Google search is good - the best available. I use it all the time, but recently three articles set me thinking about the future of search and the level of innovation in search accuracy.

1. On September 7, the Los Angeles Times published an interview with Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience. In the interview she said: “I think there will be a continued focus on innovation, particularly in search. Search is an unsolved problem. We have a good 90 to 95% of the solution, but there is a lot to go in the remaining 10%.”
2. In a recent post, Aaron Wall interviewed Quintura Search CEO, Yakov Sadchikov. In answer to one question Yakov commented: “General search is mostly locked up with Google.”
3. And according to Search Engine Roundtable, the top 2,500 bloggers have > 1000 links.

I always remember, as a school boy being told about Philipp von Jolly, a German mathematician and physicist, who advised Max Plank in 1878 not to go into physics, saying, “in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes.” Obviously in the light of all the discoveries in the last 125 years, a very silly thing to have said.

I suspect that Marissa Meyer realized that saying 90% of search is already “sown up” was also a rather daft thing to say too. A few days later, on September 10th she wrote an article for the Official Google Blog in which she stated: “Today, we have a 90% solution: I could answer all of my unanswered Saturday questions, not ideally or easily, but I could get it done with today’s search tool…….. However, that remaining 10% of the problem really represents 90% (in fact, more than 90%) of the work.” (My emphasis added). Perhaps that is a way of really saying that Google only has 5 - 10% of the solution?

Marissa’s article in the Google Blog contains lots of examples about why the Google search engine is so clever - and it is. The trouble is, there are so many flaws in the results I see every day. It seems that despite the many clever semantic and data driven analyses that Google now employs, it is fundamentally based on a bedrock of on-page word analysis and links information.

It is the reliance on links as a factor in determining ranking that I have a problem with. Take Web page A. It it contains much useful and unique information but finds itself in a competitive market, competing against many other Web sites. It garners a few back links from people who happen upon it, but way fewer than Web page B. We page B also contains some useful information, but perhaps not as much as Web page A and certainly not as unique, but Web page B has found ways of generating links. Nothing unseemly like buying links or anything else that would upset Google, but they have been able to get themselves included in hundreds of directories, they found the secret of getting into DMOZ and dropped nearly 300 bucks to be added to the Yahoo! directory. Web site B has a few friends in th DIGG and Stumbleupon communities, and so that has helped too. Basically they have found a few cool tricks and spent some money. Now in this scenario I suspect that Web page B would rank significantly higher than Web page A and as such Google is doing a disservice to those searching for the unique and useful information.

In the world of blogging it is natural to link to Web pages containing useful information. For most run-of-the-mill Web sites that provide useful information in, often competitve markets, linking to other sites in not normal behavior. Academia thrives on referencing the world of other academics. The world of industry and small business does not.

Have you ever searched for a hotel on Google? Say you know which hotel you are going to stay at and you want to look at the hotel site to find out more information about the swimming pool or when the bar closes. In my experience, the likelihood is that long before the actual hotel’s Web site is listed, you will find pages of Web sites that include very basic information about the hotel you are looking for (such as travel sites) but they assiduously avoid providing a link to the actual hotel.

Have you ever searched for a plumber in your local small city? If you search for plumber wasilla you get 31,800 hits. I didn’t look at them too carefully, but I bet that you have to go through many directories and sites that have cunningly created pages with every city in the USA included in them, before you arrive at an actual plumber in Wasilla.

Why does Google place any reliance on DMOZ? The directory is out of date and there have been allegations of corruption. The only reason people are so keen to be listed there is because they believe the back links are valuable.

There is clearly a lot of search innovation going on, but a lot of it is based on the ‘mashup’ mentality, that may create interesting niche products, but will not create breakthrough innovations. It is going to be difficult to fight against the giant (), but deciding that Google has ‘locked’ up search will result in less competition and search innovation will slow, not to mention the possibility that search may start to cost money. Who remembers when Microsoft Windows used to be free?

Filed under: SEO by Martyn Whittaker