Page 2 - Dark Future For traditional Search engines

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#16

November 7th, 2007, 05:21 AM

chanchal

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In Newsweek any webmaster hasn't claimed why his site not in top results.Web Searchers claimed they are not geting the best result they want.
As far as i know Google take no care of a Webmaster's satisfaction.

Cause search engines search pages for searchers not for webmasters

#17

November 8th, 2007, 10:45 AM

terriwells

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Back links are the way that humans say "hey this site is useful and relevant." Lots of humans may disagree, so when you get lots of humans agreeing on something you have to figure that there's a reason. The simplest explanation is that the site really IS useful and relevant. So search engines basically track human behavior, because they're trying to be useful to humans.

Until a bot can figure out better than a human what is useful and relevant, you're going to have back links in the algorithm. Guess what? It's not happening until we have bots with "positronic brains" like Data from Star Trek -- and give the problems he had figuring out humans, probably not even then.

#18

November 8th, 2007, 12:34 PM

chanchal

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Still there will be no problem if all the back links come naturally.

Quote:

Back links are the way that humans say "hey this site is useful and relevant."

Bots determine popularity among humans with back links.If people can make bots thinking in wrong way with artificial back links there is no way for bots to detect it.
I am giving here a portion of Newsweek article published in Daily Herald.

Quote:

Tui Stark is searching for a vacation paradise and can't find it. Googling "snorkeling beaches blue water" turns up listings for scuba diving, real-estate firms, rafting outfits. So Stark, a photography stylist in Needham, Mass., turns to Quintura, one of many upstart search engines, which allows her to focus the results on snorkeling. "The Google results just had too much stuff I wasn't looking for," she says. "I wanted to zoom in on the best snorkeling beaches." And within seconds, Quintura delivers.

That's a bad result for Google, which is more vulnerable than you think. By virtue of dominating Web searches -- Google draws 60 percent of all searches worldwide, says market-research firm comScore, with Yahoo a distant second at 14 percent and Microsoft at 4 percent -- Google has not only become the reigning heavyweight of the online world, it has also transformed advertising, riled governments and sent tremors through Wall Street. As of last week its stock was valued at $200 billion, more than five times that of Yahoo's and nearly three quarters of Microsoft's. Now it's threatening to shake up the trillion-dollar corporate-computing and wireless-communications markets.

Despite spending billions trying to diversify beyond the straightforward search offered on its stripped-down, almost childlike home page, Google reaps about 60 percent of its outsize revenues and more than 80 percent of its profits from ads on that page, according to analysts' estimates. That means the company's success continues to hinge on the dominance of its simple search.

There are no guarantees its dominance will last.

It is threatened by efforts worldwide to build a better search, involving giant high-tech rivals, governments in Europe and Asia, and hundreds of tiny start-ups founded by academic wunderkinders much like Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the Stanford graduate students who founded Google in 1998. And it's also dependent on an online public that may make up the most fickle market in history.

Google may well be able to continue its charmed life by holding onto its search lead and getting its non-search businesses to kick in more profit, and Wall Street is certainly betting that way. But the computer world has a way of bringing seemingly golden brands down to earth with surprising speed, as Lotus, Novell, AOL and other firms have discovered. It's not farfetched that five years from now we may wonder why everyone thought Google was such a big deal.

"Google has won the first stages of the Web-searching race," says Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with Global Equities Research in San Francisco. "It won't win the next one."

History shows how quickly search leaders can lose their way. The race began in 1995, when researchers at Digital Equipment Corp. (remember them?) figured out how to store the words on Web pages as an index that lent itself to lightning-fast searches. The resulting AltaVista search engine quickly became a favorite home page for early Web users. But in 1998 word started getting around about a new search engine from a tiny company with a goofy name that sometimes returned more-useful results, and by 2000 Google was the search engine to beat.

When Google tweaked its business model by linking ads to searches and charging advertisers only when searchers clicked on them -- an approach it copied from rival online marketing firm Overture -- it converted its search box into a money machine. Right now that machine is producing $15 billion a year, of which almost $4 billion is profit.

If Google has been able to crush its search competition, it's not because it has perfected the art and science of Web searching.

Google is what the industry calls a "second-generation" search engine. First-generation engines like AltaVista found Web pages containing words that matched the user's search words. Google's innovation was to further rank a Web page by the other pages that link to it, on the somewhat shaky assumption that if a page is much-linked-to, it must be useful.

Charles Knight, an analyst who runs the AltSearchEngines Web site, said there is a plethora of good ideas for a third-generation search engine and no shortage of companies trying to do them.

