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Does Google lead to winner-take-all websites?
Maybe not, read about this new study. Excerpt:
While search engines do not make for a level playing field, their use partially mitigates the rich-get-richer nature of the Web, giving new sites an increased chance of being discovered, as long as they are about specific topics that match the interests of users. So it seems that cyberspace, for now, is more of a googlocracy than a googlearchy.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 1, 2006 at 01:10 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
The *observed* googlecracy effect (i.e., the egalitarian effect, which says that unpopular webpages can be discovered nevertheless by web surfers) comes as a result of marketing efforts, in my humble and modest view.
Look. I created my prediction market vortal in December 2004. For many months, my website was ranked in the second tier by Google. Nobody ever discovered it by querying Google.
Today, my website is ranked #4 for the "prediction markets" phrase, and Google brought me 1,252 people last month. Why is that?
I've been nurturing relationships with some bloggers. When a blogger (e.g., economist Tyler Cowen) links to my website, there's a transfert of Google PageRank from his/her website to mine, in a small way. After hundreds of inbound links, then my website has now a PageRank of 5/10, and that's one of the reasons it ranks high now at Google.
Conclusion: the egalitarian effect comes from the webmasters and bloggers' marketing efforts.
Posted by: Chris. F. Masse .COM at May 31, 2006 5:16:13 PM
Wow. I write a special-interest blog and just checked my pagerank. 4/10. Not so bad. Of course, that's nothing compared to MR 7/10 or Instapundit 8/10 or Amazon 9/10 or what have you. But better than I would have guessed.
I wonder what the correlation is between traffic and Google pagerank. . .
Posted by: Matthew Cromer at May 31, 2006 9:23:46 PM
Read about this some time back- in the Economist (http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=51654070).
Had a question for the real Economists among us- IS the analogy to a real
economy anything more than a metaphor?
Posted by: rajeev at Jun 1, 2006 2:09:58 AM
Matthew Hindman did a pretty good job of exploring this with respect to political web sites and blogs back in 2003: ( http://www.princeton.edu/~mhindman/googlearchy--hindman.pdf ) He's currently teaching political science at Arizona and is working on a book applying these ideas to American political discourse.
Posted by: Allan Friedman at Jun 1, 2006 8:31:27 AM
matthew - hate to burst your bubble, but I think it's pretty difficult to have a web page (that has been online for over a month or two) with a rank of less than 4 or so. I know my front pages are about that level, and have scant traffic.
7? I can only dream...
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