Brace Yourself: Is Search Changing?
There’s been a bit of a “through the looking glass” theme to this month’s newsletter. With business predictions from Traveling Marketers, behavioral trend spotting in PPC keywords, and a holiday advertising article we can’t wait to get our hands around the next frontier. And it could be a big one. Search, as we know it, could be changing.
For some time now rumblings have been bubbling about Semantic Web, or Web 3.0 – the next frontier in search. The overall message is that user searches are getting more social. Often blog content, user-generated business reviews, and consumer product experiences are being sought out in addition to manufacturer or company information. Consumers want to know what to expect “straight from the horse’s mouth”. Search engines are even beginning to return social media updates and profiles mixed in with regular search results. It’s a way of testing the waters. If user-generated, social-type search results become more favored over what was normally returned, we may be witnessing search engine algorithm change in the making!
Search engines are trying to become more custom-tailored to the actual searcher, and they’re going to be basing their search returns off of your online search history. For example, when users turn to search for restaurants, concerts, and theaters they generally have to go through multiple sources like the cinema or theater website for showtimes, perhaps on to Google Maps for restaurants in the area, and maybe even a ticket purchasing website to wrap up the evening’s events. The idea behind Web 3.0 is to figure out how to bring everything together and to predict what you are looking for by pulling information from your past Internet searches. It sounds like a great concept, but there are red flags in the design. For instance, if you searched for Rated R movies in the past and you’re researching the latest blockbusters, the top results may be Rated R movies pre-populated because the search engine remembered your preference. Helpful? Maybe. If you’re always into horror flicks.
With the launch of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook a new way of thinking about what appears online is being formed. Search engines have started indexing Facebook profiles and returning those profiles based upon search queries, and Twitter is becoming an increasingly popular source for the latest information, especially given how quickly word spreads via their platforms. This is great if you want the latest headlines, but what if something caught your eye a few weeks back? How do you filter through the heaps of breaking information to find an old article?
Search, like most things in life, never stays the same. And there are a lot of “what ifs” to work out before any major changes happen any time soon. So for now, at NetSearch Direct, we’re happy to continue our search engine marketing and getting our customers results because we know that rumblings are just rumblings. As the landscape changes, we’ll continue to bring you the latest news and updates.