There’s a wonderful fallacy that marketing executives never tire of. It’s written right on the sign outside every McDonald’s restaurant: “Billions and billions served.”

How can billions be wrong? If an opinion is popular enough, does that make it somehow correct? How about moral relativism? If enough people believe something, does that make it right? As someone who believes in an ultimate authority, I have to answer an emphatic no to both of these.

But what about those who do believe what’s dictated by the trend? What about questions on quality of a fast food meal, where the Bible is silent?

The Internet offers a frighteningly powerful way to see what people believe. It’s called Google.

The Ultimate Democracy

Google is like a gigantic ballot-box. Each ballot has billions of checkboxes on it, and every time one site links to another site, a vote is cast. One site linking to another site is the former lending credibility to the latter. Sites that already have a lot of credibility have more voting power.

The outcome of this is that some of the highest ranking sites on the Internet are blogs. Blogs are constantly linking to each other. Wonder who the most important Matt is in the world? The top 6 are all high-profile bloggers. Matt Damon’s IMDB page clocks in at #8.

If bloggers have the most Pagerank, what does that make them? It makes them the voters in the vast democracy of Google. As we vote for each other, our Pagerank goes up, and as we vote to non-blogs, their Pagerank rises.

Trouble In Paradise

But what’s the problem here? Suddenly Google isn’t necessarily reflecting what is accurate; it’s reflecting what is believed by the population… of bloggers.

This can have a tremendous amount of impact. So valuable are the opinions of Google that there’s a whole site for them: Googlism.

Case 1: Try googling the travel-planning company Orbitz. What a mixed-bag this is! We’ve got a scathing review by Maddox, a Paul Graham posting on Lisp, a New Architect case study, and a couple pages about the short-lived Orbitz beverage.

How is someone looking to book a flight supposed to process this? Looking at search results isn’t like checking the BBB. But not everyone knows this.

Case 2: Google Paypal. Ouch! How do they stay in business? Links #2 an #3 are both blistering reports on the company’s practices. And not just single pages, as Maddox’s was, they’re whole communities full of mis-treated customers and tattling employees.

How do companies deal with that; knowing that potential customers are viewing this? On the one hand, it’s great that genuinely problematic companies can be strong-armed into cleaning up their act. However, what about embellished or slanderous reports?

I haven’t got the answer; it’s just one more of those new things that the Internet has brought about.

Surfer Beware

What’s the lesson here? Google can tell us many things, but as with any resource, the source must always be subject to scrutiny.

Mike

← Earlier Later → Posted at 1:34 am to Internet.