Adolescent Search Engines: They are growing up so fast!

by Hamlet Batista | August 15, 2007 | 2 Comments

teens.jpgSearch engines are just like teenagers. Don’t believe me? Consider this analogy.

Let's say you have a teenage kid with a handful of friends. He knows them very well and even remembers their phone numbers by heart. He’s bright and it doesn’t take him long to become very popular at school. Now, he has dozens of friends. While extremely intelligent, he doesn’t have the memory to recall all his new friends’ contact info. Now he uses a paper address book to keep track of them, looking them up by their initials.

Later, he discovers social media sites on the Internet and gets addicted. He gains hundreds of friends all around the world. He genuinely wants to stay in touch with them but his paper address book is no good and he upgrades to a web-based electronic one. Now he can find any friend by simply typing in the first or last name. After joining several social networks and starting his own blog, he has several thousand friends. Suddenly he is faced with another unforeseen challenge: many friends have the same name! He needs to use a differentiating piece of information, their country or city for example, to tell them apart. But in several cases even this fails; he has three friends in Korea named John Kim, and two of them in Seoul! He has to tell them apart by age.

Now imagine that this kid is a search engine and his friends are our web pages. Instead of a few thousand listings, search engines have to sort through billions to find what is being searched for. This is when things get really interesting. 🙂

Search’s adult dilemma

We all know that search engines use keywords to differentiate documents, but do we understand why using keywords in the body of a web page is not enough to differentiate it when there are several million web pages with similar characteristics? Just like in our social teenager analogy, the more listings there are, the more differentiating information search engine needs to tell them apart. So far, search engines are depending on info from incoming links, the information that is outside or “off-page.” But will that be enough in the future? Are links going to cut it?

My personal opinion is that search engines will keep looking for outside quality signals besides links. I mentioned some of them in a previous post, but when I reflect on this, I think that even those will not be enough. Site owners and content writers will ultimately need to learn at least basic SEO. They will need to help search engines by creating content that stands out and, at the same time, easier to find and navigate.

At some point, there will need to be cooperation between all the moving parts. It is easier to organize what has at least some basic organization than what doesn't have any in the first place. Search engines will keep trying, but should we leave all the heavy lifting to them?

What do your think?

Hamlet Batista

Chief Executive Officer

Hamlet Batista is CEO and founder of RankSense, an agile SEO platform for online retailers and manufacturers. He holds US patents on innovative SEO technologies, started doing SEO as a successful affiliate marketer back in 2002, and believes great SEO results should not take 6 months

2

REPLIES

Try our SEO automation tool for free!

RankSense automatically creates search snippets using advanced natural language generation. Get your free trial today.

OUR BLOG

Latest news and tactics

What do you do when you’re losing organic traffic and you don’t know why?

Getting Started with NLP and Python for SEO [Webinar]

Custom Python scripts are much more customizable than Excel spreadsheets.  This is good news for SEOs — this can lead to optimization opportunities and low-hanging fruit.  One way you can use Python to uncover these opportunities is by pairing it with natural language processing. This way, you can match how your audience searches with your...

READ POST
Making it easier to implement SEO changes on your website

Changes to the RankSense SEO rules interface

As we continue to improve the RankSense app for Cloudflare, we are always working to make the app more intuitive and easy to use. I'm pleased to share that we have made significant changes to our SEO rules interface in the settings tab of our app. It is now easier to publish multiple rules sheets and to see which changes have not yet been published to production.

READ POST

How to Find Content Gaps at Scale: Atrapalo vs Skyscanner

For the following Ranksense Webinar, we were joined by Antoine Eripret, who works at Liligo as an SEO lead. Liligo.com is a travel search engine which instantly searches all available flight, bus and train prices on an exhaustive number of travel sites such as online travel agencies, major and low-cost airlines and tour-operators. In this...

READ POST

Exciting News!
seoClarity acquires RankSense

X