Google is no match for the digital spectrum

Google’s search technology is becoming obsolete. While not easy to see spectrum technology drivers today, within the next five years digital broadcast television could emerge as the superior form of search. Google’s core ideas are over 10 years old and the technology world has changed all around them.

Popular Google lore has it that Larry and Serge had devised a foolproof way to catalog the world’s information from their dorm room.  Larry and Serge developed what is known as the ‘reverse linking strategy’.  Reverse linking is any time two or more web sites link to another web page then that web page (or landing page) must have had a greater of number of visitors.  The second part of the Google development is that concurrently Larry and Serge downloaded a large part of the existing Internet into servers so they could run these reverse linking algorithms against the web to prove their theory. It worked really well.
 
Fast-forward over 10 years later and Google’s search popularity process is virtually the same, however, it is showing signs of aging as it is getting tougher to find relevant information on the web. Some Google experimentation in the television space has occurred on various platforms but for the most part Google has not moved into the broadcasters’ spectrum territory.

Broadcasters, in the age of digital, can today offer consumers a superior product to stand alone Internet companies and here is why:

Dead Web Pages Skew Results – Using Google’s search technologies users find themselves wading through dead links. Web sites come and go but they can remain up on the web with out-of-date or incorrect information.  With no one to edit the contents what we are ending up with is a cesspool of dead and inaccurate web sites.  It is not possible to correct this flaw.  

Not Much Relevant Real Time Information: – Companies like Twitter have sprung up to try accomodate this structural flaw of the Internet by making available real time information on the Internet.  But the identities of those posting information to Twitter cannot be trusted.  Twitter posts have as much lasting value to the consumer as the dead web sites.    

Diminishing ROI – The shifting sands of stand-alone Internet advertising means it will get harder and harder to determine return on investment (ROI) since one must know the actual size of the marketing universe before determining ROI. With several Internet structural flaws building up like plaque the only way to determine ROI is to run a cross platform calculation reaching outside the Internet and linked to a digital television campaign. 

Cross Platform Limitations – As digital television begins to mature and technologies emerge that allow it to become linked with Internet content then Google most likely will not understand how to compete within the new digital spectrum space.  Google and other pure Internet plays are 10+years of hardwired technologies and embracing digital television ‘search’ will mean learning how to walk again and also retrain their thousands of employees.  

The mistake broadcasters make today is that we think we compete against the Internet industry when in fact our platform is far superior.   In addition the structural flaws within the Internet are so deep that broadcasters still have time to build the right cross platform tools as the stand-alone Internet continues to slide slowly off the cliff into a state of irrelevance. 

In 1996 Larry and Serge were tinkering with a reverse linking idea in their dorm room.   Let’s not give them credit that they could have somehow foreseen digital broadcast television.    If Google --which claims to have such an innovative view of the world -- missed the digital spectrum then we must put our resources towards capitalizing on our very real strategic advantage while we can.    

-- Michael Kokernak is a 20-year television industry veteran specializing in analyzing television home shopping network systems.  Kokernak has spent the past 13 years researching and inventing monetization technologies for the digital spectrum.  He is the named inventor on several patent applications in the space.  In addition Michael Kokernak is the founder of Backchannelmedia (www.backchannelmedia.com).