SEO Crunch

Future of Search

There are two problems with writing an article that dares to project what search engines will be doing in the future, unless of course you are Matt Cutts.

The first is that you run a big risk of dating yourself; the Internet landscape and the search engines are changing so rapidly that what worked even last night might not work the next day.

The second is the gremlin that haunts even the best search engine marketers; no one really know what the search engines are basing their rankings on, most “solid” information is fact just conjecture, although it is conjecture based on solid research (MOST of the time!!).

Be that as it may, we are going to present you with a few different ideas about which direction search engines might take in the future. Bear in mind that unfortunately we have no access to an Upper Google Guru, so any or all of these predictions may be wrong. They are, however, based on the direction that search engines seem to be taking currently as well as how best the big engines could overcome some of today’s glaring dilemmas.

Personalization

There has already been a blip on the Google radar screen indicating that personalization of searches is not too far off. Google, of course, has separate engines depending on country; this can be very beneficial to a web site developer familiar with media protectionist laws in countries such as Canada.

Get the formula right, and you will be number one. Google has also started to implement visitation history on many of their searches, and it probably won’t be long before they develop an algorithm that is based on IP address preferences.

Spider/human partnerships

One of the big negatives about a search on most of the engines is that searchers end up with a lot of useless pages. Developed using solid search engine optimization techniques, these pages forgot the Golden Rule: Write for people, not crawlers.

Look for growth in the method pioneered by Yahoo!; a combination of spider and human editorial staff. Not only will this help to make pages more relevant, it will allow some search engines to gain access to specific, and specialized, information. Web developers will have to write accordingly; the days of bad copy are almost done.

More PPC

We hate to say it, but money makes the world go ‘round, even on a network that was intended to distribute information for free. The search engines make big money off of their PPC programs, although many web developers have found the value is not reciprocal.

The big engines swear that organic searches will be kept alive, but my bet is that they become even more limited, sandwiched between several advertisements. Hopefully you can start planning your web site development now so that you are prepared to adapt when today’s techniques stop working, as they are bound to do. For our part, we think that the future of search will in fact become more focused on the searcher, even in the PPC campaigns.

The most solid prediction we can make is that on all matters pertaining to searches, the engines will want to see more landing pages of use to their users. After all, they exist to supply relevant information; it only makes sense to see them taking a more focused approach on what they rank.