Google – Observations and the State of Searches
By Paul Lyons
In this posting, I am going to muse over the present state of Internet searching. In no way does this little essay attempt to be thorough or even scientific. It is simply observations that hopefully with illuminate some of the craziness that is going on out in the Internet world.
The whole environment of Internet search engines is a thing that has created much anxiety. In fact, whole businesses have sprung up that attempt to make money from search words. At the present time, Google is the leader and has the majority of the online searches - but not absolutely all of this market, as Yahoo comes in second with a significant amount of traffic. (See: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2156431) Because of the way Google values web sites, even blogs have become a big business with large companies investing in blog teams and trying to garner income from Google, Yahoo and banner advertising. The innocent day of hard coded home pages about your softball team has been over for a few years now. Now people are investing in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and playing hardball to try to get their website at the top of the list without being "black listed" for playing too rough. I know. Some of my recent Internet gigs have been doing just this kind of work.
There is even a whole industry that looks for keywords that people are searching for that do not have a corresponding number of resulting pages. They then create generic content or buy this content for these topics, in the theory that then people will go to these pages. Income is then created through online advertising. There are people who are becoming millionaires using these methods. Crazy!
I, like most, use Google as my primary search tool. Last night I was going through some web statistics generated for last month on www.pelicancafe.net and I found some interesting things that made me pause. I find it amusing that www.pelicancafe.net, which is really not a café, and serves no food, ranks higher than other real cafes in Google. In fact, if you search for "Pelican Café" on Google, lo and behold, www.pelicancafe.net comes up fourth on the list, above many "real" cafes. Of course, the reason for this is that this café changes often – new essays are written by the staff, new movies are created by our video department, and this new content is one of the major factors that makes sites climb the search rankings.
So I started to dig a little deeper. One of the search terms that people used to find www.pelicancafe.net was "excavating Tikal." I pondered that for a minute and tried it out in Google. The top link is to the essay that I wrote on visiting Tikal a month back. The reference to "excavating Tikal" had to do with me meeting a guy in a bar who had been a member of a team of people who excavated Tikal in the late 1950s. So I meet a guy in a bar, write a little about it on my blog and presto, I am the first search result on Google when someone is researching one of the greatest Mayan ruins.
And hear lies the problem with Google. With the arrival of the blog, Google sense of priority has lost sensibility. New is better. The more posts the better. Noise over silence. And with this the quality of content on the Web has generally plummeted. The big business of blogging has made it so people like Scooble, (no I will not link to his site here) who is hired by Microsoft or PodTech as a professional blogger, and says so little and repeats himself like a parrot, is at his site every day adding vacuous content that says almost nothing. (Though, I must admit that I have met Scooble and he seemed genuine and quite likeable.) Along these same lines, I read a story the other day about a guy who is now a millionaire and sold his blog to some big media company but still writes endlessly 15 hours a day, mindless gibberish; this guy has a problem and should check in to a clinic!
To be fair, there is something called Google Scholar that seems promising, however, I think that it is not well known among most Internet users. You have to go to the Advanced Search page in Google and then click a small link on the bottom of the page. I doubt many general users get this far. See http://scholar.google.com for more info.
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