Blogging India

Hello all,

I found this rather curious little thing while I was browsing about a week back. I was searching for something in Google, and it was something rather hard to find, so I thought of searching for it in Google Groups and News. So I scrolled to the top of the Google search page, where the little links to Google Images Search, Google News Search, Google Scholar Search and other Google utility searches were displayed.

To my surprise, there was a link to Orkut(Orkut is the social networking website owned by Google)! This particular link took me to an Orkut search page for what I searched. I was logged in to Orkut at that time, and thats why it showed me the search page. When I logged out, and searched, and clicked Orkut again, the usual log in page appeared.

But the interesting point is that, Google either thinks that Orkut has useful material, or it wants to drive traffic to its Social Networking site. It is most probably the latter, since most of the content on Orkut are either highly personal (and useless for a 3rd person, unless he’s studying customer psychology) or extremely spammy. Most of the communities I’ve been to so far, barring a single one on Indian stock exchange updates, are notoriously spam filled, thus presenting nothing search-worthy.

Then we have to question – why is Google going so orkutty?  A few of my observations -

• Information contained in Orkut is highly useless to any person searching for something conrete
• Orkut communities are extremely spam filled – thus leading to incorrect information
• Orkut communities harbour many illegal activities, like hacking/phising attempts
• Thus, presenting Orkut search as an option in Google search destroys the search engine’s credibility by providing highly incorrect search results.
• Google, by putting in the Orkut link, is trying to get more visitors to sign up at Orkut, thereby providing more income to Google

So finally, we have to ask a few questions… Is Google compromising on search quality to drive forward its products? Isn’t Google thus creating an unfair advantage for Orkut over other social networking websites? Isn’t Google misleading people to click on the Orkut search link, and thus making them sign up?

Unfortunately, we do not have answers. Hopefully, a Googler will see this post, and send me a rather flighty email But until then folks, ciao, take care

[tags]orkut, orkut search, google, google search, decreasing google, google standards, orkut information, google news[/tags]