The De-Optimization of Search Engines
Search engines have been resilient and successful applications Internet has had. Consumers, businesses and marketers
have been glued to them making them the melting pot of Internet and marketing. But search engines have big problems.
Though they use logical ‘signatures’ of good content like number of incoming links, they cant differentiate good content from ‘cooked up’ material. Take a look at this video. The maker of this video claims that he was able to get some junk rank in the first page for target keywords. There are a ton of ‘search engine optimizers’ who ‘exchange links’ or create links that manipulate search results. If you optimize your website or content for keywords just because you want to attract business, I am not sure if you the search results are being optimized in the process.
That’s not too encouraging for search engines. There’s a good proverb in Telugu. “Pulini choosi nakka vaata pettukunnatlu” It teases a fox that tries to look like a tiger by having scars to copy tiger’s stripes. The difference between a fox and a tiger is DNA. But a search engine can’t differentiate the DNA. It reads a fox and puts it in the search results for “Tiger” because the fox has stripes, those incoming links, the keyword density etc., on its back. That probably explains why the research shows that 50% of search engine queries don’t end successfully.
But that’s good news for entrepreneurs. Discovery of content is still a problem yet to be solved. Digg, StumbleUpon and other websites have come up to solve this problem and there are opportunities out there to solve it.