Yahoo has a new feature that provides search-term suggestions that pop up as you start typing your query.

Microsoft search chief Brad Goldberg said, "We're working on ways to capture what the user is doing and carry it into the search experience." In theory, that could mean a Microsoft search on "Coke" would give an accountant financial information on Coca-Cola Corp. while a student writing a term paper on health and diet might get nutritional information.

Notwithstanding rumors of a forthcoming phone, Google hasn't yet established leadership in the mobile-phone search market.

Some search engines, like Hakia, the forthcoming Powerset and Sydney-based Lexxe, are trying to go beyond matching your exact query words -- they seek to get a sense of what you're looking for and pull up the best pages based on an understanding of their content. Some new search engines, including Mahalo and ChaCha, rely in part on human editors or guides to pre-cull the most relevant pages for some searches.

Google isn't waiting around to be AltaVistaed. Its smaller challengers can't hope to match the company's massive investments in computing infrastructure, said to include more than 450,000 servers. So be prepared to wait an annoying three seconds or so for results on some of the wanna-be search sites, compared with Google's blink-of-an-eye speed. And with $12 billion cash on hand, Google can buy hot companies that pose a threat.

But even $12 billion and the billions more Google could borrow wouldn't buy all the world's competition. In the end, Google has to have a better search to stay on top. Its army of software engineers is looking at every wrinkle in search, insists Google's research director, Peter Norvig. "I guess we're paranoid," he says.

#19

November 8th, 2007, 01:02 PM

JagNet

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Quote:

Originally Posted by chanchal

Still there will be no problem if all the back links come naturally.

Bots determine popularity among humans with back links.If people can make bots thinking in wrong way with artificial back links there is no way for bots to detect it.

The question is, how do you define the difference between a natural link and an artificial link?

If you email a website owner suggesting they link to your interesting content, is that link now artificial? Are natural links only those which the linked-to site has had no hand in?

Any method to determine relevance is always going to be open to manipulation. That's human nature - where there's money to be made, people will always try to get the upper hand.

The role of search engines now and in the future is to continuously develop their algorithms to detect "natural" versus "artificial" links. But no matter how sophisticated the algorithms, there will always be a grey area in between (see my question above) and it's that grey area where we, as SEOs, play. The role of search engines is not, however, to throw up their hands and give up on a key relevancy determinator on the basis that it can be open to manipulation.

#20

November 8th, 2007, 01:19 PM

fathom

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I really don't have a clue what point you are trying to make BIT:

Quote:

Originally Posted by chanchal

Still there will be no problem if all the back links come naturally.

Unfortunately, "natural" is a grey subject.

"OMG - what a great resource... HEY EVERYONE LOOK AT THIS & LINK"

To

We review this domain and provided a link

LINK - Offers this & that. Features this, that, and other stuff.

To

PSST... I'll give you money for ad space if I can have a LINK

To

I JUST BOUGHT THIS WEBSITE FOR $50,000 AND WILL 301 RE-DIRECT TO MY CURRENT DOMAIN.

To

I'll give each of your staff member 2 free hotel stays at my hotel for a LINK

Seriously - you and all search engine would be powerless to determine that these are "NATURAL" or"UNNATURAL"... so you caution is unwarranted.

Quote:

Originally Posted by chanchal

Bots determine popularity among humans with back links. If people can make bots thinking in wrong way with artificial back links there is no way for bots to detect it.

I am giving here a portion of Newsweek article published in Daily Herald.

OK so you say traditional search engines WON'T become obsolete ANYTIME SOON BECAUSE back links are the fairest way to determine the order of domains.

Short of search engines becoming the world's "BIG BROTHER" with algorithm inputs from tax returns, credit ratings, and bank/credit cards accounts of all your customers and supply chains... you ain't gonna have a better way to order ranks.

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#21

November 8th, 2007, 02:17 PM

chanchal

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Quote:

Unfortunately, "natural" is a grey subject.

I strongly agree with this point.Where there are no ways to detect natural links, how back links can be the way to measure true popularity of a web page?

Quote:

you ain't gonna have a better way to order ranks.

Quote:

Any method to determine relevance is always going to be open to manipulation. That's human nature - where there's money to be made, people will always try to get the upper hand.

Quote:

The role of search engines is not, however, to throw up their hands and give up on a key relevancy determinator on the basis that it can be open to manipulation.

It is also not a job for search engines to always hold a determinator that was on past.If that, the concept of back links wouldn't have come.Keyword density in contents and keyword in tags were the major determinators in first generation search engines.And now keyword stuffing is one of the way to get removed from search engines index.

Quote:

We more frequently fail to face the right problem than to fail to solve the problem we face

Whose quote i don't know.Isn't it a true one?

