This post is mostly a response to Rowan Polovin’s question on TechLeader - “If it doesn’t show up on Google, does it exist?“.

I think we’ve all heard this before - Google’s dominance across the Internet (and now, their entry into the “real world” with Android phones) is something to be wary of. We’re effectively letting a single company take control of the Internet - a vast, endlessly multiplying, infinitely powerful resource.

I suppose one of the major reasons Google is so “powerful and dangerous” is because their users have fallen victim to laziness. How easy is it to do a Google search from your Firefox toolbar and just pick the first result? How much are you missing?

In the beginning, the Internet consisted of people that wrote software for a living - they enjoyed the intricate challenges the Internet poses. They were the ones that started the earliest BBSes, wrote their own pseudobrowsers, and turned to the Internet as a new source of challenge, opportunity, and engagement.

These days, the Internet is overrun with people that use it for singular tasks - Email, banking, shopping, blogging. Its become a commodity - something that can be made and bought and sold. Other people are capitalising on that, flooding the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) by means of questionably-ethical SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) practices. They’re in it for the money, and they don’t care about the effects their actions have on the rest of the Internet.

It’s mostly because of these people that engines like Google have had to take more and more drastic measures to reduce the amount of “spam” links on their front pages. They’ve introduced algorithms like Google PageRank (and their own internal measurements) to determine the “weight” of certain pages on the Internet.

For instance, an American news site that updates every 5 minutes (they really do update that fast), and that has tens of thousands of readers, and hundreds of people linking back to their articles in blog posts of their own, will rank a lot higher on Google’s result pages than, say, a family site on a free hosting server that sees less than 20 visitors a month.

You could argue that “well, when people search, they’re looking for relevant and up-to-date results”. That’s true - and unfortunately, over 91% of the global Internet population relies on Search to find the answers they’re looking for.

There’s an excellent illustration of this in the Pixar movie “Cars”. McQueen accidentally ends up in Radiator Springs - a small town far from civilsation that seems to have fallen apart. Eventually he learns that it used to be one of the largest and most successful towns in the country - but the completion of a bypass highway had drawn all their visitors away.

Google is the bypass highway of the 21st century. From “start” to “result” is less than 0.001232 seconds. And because of that, there’s so much to the Internet that most of us are missing. This image is the result of an attempt to chart the Internet:

Each dot on the map represents a “node” (or a server) on the Internet. Essentially, the red blob in the center represents the high-speed servers used by companies like AT&T, and the outer fringes represent the smaller, antiquated, poorly-networked servers used by the thousands of smaller ISPs worldwide.

This map could also be used to represent global attention economics. If over 90% of us use search engines to find what we’re looking for, essentially, we’re all focused on that little red blob in the center there - when there’s so much more to the Internet.

Effectively, we’ve gone and reduced the Internet to a list of 10 search results.