Search engines, as an industry, are destined to change or fail. The reason I make this statement in such a straightforward manner is the absolute truth behind my outlook on their logical approach to search. I’ll list a few failed assumptions the current search engines are making below and then delve into each in greater detail.
Failed Assumptions
- All searches are equal, and the best way to display results for any given search is a list of results from highest ranked to lowest ranked.
- Search engine optimization, or a company’s understanding of SEO, or their budget for SEO, etc., directly correlates to that company being the best service provider in every industry across the board.
- The search engine’s opinion of who the authority is on every single topic under the sun is the correct opinion.
When you really sit back and consider those three points, you see what is missing from their logic:
- Choice, especially when you consider the very limited ability of an end user to do any sort of their own sorting of the resulting data for their search.
- Vetting, as if any computational algorithm based on the programming or popularity of a web page can truly determine who the industry leader is.
- Ego, or moreover, the expectation that every business on the planet should adjust to your algorithm for determining credibility and authoritativeness.
Local search is a step in the right direction, and in some ways breaks away from the first failed assumptions of today’s search engines, but not nearly enough. The same can be said for image search, and other types of search that are more specialized, however, these are still very poorly implemented generally speaking.
First of all, let’s remember that we’re humans looking for something, and we’re using a computational interface to assist us with that search. The first rule of computer programming says that a computer will do exactly what you tell it, so the first thing we need is a way to override the default behavior of the program if it gives us results that are off the mark. Unfortunately, the only way to do that now is to start a new search, most likely by altering the search phrase.
By offering a few options prior to starting a search, or even by starting off with a quasi-advanced search UI, much better results could be realized in many scenarios. For instance, if you’re looking for a news item, you shouldn’t have to necessarily go to a news search page. The same is true if you are doing some shopping.
Let’s look at a scenario where choice is downtrodden in today’s search methods. Take looking for a restaurant as an example. The search engine doesn’t know what type of price range you’re looking for, and basing the results for a search for food on the programming of a restaurant’s website is just really bad to start with.
What would the best solution be in this case? The searcher is looking for choices. Not a #1 result, they’re searching!
I hope that statement made a light bulb go off. In fact, every time we do a search, we’re looking for choices, unless of course we’re looking for something concrete, like a mathematical equation, definition, etc.
Google has begun displaying an area with information for static factual information such as definitions, and this is a move in the right direction in my opinion.
Revisiting our search for a restaurant, given this is a local type of search, wouldn’t it make much more sense to display the results in a way that’s not top to bottom, first to last? In fact, after much deliberation here, my approach of choice for choosing a default order would be very simple: randomize it!
Why should the search tool try to determine who gets the customer? Situations like these are where Google gets in the way, and needs to take a deep breath and take a seat and let us humans do some thinking for a change.
The same is true with respect to many industries. For instance, let’s say you’re looking for a CPA, an insurance agent, a lawyer, real estate agent, or other type of professional. Essentially what Google is saying is, whichever real estate agent has the strongest web presence (according to Google’s algorithm), should be displayed at the top of the list every time, and deserves the majority of the traffic. While any professional service provider needs to have a web presence these days, just for the sake of visibility and reputation if nothing else, this in no way carries any weight regarding their capability to deliver results in their industry.
If you want to give them all a fair shake, the only way to do so is to display the results in a non-list type format, but more of blocks or buckets in a grid fashion, and to load the results in a random order. I’d be strongly in favor of a button to serve the results a second time, which would cause the results to be randomized in a new order as well.
There are so many professionals these days who are apprehensive of SEO, web search, and even of having a website, because they feel like they don’t really have a shot unless they pony up the big bucks to compete with the bigger companies in their industry.
Finally, allow the person spending their time to do the search to sort the results as they choose based on sets of criteria. After all, the job of the search engine is to provide information, and there is no way Google will ever be able to achieve ranking websites in a manner that the first result displayed for every search will be the best result for the person doing the search. It’s just not going to happen!
The best thing to do at this point is stop striving after perfection in a flawed logical approach. Let’s bring competition back into the equation in a legitimate way (what I mean is, let’s not base rankings on an unseen algorithm that everyone is trying to figure out so that they can cheat that algorithm, and which doesn’t even display the best result first anyway), even the playing field, and work to improve the way information can be provided to searchers, not opinions from an algorithm.
Digi Purpose 