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09.29.09 Where Is SEO Leading Us To?  By
Peter Da Vanzo SEO came about soon after the advent of the web crawler. The commercial imperative was obvious - where there was web traffic, there was money to be made. Positioning a page first in the engines was pretty much a licence to print money. Still is, of course. Throughout the history of search and SEO, the predominant metaphor of the web has been one borrowed partly from publishing - the page - and partly from computer science - the domain. A domain contains pages. A domain is a silo. A domain has clear borders. The Search Metaphor Search forces quite a different metaphor on the web. Search is a connector between a person and a page. Search subverts the domain structure because the visitor can dive in at the page level. In this respect, all pages become a part of the much bigger silo. In 2009, that silo is Google. Search also strives to be the ultimate answer engine - the mind of God. Got a question? Google it. Google will provide the answers. But search is not quite there yet. Search still returns pages - the user still digs through the page to find the answer. But for how long? The Slow Unraveling Of The Page Unit Consider social media. Is a page the basic unit of Twitter? No, it's the sentence. How about Youtube? The video. Social networks? The person. All can be extracted, re-purposed and dis-intermediated without losing meaning. Consider the semantic web: Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Finnish word for "monkey", reserving a library book, and searching for a low price for a DVD. However, acomputer cannot accomplish the same tasks without human direction because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing, and combining information on the web.
What happens when the machine "understands" the query enough to provide a direct answer to a question, as opposed to returning a list of pages? Black Clouds On The Content Producer Horizon, Or Opportunity? In a recent Techcrunch interview, Eric Schmidt said something rather telling: So I don't know how to characterize the next 10 years except to say that we'll get to the point - the long-term goal is to be able to give you one answer, which is exactly the right answer over time. Perhaps he was quoted out of context, but that strikes me as an absurd thing to say. As if there is ever one "right" answer. Well, I guess there is if you live in some Orwellian nightmare. More importantly, if this is where Google intend to be in ten years time, then where does this leave content producers? If Google provides "the answer", why would anyone click-thru and visit a page? Conversely, why would anyone let Google crawl their content if Google's aim is to disintermediate the producer from their content? Johnon had an excellent post on this topic. Recently, Google released rich snippets, a feature whereby you markup you data to suit Google's display criteria. Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Peter Da Vanzo is the founder of Search Engine Blog.com, a news resource for the search engine marketing industry. He is also a regular contributer on SEO Book. |
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