For as much as we occasionally criticize Google here at the Reputation.com Blog, nobody can dispute the company’s considerable innovations and contributions to the Internet. A true juggernaut of the tech world, it sometimes seems like everyone else in the Silicon Valley is merely trying to keep up with the big G. I mean, you have to be big when your company’s name is listed as a verb in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Of course, the reason Google became the king of the Internet is the company’s unrivaled search technology. Originally founded to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Google differentiated itself from competitors with the development of the link analysis algortihm PageRank.Through PageRank, Google became the place where people could go to find the “best” information on the Internet as determined by popularity, authority, and influence.

As the Internet has evolved, however, Google’s hold on search might be slipping. Between hard-charging competitors like Microsoft’s Bing and an ever-evolving Internet (30% of Internet searches are now people related), perhaps it is time for Google to take the next step in search? But what could this be? Where is search headed? In a recent post for the marketing blog Threeminds, Marshall Clark suggests Google invest in something he calls “PageRank for people.”

From the post:

In the physical world, your reputation follows you. If you’re the world’s foremost expert on AJAX, your opinion on the topic will be respected wherever you go. Imagine if the same held true online. Publish an article on an obscure web dev blog, it ranks highly, because hey – you’re an expert. Pen a guest column on “AJAX and You” for Women’s Day magazine and it ranks great, because you’re the best in your field. Post a comment on the blog of an up-and-coming developer and that post gets a boost, because one of the luminaries in the industry judged it worth weighing in on. These are just a few of the possibilities, I’m sure there are plenty more.

Mapping reputation to people instead of URLs makes PageRank portable. It’s PageRank for people.

Marshall fleshes out the concept further, saying:

What we’re talking about here is a fundamental shift in how we track and evaluate content online. One that mirrors how we assess information in the physical world: “Who’s this guy talking? What’s he done before? Do I like him? Do people I like, like him?”

Some of the criteria the PageRank for People algorithm would look at:
• Topics of expertise
• Number of links to your posts and the reputation of those doing the linking
• Number of comments and the commenters’ reputations
• Who’s in your community (those linking, commenting, reposting your content frequently)
• Ratings, weighted by the reputation of each rater
• Where you’ve been published
• How long you’ve been online
• Maybe even semantic analysis of your content (are you a troll?)

It is an interesting concept and one which we spend a lot of time thinking about at Reputation.com. One of the sad truths of the Internet is that it takes very little effort to permanently tarnish someone’s good name. If Google moved toward a verifiable PageRank for people model, perhaps it would not be so easy to slander someone online. By taking a strong pro-active stance toward one’s online reputation, you could effectively mitigate a personal attack from an anonymous stranger. After all, who is a more authoritative source of information on yourself than yourself?

What do you think? Is PageRank for people the next step for Google? What are some pitfalls for a people-focused Google search?