"Google can't scale"? Ridiculous
Google is far and away the most powerful search engine on the web. An increase in the number of web pages its spiders search through merely means an increase in the number of servers necessary to hold the additional retrieved information, and several years ago Google had already had more than 100,000 servers under its control. Indexes on the database that holds the information supplies the necessary search speed, and only an improvement in the indexing algorithm will increase that search speed. That is the kind of scaling which is necessary, and which brought Google to the pinnacle of its success. Apparently Microsoft thought the Google search was better than its own Bing results, but masked the Google results behind its own Bing window dressing, although they deny it.
As far is claiming that social web sites are necessary to scale, that too is ridiculous. I often search for information which hasn't been and usually isn't linked by ANY social page "Like" button, for neither Facebook or Google+ links appears in beneath the ad listings on most of my searches. To link search results to only what folks on Social pages are interested in would be like teaching in school only subjects that are interesting to social gadflies, and would be like running a Formula One racer in only 1st gear. In fact, most links on Social pages were made by folks who found what they were looking for during a Google search, or were passed a link by someone who used a search engine to find it. To claim that a Social page would help "scale" the search is the kind of circular argument that some folks here commented about. The number of times a specific subject is searched for, or linked to on a Social page, may be of interest to demographers, but the search targets are listed in the database only once, for one listing is all that is needed, just like an inventory item needs to be in the inventory data base only once, or a customer in the customer database only once.
This whole article reeks of a Microsoft/Facebook attack ad. It reminds me of the many articles highly favorable to VISTA that were written by supposedly "independent" journalists and influential IT folks just before and during VISTA's initial release. It was only when ONE ethical journalist blew the whistle on the whole sordid affair did we learn that these "journalists" received expensive high-end laptops with VISTA installed on them as a "gift", as the letter that came with them described it, in exchange for favorable articles (they should have been called stories) about VISTA. Only AFTER the bribes were made public were face saving announcements made that the laptops were being donated to charity made. A few, however, brazenly kept the laptops.
