“You can’t say you don’t like Google. You might offend people.” Or, at least, that seems to be the ideology found in the atmosphere of the technology community. The world is quickly divided into Google fans and Google haters, and the latter group is often greeted with a reproachful disdain. It’s not just tech journalists who do it, though. Vivek Wadhwa, a highly respected UC-Berkley professor and web expert, recently called for a “New (and Better) Google.”
Vivek Wadhwa has a lot of experience in the world of both business and academia, having started two software companies prior to his move to the educational field. To those in the realm of academics, Wadhwa is known as the Director of Research for the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization (we know, it’s quite a mouthful) at Duke University. In the tech community, however, he’s more commonly known as a vocal contributor at Tech Crunch, which is where he made his recent, anti-Google statements.
Wadhwa starts with an analogy, telling of how Google has become a fruitless — possibly useless — tool in many information-seeking endeavors. While users could once have used the search engine to find critical data on key figures, their background, and their presence online, Wadhwa claims that the results are now little more than spam.
“Google has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers,” says Wadhwa. “There’s no way to do a meaningful chronological search.” This, as most in the industry can easily tell you, is the result of investment in modern SEO — and, more precisely, link building and content creation to help bolster page rank.
Wadhwa concludes with a hope that “Blekko and a new breed of start-ups… do to Google what Google did to the web in the late 90’s — clean up the spam and clutter.”
