Web Search is Losing Its Relevance
When web search was in its infancy, search engines worked to simplify the life of its users and provide high quality results. Google’s work was then thought be to be separating good content from irrelevant content for a particular set of keywords. That relationship worked well for some time, but it has changed for the worst in the last few years. The fact that Google makes so much money from each of us as search engine users has forced a change in the way they operate.
Gradually, Google is inverting the relationship and saying that not they, but web masters themselves should be responsible to handle meta information describing the content of web sites. For example, Google now provides several tools, broadly labeled as Webmaster Central, which can be used to enter all kinds of data about a particular web site, from a site map to a semantic description of its pages.
This may look like an improvement, but it is wrong in several levels if we analyse the situation with care. First, by using this type of strategy Google starts to dictate what is acceptable or not in their index, while promoting the use of tools like Webmaster Central to create a “semantic web”. The true question is: why should page writers care about this? Isn’t the search engine responsible for finding the information it needs to classify web pages?
Second, and in my opinion worse, is the fact that this strategy creates the incentives and the opportunity for spammers to do better than honest users. If you need to go through all this effort so that a web site is properly listed in a search engine, then the only people willing to do the work will be the very same ones who profit the most from it. In general, this means people that creates content farms and similar web sites in the first place. After all, with few notable exceptions they are the only ones making big bucks from Google — not the after hours hobbyist that maintains a small web site.
Changing Expectations
Google made a lot of sense in the early web. In a non-commercial Internet, content was organized mostly by hobbyists, people that created isolated web sites on particular topics. This was the case because the web evolved from university web sites, which still follow pretty much the same organizational style.
The evolution of the web and the possibility of content monetization made the creation of content a big cash cow. Increasingly, it is not the case that your questions will be answered by an independent site. Most of the world’s content is currently hosted by commercial web sites or sites that are non-commercial but linked to big non-profit organizations, such as Wikipedia.
Google has transformed the web into a place dominated by big content sites. Places such as StackOverflow thrive because they provide an increasing amount of content that Google indexes and sends to web search users. In other words, it depends on industrial scale content production.
However, after some time operating under this tendency, what becomes the point of using Google anyway? For example, if I have a generalist question, one that could be answered in an encyclopedia style, nowadays I just go to Wikipedia, and avoid spending my time looking at Google-spam. Similarly, for programming searches I could very well go to StackOverflow directly, and have probably the same chance of getting my questions answered.
In this scenario, I don’t see a need for Google. It is still useful only as an engine to find content inside particular web sites, the ones that you know and trust. What I see as the future is people choosing content web sites according to what they want to learn about, and staying on those web sites as long as possible, without exposing themselves to Google spam.
What Might Work
In the future we will probably need more directories (probably curated by people) than search engines. Web sites will be ranked by their qualities, and you will be able to search the ones that you select, while blacklisting or just ignoring the ones that people know are spam.
It sounds odd because the web was organized like this in the very beginning, with people and companies such as Yahoo creating a curated directory of sites based on areas of interest.
The future may be similar, but with a rank of web sites instead of single web pages, since people need to determine the general quality of a web site before using it. And it looks like Google is trying to do exactly this anyway, since they are using a heuristic to determine sites that should be penalized and the ones that should stay around.
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About the Author
Carlos Oliveira holds a PhD in Systems Engineering and Optimization from University of Florida. He works as a software engineer, with more than 10 years of experience in developing high performance, commercial and scientific applications in C++, Java, and Objective-C. His most Recent Book is Practical C++ Financial Programming.
