#intheplex

I'm just about finished In The Plex, a chronicle of Google up until its publication in 2011.  The author had pretty good access through his Wired and Newsweek gigs.  Although I'm generally not a fan of magazine writers turning their magazine articles into books, there were definitely things that were new to me.

Mostly it felt like taking a walk back through the last 15 years.  If you have cared about the Internet during that time, then it was an interesting retrospective as seen through the lens of one of the major pioneers.  Also it convinced me that my friends who joined Google when we graduated from college must have made way more money than I had figured.  So I felt dumb for not having done that.

While frequently interesting, reading In the Plex was a bit tiresome for me in one way.  There is a constant obsequiousness that rubbed me the wrong way.   Google built a great search engine -- but of course, they got pretty lucky in that an employee built AdWords so well.  It's not clear that they were going to figure it out.  

But one of their early hires did figure it out, so put it down to good hiring. And in fact good hiring really seems to be the biggest takeaway for me on why Google was successful.  They found bright people and then they gave them substantial freedom to work on what interested them.  Moreover, they had the money, the reputation, and most importantly the mission to attract those people. 

But as I read In the Plex, I constantly found myself thinking, "why hasn't Google done more?"  If you think about it, Google's search rankings have only marginally improved in the last decade or so.  Indeed, Bing is now just as good to the point where search rankings have become commoditized.  Sure, Google tweaks its algorithms, and we now have autocomplete in the search bar.  [Many non-search apps are quite good as well, but I'm talking about Google's core web search business.]

But we aren't even close to the day where it is unnecessary to learn about SEO, which is a stated goal of Google.    You still need to have at least the basics down, depending on how tough your keywords are.  And if you can run a bunch of A/B tests to figure out where the algorithm is right now, then there is definitely value in that as well.  (Hint: doing that is harder than it used to be.)

Furthermore, Google really only maps the web.  If you send a friend a link through email, that's actually a good sign of quality.  If you can drive lots of traffic to your site through offline means, then that's a good signal that your site has value, even if you have zero links on the web.  If a Congressman mentions a website on the floor of the US House, then that should be in an ideal search algorithm.  But Google doesn't know any of that yet.