The changing face of Web site search
Being 'top of the search results' is every Web site owner's goal, but forthcoming search engine changes may well render this meaningless.
22 August 2007
It would be no exaggeration to say that search engines are seen by many to be the gatekeeper's new customers. After all, searching on the Web is becoming the most common way of finding products, services and suppliers. No surprise, then, that people want to be high in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
This provides two key challenges, one for today and one for tomorrow. First, when people say that they aren't high enough in Google (or any other search engine), they are often highly optimistic about the search terms someone might use to find them - so the assumption that they may not be high enough up in the search results may not be correct. As an example, a painter and decorator might type 'decorator' and (of course) find that he/she is not listed on the first search results page. In fact, this is not something to be obsessed about, because that's not normal search behaviour. Normally people use longer search phrases which are more specific to their needs - such as 'decorator Cardiff' - which is then going to narrow the results down into something that's more relevant to the person who is searching. It's well known that if you're not in the top few search results then you will get less benefit - but, what's not as well known is that when people don't find what they are looking for in the first few items listed in the SERPs, they are more likely to change their search than they are to keep looking further down, or on additional pages. So, they might type 'household decorator Cardiff bay' for example, which is going to improve the relevancy of the results no end. This type of search is referred to as a 'long-tail search' and usually represents terms which are of most individual relevance to the person who is searching.
It's not been lost on Google (and other search engines) that for search engines to be really relevant, they have to reflect the needs and situation of each person. If I live in Cardiff Bay, it would be far better if I get the results of the latter search when I type the shorter search phrase - with search engines somehow 'knowing' what it is I mean and what it is I'm really looking for.
Take a slightly different search. If I were to search for 'Dalek' (also a resident of Cardiff these days, but we're not sure that Google knows this) what do I mean? I may well mean the Daleks, Doctor Who's greatest foe - but there is also a very popular hip-pop band called Dalek, a very successful artist called Dalek, and there's even a hypnotist called Dale K!
The current paradigm of search engines is to provide pretty much the same set of answers to everyone - so, the higher listings will be (looking at it from a simplistic perspective) the most popular pages with that search term. But this doesn't make the search right - I may well have been searching for the artist Dalek and not the metal-cased creatures from Skaro. If that's the case, the SERPs may be relevant to more of the world, but will be less relevant to me.
And that's the second key challenge - the search engine challenge of tomorrow.
The search engines know that they need to provide more relevant information, at an individual level. They need to have some notion of which of the different meanings of a word are the ones which you are specifically looking for without typing the long-tail search.
This type of personalised search is in its infancy, but the goal is really to have search engines learn the types of things that we are looking for, so as to provide the most relevant results. So, if I'm a dance music fan, when I type Dalek, the top of my search result will be the band, or, if I'm a Doctor Who fan, the top results will be the Doctor's worst enemy.
And there's the challenge for Web site owners - because being top of the search results will be less related to factors which can be controlled and predicted, such as the copy/keywords on your site, the other sites which link to your site and so on. Two people sitting next to each other might type in the same search term and get two radically different (yet equally relevant) search results.
When search results are delivered in this way, no one is 'top' of the search results, and measuring your place in the SERPs becomes very difficult indeed - since it depends on the person doing the search. But it does mean that search results will be fairer (since many sites can hold the theoretical 'top' position at the same time) and it will be much harder to use underhand techniques to achieve higher rankings.
