SEO, Social Media, and Susan Boyle
A few weeks ago, Google made changes to the way search results are displayed – resulting in a lot of noise, wailing, excitement, and the usual ‘search has changed forever’ histrionics that rival anything the tabloids can stir up about Susan ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ Boyle’s public breakdown.
Unlike reality TV, new Google tricks get us genuinely excited here at C&M. Quite a few new-cool-things have been added – although only to a limited series of domains at first. Many of these changes are in response to the challenge of sprightly search-engine-upstarts who could pose a threat to Google’s search supremacy.
Throwing down the gauntlet are (among many others):
Wolfram Alpha: Hyped as a Google beater, but still quite a different beast. Go and sample its utopian streets and avenues – or just type something in. It speaks another language, based on a different grammatical system. English. Basque.
Mahalo: A ‘Human Powered’ search engine, results are filtered through user participation and involvement. Good idea but, alas, the results aren’t great….yet.
Twitter: Not strictly a search engine – but it’s real time updates are appealing for some searchers and newshound journos, as opposed to the more static default Google SERPS.
Google has responded with:
Support for Microformats: An extended, semantic, form of meta data, that allows extra meaning and context to be displayed in response to a search engine query. For instance, a search result for a specific product search may contain a review rating – a bit like a mini website preview rather than a description.
Added search options: Results can now be categorically filtered. Much of this functionality (e.g – search by date) was previously available through advanced search. Other new bits ‘n’ bobs like the ‘wonder wheel’ add an extra visual and semantic edge to searches – along the same lines as Hakia.
So what does this mean and, two weeks on, how are things looking/changing/(brace)evolving?
At the top level, this means that users are given more scope for customisation of search results (arguably bad for SEO), rather than being, effectively, lumped with the ten sites that Google chooses. However, this isn’t really anything new – a few months back, ‘SearchWiki’ was introduced, allowing results to be deleted and adjusted (using the two icons at the side of each result).
In my humble opinion, it’s unlikely that the majority of users will take much notice – at least not for a while. Of course, the web amigos (and amigas) will embrace these changes like their lost daschund that’s just returned after five gruelling nights in the hills; others will just click on. Web literacy still has to catch up before there is any behavioural or, even, psychological change.
It will take a while for the billions of web pages to catch up with most of the changes. Even finding a representative query for this post was tricky.
While some of us are infuriated with the SPAM, irrelevance, or just plain dullness of the ten results that fall onto our screens in response to our keyword demands; others won’t take too much notice. Sometimes people can be strangely resistant to the new, even if it makes something easier or better, providing that ‘something’ was never too much of a problem in the first place.
It’s easy to get caught in the internet bubble but l don’t think these changes represent any immediate, or significant, change in the way the general public searches…yet.
Poor Susan.
Agree / Disagree?
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