Search engines have caused users to become dependent on their functions, even to the point of becoming “fans” of one or another; that does users a disservice.
Editor’s Note: Will a metasearch site ever gain the prominence of a Google or Yahoo? How will that affect SEO marketing efforts? Search your feelings and post them at WebProWorld.
The Wall Street Journal’s article on SEO firm Traffic Power, and the problems experienced by some of its customers, makes for very interesting reading. While the focus of the article discusses the company’s founder, its practices, and the experiences of some of its customers, David Kesmodel’s report makes a different point very apparent in my opinion.
Search engine branding has taken hold, and that branding has caused businesses to need to pursue optimization strategies. The best resource for a particular product or service may not be the one that gets a high placement on the first search result page in Google or Yahoo, for example. It might not even get on the first page.
That branding may be hurting users instead of helping them. If a legitimate business uses a SEO firm that employs the kind of tactics that get sites banned from indexes, the business feels the impact online. A customer who could benefit from a particular online business, and doesn’t find it due to banning, is as much a victim here.
All the big names want to keep users in place. Specifically, their place, their top-level domain, their advertising. Monopolies tend not to benefit their users over a long period of time. Users would benefit from using sites like Clusty or DogPile to find a broader assortment of results.
Vivisimo, creator of clustering engine Clusty, did a whitepaper about metasearch. While they certainly have an interest in promoting the metasearch approach, Vivisimo makes a good argument for the “many headed” approach to search:
General web crawlers today are harmed by the noise of blog cross-linking, link bombing (aka Google bombing), and commercial efforts to skew PageRank scores
To see how meta-search can lead to improved results, consider how electrical engineers perform averaging of noisy signals, which cancels out random noise and reveals the original noise-free signal. Since web noise affects regular search engines in different ways, meta-search filters noise by averaging the votes of the underlying engines, revealing the consensus best results.
They have to get in front of the users, and to do that means overcoming branding. Millions of dollars and years of work go into branding. But Internet users have been demanding more of their online experience. That’s why video has become more important online.
Search may be going that way too. It will be interesting to see if someone like a Rupert Murdoch takes an interest in pushing metasearch to the masses. Imagine Bart Simpson saying “Clusty is my hero” on Sunday night. Think that would push usage a bit?
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
