Search 3.0: Real Time Search Poses Real Time Challenge for Engines
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Written By Noah Mallin | April 21, 2009 | Share This
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When things start happening quickly, it can be tough to control results. It’s one thing to drive Germany’s legendary Nurburgring racetrack in a dimed-out Olds Cutlass at 85 MPH, but quite a bit more challenging when you’re behind the wheel of a Formula One car doing 150-plus.
Accelerating the speed at which search results are indexed and served up by search engines similarly challenges the ability to respond to erroneous or purposely malicious results. I posted earlier about Google News being the test bed for Google’s future search offerings, it’s only fitting that the fastest index part of the Googleverse should also be a testing ground for future Black Hat trickery.
A good example of this was found by Jason Lee Miller who described how unsavory characters have used Google Trends to figure out what stories were getting views during the day and creating targeted websites to catch unwary searchers. On one Google news search he ran the top 5 results were spam sites. He explains it this way:
“Part of the appeal of Twitter to many people is the platform’s ability to provide real-time information; the live Web works remarkably well there so far because Twitter’s set up isn’t very conducive to spam (yet). At least Twitter has to some extent control over accounts.
Google, on the other hand, cannot control for content appearing on the Web at large, and historically its famous algorithm performed better than any other at weeding out spammy webpages and malicious results. Unfortunately, that was a version of the Web that was more static. The live Web presents entirely new challenges manifesting as the first major weakness the search engine has faced.”
In other words, Search 3.0 (which encompasses the Live Web) moves too quickly for Google’s current algorithm to weed out the bad stuff as consistently as it did in the past. This begs the question – does Google have to overhaul their algorithm radically to keep up (turn their Cutlass into a Ferrari) and is this even possible? More importantly, am I a fool for stating as I have that the next big changes in search engine results will be presentational rather than algorithmical?
Well, fool though I may be, I believe that the changes in the way results are being shown, and the type of results that are likely to be surfaced in the future, could very well act as a more effective counterbalance to the spam horde than fiddling with the algorithm.
After all, these Black Hats are basically gaming one field in search results. If those results were juxtaposed with Twitter search results and other real time social media conversations it would become easier to distinguish the real from the fake. That being said it is possible to seed fake links and conversations across search and social media simultaneously but its difficult compared to spoofing the results on only one platform. More to the point, people talk back on social media so there would quickly be backlash to the spam that would be readily visible on the results page.
The bottom line is that Search 3.0 is presenting a lot of challenges and opportunities for search engines, marketers and users.
Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here or check out Reprise Media folks on Twitter.
Topics: Click Fraud, ECommerce, Google, Publishing, SEO, Search 3.0, Search: News, Social Media, Technology, Twitter |