Page 3 - Dark Future For traditional Search engines

At no point in this discussion did I ever say that back links were the only way to determine relevancy. If you look at the comment of mine that you quoted, I said that it is "one of the best methods of determining relevance".

So, let's look at the Newsweek article in more detail. First of all, it's quite obviously written with a view to bash Google. Terms like "bad result for Google", "simple search", "childlike homepage" set the tone.

Hardly surprising given that search was it's original function, and continues to be its most used offering.

I would imagine that Google would be the first to agree with that. Talk about stating the obvious.

So, after only 12 years, of which Google has been the leading search engine for 7, is it really appropriate to suggest that "history shows how quickly search leaders can lose their way". We could just as easily say that history shows how difficult it is for new search engines to make an impact.

When viewing the web as a whole, that's actually a pretty safe assumption.

I could have sworn that Google Suggest has been around for a lot longer.

Great, so for some searches you get results based on what other people think might be most relevant for you. Given that ~25% of searches performed are brand new (ie, have never been searched for before), and that the number of searches made vastly outweighs the number of searches for which human editors have been involved, it's hardly going to come as a surprise that this is not a giant-toppling model for new search engines.

At last the article says something sensible. Google is not standing still. So whilst new search engines continue to be developed, unless they come up with a ground breaking (and scalable) new solution, as Google did in 1998, they cannot hope to match, let alone overtake Google.

And let's look at the stock markets - Google stock continues to rise inexorably. If there was any indication that Google was about to lose out in the search engine wars any time soon we'd soon see indications of this in the stock price.



It's a shoddy piece of journalism, designed to attract attention by giant bashing, but without any real evidence to back it up. It makes gross assumptions and generalisations, and twists historical facts to suit its own purposes. Finally, in the second to last paragraph it turns around, contradicts itself, and says that actually, it's unlikely Google will be overtaken. Overall it leaves me thinking, what exactly is the purpose of the article aside from promoting a few new search engines? The writer got paid, the new search engines got a little exposure, and the world moved on without batting an eyelid.

I suspect backlinks are going to be the primary focus of search engines for quite a while yet. They might be susceptible to manipulation, but every idea I seem to hear about sounds a far worse solution.