Monday, January 01, 2007

Search Engine Evolution

I predict that search engines will changes as much in the next 27 months as they did in the last 27 months. In short, almost everything will change in the next three years. Here's my thoughts on why and where they'll have to change.

1. Track user feedback and use it for rankings to augment or replace links for ranking. For instance, if users search for xyz and go to site a but leaves it immediately. Then they click on site b and they stay there, the search engines should track this user preference for that site for that search term and use it to prioritize site b for that term over site a.

2. Get an improved sense of meaning. Why do users get different results for 1st grade math than for first grade math. It's because google is primitive. To survive, it must evolve. BTW, I'm 13th for both. And, for the first time since I've been testing this over the last 3 years, the listing for the terms is very close. This concept's time for implementation might be here!.

3. Be more critical of repeated content. When I just created my page on homeschooling, I tried to make it 50% different than my existing page on homeschool. I'm pretty sure that google tracks percent identical of pages and uses it to track original sources (which get prioritized) and excessive repetition (which so far, I see no penalty for). Right now, google seems to reward bigger sites even if most of the content is highly repetitive. This helps people like me who are willing to do alot of writing. But it would be better if they forced us to make the content more original (and more sticky, per point 1(.

4. Link inflation and ranking algorithms.... Link inflation will accelerate. You'll need more and more links at a faster rate to stay in the same place in the rankings. Also, google will keep up with many link creation techniques and rate them accordingly. They'll do more to downplay links from related sites (related owners, hosters etc) and they'll downplay links from "promiscuous sites". This will probably happen by increasing the value of the true "authority" sites.

5. Stay tuned for more, or give me your suggestions.....

And our sponsor has now a great animated character who now has his own site and merits a looksee.

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