Advances in the Search Engine Industry and the RustyBrick Perspective

Last Updated: 12/19/2003

The search engine industry is a rapid and dynamic market. Search engines are constantly updating and upgrading their algorithms and indexes to achieve the competitive edge. Search engine marketers spend several hours each day trying to stay up-to-date with these changes in order to provide their clients with better results. Most of these dynamic changes remain transparent to the average Web searcher, which happens to be part of the goal.

Most of the people reading this article are well aware of the Google Updates, also known as the Google Dance. The Google Dance is a time period when Google begins to update its index throughout the Google datacenters. Normally you will see a change in the search engine results page, where pages are added, removed, bumped up and bumped down. All search engines have this update process where the results change on a sequential basis. Each update is the search engines attempt to provide better quality results for the searcher. Better quality results for the searcher translate into a larger searcher base. Marketers look to advertise at search engines that have a large user base.

As covered by Danny Sullivan, search engines are trying to provide the most relevant results possible without the need to specify exactly what the searcher is looking for. For example, if you want to do a search for a picture of a map, the search engine should know that by typing in "map" to return pictures. Currently if you conduct a search in Google on "map" it returns Map Quest as the first result. The user then has to know enough about clicking on the "images" tab to specify that he or she wants map images. Google does tell you to try an image search if you type in "map picture" but Ask Jeeves actually gives you pictures as part of your results. And Teoma is one of these search technologies that is moving towards that area of search. Anticipating what the searcher really wants and making that transparent to the end user will prove to be the killer search engine application.

Other areas where you can expect advances to be made are in local search. When searching for a local specific keyword phrase, the search engines will try to provide the best possible matching results. How they do this is a combination of teaming up with the yellow page directories and using some sort of geo-filtering technology. Yahoo might come the closest to providing those results; but then again, you need a tab to get them in the format you are looking for.

With Microsoft racing to compete in the search engine market and with all the consolidation amongst Yahoo, Overture, Inktomi, and Alta Vista we can expect a lot of excitement in the upcoming year. Will MSN compete? The common analogy is the Netscape and Internet Explorer history. However, others still feel MSN is too far behind, and it is unlikely that they can catch up. Others believe that since Microsoft has such a control over the PC market that if they build the search into the operating system they can easily win over the market. Danny Sullivan argues with that by pointing out that search is already built into the Windows operating system, so why aren't people using it? I feel that Bill Gates will be focusing more on search and promoting it more in the operating system that people will be locked in to using MSN.

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