It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when the mainstream press was barely acquainted with the genius and foresight of today’s technology leaders.

Fifteen years ago Bill Gates appeared on the BBC’s Wogan show – which the Beeb thought of as a nightly Johnny Carson, but which was really like watching Regis Philbin on cough syrup – to show off his WinPad PC. The wooden Gates made a joke about making his money disappear, with only a couple of clicks, using only a stylus. As Gates blinked, a nation which had never heard of Microsoft, and couldn’t quite figure out why the guy in glasses wasn’t singing or dancing, looked on in sympathetic embarrassment.

But Gates’s prime time TV appearance underscored one point, popular in the public prints at the time, which was that a nerdish, upstart technology was changing the very foundations of the world as we know it. Microsoft was simply smarter, more agile, more cunning, and far more darkly mysterious than the fusty incumbents, like IBM, could ever realize. To stand in the way of Microsoft was to stand in the way of youth, innovation and progress itself.

Now, it may puzzle you as much as it puzzles us that this idea ever gained popular currency – let’s save that discussion for another day. But it can’t have escaped your notice that this mythical struggle has been reprised by the inkies several times – in the mid-1990s with Netscape – and today with the phoney war between Microsoft and Google.

If you’re of the view that history repeats itself the second time round as farce, then the parallels are even more uncomfortable.

Today, Microsoft is a software monopoly that equally, is barely acquainted with its own methods of production. The last Microsoft engineer who worked on the original incarnations of Windows left an engineering capacity at the company a long, long time ago and, as a consequence, a company that once could turn on a sixpence and drop off an OS refresh that seriously screwed a competitor now takes seven years to eke out an update. Insulated by the comfortable monopoly position it enjoys, Microsoft today isn’t even in control of Microsoft. But then again, why does it have to worry?

Now fast forward to 2006, where Google, if we’re to believe the popular prints, is simply smarter, more agile, more cunning, and far more darkly mysterious than its incumbents can fathom.

Or, er, is it?

When Google unleashed PageRank™ on the world, it really created a monster.
Google was so proud of its algorithm that it liked to boast that it mirrored the “inherent democracy” of the internet, a phrase which coyly and insidiously, flatters us all. PageRank™ was a truer representation of life than we ever realized, Google said, if only we cared to look.

The trouble is, PageRank only worked within a small dataset of peer reviewed academic journals. To extrapolate this into a way of life, as Google’s dreamy maths-obsessed boy wonders tried to do, was an essentially utopian gesture, which supposed that no one would try and game the system to their own nefarious ends. Only the inevitable happened, and as Google got more popular, and as the value of appearing in those top spots increased, Google gradually lost control of the algorithm which was once its muse. At the time, we remember, we gained very few plaudits for documenting this weary process – as Google was gradually gamed by desperate trinket salesmen, who built link farms to tout their wares – and by technology evangelists, who mistook overnight popularity for a validation of a lifetimes’s achievement. All were to fall to earth eventually, as technology offers no short cuts or backdoors when the calculations are finally made.

identify how much of its search index is comprised of robot-generated junk, designed to trick its PageRank™ algorithm. With billions of pages of “content” – pages of junk can be created on demand to populate cheap, disposable “web presences” – it’s beyond the wit of any algorithm to determine what’s real and what’s simulacra.

Like Microsoft, Google has simply been outsmarted. To read the popular press and discover that they’re arming for a billion dollar fight is like watching two dunken prize fighters hoping they’ll land a punch.

But thanks to blogger Mark McGuire for providing another dimension, one we and everyone else missed.

Just as Microsoft doesn’t have to care about the quality of its software, nor does Google (or Yahoo!, or any other want to be web destination) have to care about the quality of its product. Up to a point.

Noting the Big Daddy fiasco – Google’s attempt to weed out the spam from its search index – McGuire notes that Google profits from the irrelevance. Google makes next to no money from “search”, but makes all of its money from selling advertising.

Mark notes, as we do, a webmaster’s comment that the deterioration is gradually turning the SERPS [Search Results] back into a primordial soup:

“At this rate, in a year the SERPS will be nothing but Amazon affiliates, ebay auctions, and Wiki clones. Those sites don’t seem to be affected one bit by the supplemental hell, 301’s, and now deindexing.”

Mark observes:

“Google may take some action here and there, but I believe that they actually like a little mud in the main organic results for commercial terms. Why? Because less than stellar organic results (from practices like web spam) mean higher CTR’s on their paid links and more juice for their quarterly earnings.

“A little irrelevance is good for paid links and paid links is how Google makes money.”

If you want to be seen in Google, you have to pay to play – and create an Adwords account. How else are you going to be “seen”? In other words, it’s pay to play – the old economy reasserting itself with a vengeance.

This is a fascinating subject – how far can you con the public without being rumbled? Google executives may well look at Microsoft’s history and conclude they can ride the goodwill train for many years. A cynic may say the public doesn’t really care about the mechanisms, so long as they’re being delivered real results.

But the public is increasingly sophisticated, and as the web spammers have proved (the “Big Daddy” fiasco being the primary evidence) more than capable of outwitting Google.