not necessarily equal ‘relevance’.
Ranking pages based on popularity was a phenomenal start. Google set the bar for search—and, in doing so, provided a launch platform to the moon. Now the technology is available to combine Google’s immensely powerful statistical algorithms with a means of ensuring those results are more relevant to the particular individual conducting the query. This collaboration will take us a step closer to Cerf’s vision of relevant search.
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but there’s nothing wrong with improving it.
