| Just in the past 3 weeks the Search Engines changed
their algorithms.
Here's a short recap of what happened. Yahoo! dropped Google as
it's
backend search engine and went out on it's own again. This means
that
people who weren't showing up highly in Yahoo! are now showing up
more
highly in their respective categories.
On the flip side though, the websites that were showing up highly
in
Google, for example mine www.stephaniecota.com are now ranking very
low. Google is trying to make it "fair" to all web players
and so the
sites or webpages that don't rank very high due to lack of substantial
content, or importance in their category or content, are now ranking
higher than many websites that have put in the extra search engine
efforts. This has infuriated many many people and so Google has
lost
some popularity recently, but their market position is still quite
strong.
That's where Yahoo! And Google are now battling it out.
As if that's not enough, MicroSoft also known as MSN, is writing
a new
search engine that will be based on personalization and keyword
searches. For example, I am a web developer and am constantly
searching for technical items where as you may be searching for
book
publishing items. Their search engine is going to work off of a
form
of articifical intelligence that would know your preferences and
suggest categories, and search matches to you. It is quite the
oppossite of Google, where you simply rummage around until you find
what you are looking for.
There are also several search engine projects occuring that are
indexing the entire web by clusters and categories. For example
your
websites would be clustered under a catagory relevant to your specific
content and what would make sense to the computer robot who is looking.
This throws out the whole keyword relevancy metaphore that many
of us work under right now.
The search engine companies are trying to stay competitive and so
are
constantly undermining one another and making the field of web
development and SEO very unpredictable, long and challenging. What
worked even 6 months ago isn't all that successful now. There used
to
be known constants that we could work from, but now in the last
month
or so due to MicroSoft wanting to monopolize the market, Yahoo!
wanting to regain it's former position, and Google wanting to still
rule to SEO market, they are throwing that all away. To add to that,
you've got a bunch of smaller companies like Overture that are
challenging and pushing the envelope in order to get themselves
a
piece of the pie and market share.
We are also looking at more paying services and will have to see
if
SEO becomes solely commodified or if the true spirit of the web
and
Internet remains in place.
Page last updated 1/28/2004
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