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Three things that are changing today’s search environment

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 18, 2008 in Search Engine Optimization

Search engine technology is constantly changing but there are larger pattern flows in process that represent collections of actions or decisions. These larger patterns have a greater impact on the search environment than specific events such as the proposed Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo! (which would be disastrous for the search environment if it happens).

1. The Search Engine Brain Exodus

Smart people have been leaving all the major search services: Ask, Google, Live, and Yahoo! have all lost key employees at mid- and higher levels. Project managers, vice presidents, key engineers, innovators — the flow of experience and intellect outward from the major search engines sometimes looks like a major artery has burst. But these gushers are symptomatic of something other than imminent disaster.

As any industry matures its founders, originators, and idea-makers grow older. They become weary of processes that once were challenging but now have become more predictable. They’ve made changes to the status quo and have helped shape the status quo. Eventually change forces a new equilibrium in their workplaces that many creative people don’t want to adapt to.

We’ve seen this kind of Big Bang of Talent in other industries. The core companies remain behind, growing larger by drawing in new talent, acquiring new companies, and training up new innovators and thought leaders (the Disney Company is a great example of this type of company; IBM is another). The first generation creators move on to new visions, new challenges. They start new companies that leverage their knowledge and experience, pushing back the frontiers of the industry they helped to create, shape, and grow.

Today’s search engineers were among yesterday’s Web imaginators. Tomorrow they will be among the New Web Imaginators who help create interesting platforms and offshoots of existing themes and technologies. It’s not likely any of them will pioneer new ground-breaking ideas as innovative as search engines but they may transfer some of their creative energy to a new generation of young imaginators who go on to create — in 10-15 years — the next technology revolution.

In the meantime, the core search technologies will continue to mature and expand in different directions. They will pursue paths that the founders didn’t envision but which will provide for needs that don’t yet exist. The evolutionary path will divide, leaving behind the search engine industry and spawning new fringe industries, but search will continue to evolve.

These changes represent a new era of opportunity for optimizers because we’ll be introduced to an array of new ideas and technologies that may help our search visibility. We’ll also have to contend with evolving sets of rules and processes in the core search technologies that won’t look much like the first generation of rules and processes. Ultimately, we may find ourselves caught up in a war of competing technology streams.

Think of what happened between VHS and Betamax. That’s Google and Yahoo!. Now think of what happened to VHS once DvD came along. Can you even buy new VHS-format movies any more? To the consumer one product choice replaced another but to the engineers who created these technologies there was an evolutionary competition for survival which resulted in VHS’ victory and now there has been an evolutionary step forward that is giving rise to a new competitive battle between DvD and its digital disk cousin BlueRay.

Tomorrow’s search engines may not even have been named yet, but they will do battle as giants in the same way that today’s giant search engines lumber into the arena and clash with the thunderous roar of the crowd egging them on. Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft will become forgotten and meaningless to the next generation of search users just as Burroughs, NCR, and Control Data Corporation no longer dominate the discussions of programmers and computer science majors.

II. Rel=nofollow

As more and more SEO pundits step up to the “sculpt with Nofollow” book and sign their names on the dotted line, search engine optimization and Web marketing teeters on the brink of a radical new concept: less linking is more effective. The concept has not been proven to work yet as the people who preach its merits have not put forth one credible example of its working. They have failed to take other factors into consideration when making grandiose claims about the successes of their Nofollowing internal links.

But then, everyone agreed Betamax had the better technology. UNIX was always more stable and powerful than Windows. And Apple Computer created an operating system that was considered the standard by which other small computer operating systems were judged.

The better ideas don’t always win out. Today’s SEOs are so obsessed with obtaining links that providing quality search engine optimization either to themselves or their customers really doesn’t matter. Perhaps tomorrow’s SEOs will become equally obsessed with sculpting PageRank — blind artists shaping a medium they can neither see nor feel nor taste nor hear nor smell.

The debates over rel=nofollow won’t die down any time soon and it’s probably only a matter of time before recriminations become more singular and personal. I’ve already grouped all pro-nofollowers into groups like “morons”, “idiots”, and “fools” so what have they got to lose by calling me names, too? Not that you win arguments with insults but I’m not out to win this argument. The more people who turn to sculpting PageRank the less competitive my competition becomes. I don’t have much incentive to fight wrong-headed thinking in an industry that has no standards.

But nofollow represents more than just a difference of opinion. It in fact represents an almost complete reversal of opinion on what the entire Web should be. Google proposed nofollow as a stealth anti-search spam tool and they’ve done a pretty good job of fooling a lot of software providers into incorporating it into their products. The W3C has proposed adopting the nofollow attribute into its coding standards.

“rel=’nofollow’” only benefits Google as it does nothing to help you get more pages indexed, in no way deters blog and forum comment spam (which is what it was originally proposed to do), and doesn’t add any value to the visitors to your site. It’s a stealth search filter that offloads Google’s responsibility for making the nonsense idea of PageRank work to the Web site operator — and Web site operators, by and large, couldn’t care less about whether Google can calculate a natural PageRank.

