Editor’s note: This guest post is written byTom Anderson, the former President, founder and first friend on MySpace. You can now find Tom on*Facebook,Twitter, andGoogle+* Google is an algorithm driven-company. “PageRank”](PageRank - Wikipedia) (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. The algorithm continues to evolve—in fact, it’s Google’s most important work—and by some accounts, it includes more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms to perform its magic. Can a company so enamored with the power of algorithms and machine learning, let the user take control? This might be a more precise way of raising the question people keep asking. Is “social” in Google’s DNA? I love using G+, enough so that I’m worried that Google is going to make a misstep and ruin the service. Specifically I worry that Google will assume an algorithm alone is what’s needed to reduce the “signal to noise” ratio in the G+ feed. Several Google engineers have posted publicly that they’re working on this algorithm. I’ve been making my opinions known in comments for a few weeks now—hoping to catch the ear of Google engineers, but now that it’s harder to gain their attention as one voice within 10 million, I thought I’d do better to post something more substantial.
