Thinking Strategically About Search
"...This brings us to the question of shoe leather and what Google can do to support those who want to produce original content."Spot the flaw in
this statement?
It will be, ultimately, Google's Achilles Heel.
Google has a very weak incentive to "support" content of quality. Put another way, Google's incentive to "support" content creators diminishes in quality.
Think about this intuitively: the more crap there is, the more stuff you have to wade through - the happier Google is (at least in the short run).
Let me put this even more succinctly.
Google doesn't care about absolute levels of quality - it only cares about relative levels of quality. And the more media it indexes, the stronger this dilution of incentives gets.
Hence, it's incentive to "support" content creators, already weak, is going to
diminish over time.
This is a huge problem for search. On the one hand, there is long run pressure to amplify the efficiency of search. But on the other, in the short run, there is a very real pressure not to ever touch the Golden Goose.
Note that this long run is a
very long one - because search is a natural monopoly business, and so entry (aka competition, which forces investment in the quality of search) is slow, thin, and lacks momentum.
It's here that new entrants (hi Jimbo) should focus. How can this obvious vital point in the new value chain Google is forging be targeted?
It's an interesting question.
I don't have time to write a longer answer - but I think possibly you're better off thinking about this stuff than rehashing the same old conversations (ie, YouTube vs Viacom, are newspapers dead, etc).
As a sidenote, I think it's unfortunate that the usual suspects - Tim O'Reilly, Esther Dyson, blah blah etc - are completely ignoring questions like this in favour of kind of dead topics...but that's another post.