Google has perverted PageRank beyond recognition by its desperate attempts to prevent most links from counting. The idea that links are endorsements was never correct or supportable but now Google has succeeded in turning its core philosophy into a faux Web design requirement. “Rel=’nofollow’” is Naugahyde that doesn’t even look like fake leather, but it’s accompanied by so many lies and so much bullshit that people just don’t dare believe that it’s NOT required for something.

Google says it’s good for you, SEOs say it helps, so therefore nofollow must be good for you even though many of the people who originally welcomed nofollow have long since disassociated themselves from its antispam value. It doesn’t work as promised but it only took two SEO idiots getting on their blogs and saying, “Hey, you can sculpt PageRank with nofollow!” and suddenly Google had a new purpose for its useless link attribute.

In “The Trouble With Tribbles” Spock noted of the little furballs that “they toil not, neither do they spin”. Outside of their natural environment (where they served as food for predators) the Tribbles were only a nuisance that consumed large amounts of grain. There is no natural environment for nofollow, but unlike Tribbles it doesn’t pur and coo and make people feel good.

Bullshit makes people feel good so fortunately for Google there seems to be plenty of bullshit to cover up the nofollow attribute.

In any event, nofollow is probably here to stay, serving no useful purpose to the Web community at large, adding absolutely nothing to the arsenal of search engine optimization. It will only become a crude tool for turning links into expressions of opinion — and that was certainly NOT what Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he proposed adopting hypertext technology to the Internet to create the World Wide Web.

The Web was intended to connect everything on the Internet without regard for need or quality. People could make their own decisions about what was useful. That day is now dead. We’re now moving into the era of the World Notfollowed Web — it will look very strange because it can only be seen through the lens of the Google algorithm, but everyone will dance to this tune because it’s about to become a standard.

III. Traditional media

The Internet is becoming more and more entrenched in product packaging, news broadcasts, and television shows. Even movies now promote official Web sites. People have alternatives to search for finding Web content they want and traditional media has always been one of those alternatives. But today’s traditional media is better suited to helping promote Web content. There is a symbiotic relationship between media platforms and their cross-promotional transactions are becoming increasingly more sophisticated.

The day is not far off when consumers will be able to search their on-demand cable services for Web-related information. Why not? We can surf the Web from our televisions so it follows that new cable-service Web directories will be needed to help consumers find the Web sites associated with the shows and movies they watch.

Newspapers are also struggling to make the transition from 1800s-style journalism to 21st Century information presentation and management. Some news organizations have already experimented with specialized search inventories. If someone can prove the concept others will follow because, frankly, simply putting Google or Yahoo! search results on a news site is not a satisfactory experience for consumers.

News and Entertainment search pretty much suck right now because these industries have the most dynamic, user-intensive information needs. Search hasn’t been able to catch up to — let alone overtake — what news and entertainment need to do. If you don’t believe me, watch the movie “Deep Impact” and pay attention to the scene in the network news room when the President of the United States announces to the world that a giant asteroid is on its way to crush us.

You see dozens of people rushing to put together graphics, history, and background information. There’s even a guy composing a new theme for the special reports that will be produced over the coming months. Today’s search technology just doesn’t even come close to helping a news organization assemble the troops in that timely order. And it’s not about to get there quickly.

Years ago I had the privilege of meeting the senior editor at one of the United Kingdom’s largest newspapers. He politely asked me what I did. “I’m a data processing manager,” I said. “What does that mean?” he asked. I didn’t realize it but he was testing me. “Well, among other things,” I told him, “I’m a computer programmer.”

He snorted and looked at my shoes. “Have you ever heard of pagination?” he asked in a thick accent. Couldn’t say I had.

“Pagination,” he said again, and the disgust in his voice was quite clear. “It’s the wave of the future. I’ve spent 7 years and 5 million pounds developing it. I have teams of programmers working on the concept and they cannot even tell me what it’s supposed to do.”

There are currently several distinct or different definitions for pagination but basically you can think of it as a way of grouping information items together in a paged format. There has to be some sort of structure to the page format and the user has to be able to move through the pages of an information archive relatively smoothly. Newspapers have been doing that since Gutenberg put together his first press. Books have been doing that even longer.

Electronic pagination sounds like a great idea but it took a lot of work from many people around the world to actually get it to the production stage. Of course, we now live with pagination on the Web. It’s in our daily lives and we think nothing of it. But there was a time when no one could really explain how it could or should work in an electronic medium. And I would not be surprised to learn that the same programmers who spent so many years trying to do it for traditional newspapers were not involved in the groups that put the Web together.

Newspapers saw the need for the World Wide Web before it existed. They just didn’t know what it should look like or how to create it.

They may seem like a poor bellwhether for search technology but the consumer demand for more information and more timely information will drive the news publishing industry to improve existing pagination technologies.