#22

November 8th, 2007, 02:43 PM

JagNet

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Quote:

Originally Posted by chanchal

Technology always have to be updated when it is going to be backdated.If not,we have to use Alta Vista(First Generation Search Engine) till now and forever.Page Rank algorithm that Larry Page gave have been several times modified.

It is also not a job for search engines to always hold a determinator that was on past.If that, the concept of back links wouldn't have come.Keyword density in contents and keyword in tags were the major determinators in first generation search engines.And now keyword stuffing is one of the way to get removed from search engines index.

Yes technology moves forward, and yes things change. But back links is still one of the best methods of determining relevance, and it will remain so for a long time to come.

Whilst technology and methods move forward, they don't abandon successful methods.

As I've already said, algorithms will alter, and the way in which links are judged for their relevancy will improve. BUT, back links are not going to be abandoned from the algorithms for a very very long time, if ever. They are the underlying principal behind the web.

#23

November 8th, 2007, 10:32 PM

chanchal

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Quote:

BUT, back links are not going to be abandoned from the algorithms for a very very long time, if ever. They are the underlying principal behind the web.

read about Google how they are handling other search engines threat.

Quote:

Some search engines, like Hakia, the forthcoming Powerset and Sydney-based Lexxe, are trying to go beyond matching your exact query words -- they seek to get a sense of what you're looking for and pull up the best pages based on an understanding of their content. Some new search engines, including Mahalo and ChaCha, rely in part on human editors or guides to pre-cull the most relevant pages for some searches.

Google isn't waiting around to be AltaVistaed. Its smaller challengers can't hope to match the company's massive investments in computing infrastructure, said to include more than 450,000 servers. So be prepared to wait an annoying three seconds or so for results on some of the wanna-be search sites, compared with Google's blink-of-an-eye speed. And with $12 billion cash on hand, Google can buy hot companies that pose a threat.

But even $12 billion and the billions more Google could borrow wouldn't buy all the world's competition. In the end, Google has to have a better search to stay on top. Its army of software engineers is looking at every wrinkle in search, insists Google's research director, Peter Norvig. "I guess we're paranoid," he says.

Have i ever said their will be no calculation on back links?
Long time means how long?
You said technology changes but you can not think a change of strategy.Read about third generation search engines.

Quote:

* First-generation search ranked sites based on page content - examples are early yahoo.com and Alta Vista.
* Second-generation relies on link analysis for ranking - so they take the structure of the Web into account. Examples are Google and Overture.
* Third-generation search technologies are designed to combine the scalability of existing internet search engines with new and improved relevancy models; they bring into the equation user preferences, collaboration, collective intelligence, a rich user experience, and many other specialized capabilities that make information more productive.

#24

November 8th, 2007, 10:53 PM

gazzahk

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I think the next two big change in SE technolgy will be with 'voice activated search'. This will come as we see increasing convergence between TV, computer, music, game console etc. People will want to be able to search the lot from the sofa and see the display on the TV. This will change the way we need to think of keyword and key phrase people speak differently than they type. I would also think this technolgy will favor richer companies over smaller operators as it will require far more complex websites.

The other big change will come when SE technolgy learns how to read flash and video files for content. Many bigger sites now use flash but they are not appearing in many organic searches other than specific company name because no text on their site. Watch the web change as soon as SE solve this problem.

Still my money would be on google to be the ones introducing or buying the technolgy that can do these things.

For google to loose its dominence I would think would require a technolgy breakthrough that allows similar levels of service without the massive infrastructure investment. Or for yahoo or msn to get the paptent on the new technolgy and this technolgy take off....

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#25

November 9th, 2007, 12:59 AM

JagNet

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Quote:

Originally Posted by chanchal

Have i ever said their will be no calculation on back links?

Yes: "In third generation search engine their will be no importance on backlink"

#26

November 9th, 2007, 02:05 AM

chanchal

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No importance doesn't mean no calculation.
Actually i should use less importance.
How could i understand it is hard for people to understand difference between "importance" and "calculation"?

#27

November 9th, 2007, 02:30 AM

JagNet

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Quote:

Originally Posted by chanchal

No importance doesn't mean no calculation.
Actually i should use less importance.
How could i understand it is hard for people to understand difference between "importance" and "calculation"?

I know, how foolish of me not to realise that "no importance" really meant "less importance", and that "Back Link is coming a obsolete factor" didn't mean it was going to be of no use in the algorithms.

You can't say one thing and then claim later on that you meant something else entirely.

#28

November 9th, 2007, 03:17 AM

chanchal

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