Is Social In Google's DNA?
Google is an algorithm driven-company. “PageRank” (named after Larry Page himself) was the “founding algorithm” of Google—the one that gave it superior search results, and eventually led to Google “winning” the search wars of the early 2000s.
Context & Ripple Effects
The question TechCrunch poses sits on top of a decade of Google self-definition. Mid-2000s profiles already framed the company as an algorithm house first — CNN's speculative tour of where Google was headed and the New York Times' look at a search engine turning itself into an inventor both treated PageRank-era engineering as the company's defining trait. With Google+ live and positioned, per the reporting around it, as a more open alternative to Facebook, that framing gets stress-tested.
The story travelled beyond TechCrunch on day one: Robert Scoble's syndicated take argued Google+ had made Twitter boring and pressed Twitter on its response, while a demographic report finding roughly a third of Google+ users female pushed back on claims the network was nearly all male. The debate is not whether Google shipped a social product — it did — but whether an algorithm-native culture can operate a people-native one.
First-order effects
- Google+ moves Google into head-to-head competition with Facebook and Twitter for user attention and identity, with Google explicitly pitching openness as its wedge.
- Twitter faces immediate competitive pressure from a rival whose early traction commentators like Scoble attribute to making existing social habits feel stale.
Second-order effects
- Game developers become a battleground for social-graph supply: Google's disclosed investment stake in Zynga, per the updated IPO filing, gives the company a lever to pull social-game content onto its network the way rivals built theirs.
- Publishers and site owners now face a second optimization surface alongside PageRank's link graph — activity and connections inside a Google-owned social layer — splitting effort and reshaping traffic strategies.
Third-order effects
- If social signals earn real weight in ranking, the pure link-analysis model that won Google the early-2000s search wars cedes ground to identity-weighted results, rewriting the economics of search visibility for everyone downstream.
- The deeper test is organizational: whether an engineering culture built around neutral, query-time algorithms can sustain products that depend on ongoing human relationships — a capability gap competitors will exploit if it persists.
The trend: Search and social are converging as ranking shifts from counting links to weighing people and their connections, forcing algorithm-native companies to buy or build the social competencies they lack.