Google’s New Infinite Search Space – Revealed

With its much publicized recent algorithm changes, Google continues to battle to protect the quality of the search results it provides from the actions of those who seek to gain an unfair commercial edge. Filtering pages that provide little in the way of informational content – with the goal of collecting leads or pointing visitors to products or services that may be purchased – has long fuelled the continual reworking of the algorithm.

It is a battle that has waged ever since the internet began and one in which the advantage has swung one way and then the other. In the early days, there were occasions when the SERPS (search engine results pages) were simply swamped with junk pages, something that is less and less likely to happen as the search algorithm is refined.

The business of SEO (search engine optimization) is all about helping organisations to obtain first page rankings, of course. But, according to Google, there is a fine line between doing this ethically and deliberately seeking to unfairly manipulate the SERPS; a practice that has become known as search engine spam. In this article, I would like to consider the future of the search space and how SEO, as a business, is likely to evolve.

To begin, I would like to recount a little story. It is a true story of how I came to realise that Google has the view that it is possible to provide a personal search experience by creating what is, effectively, an infinite search space.

The realization came to me as a result of conducting a search on a term that is related to my main site. As I was scanning the first page of Google, I noticed something strange: the company I had previously worked at was on page one for that term. At first, I did not understand the significance of that result. I simply thought that my old colleague, the marketing manager, had done a particularly good job with SEO.

As I was about to email him to congratulate him on this excellent result, I noticed that I was still logged in to my Google Gmail account – and that’s when the penny dropped! I immediately logged out and tried the search again. As I suspected, that company was not to be found in the top ten pages for that particular term.

Further investigation led to me to the conclusion that the reason Google had manipulated (personalised) the ranking of that page in my results was that I happen to follow that company on Twitter. This was the first empirical evidence I came across that Google is in the process of building a search engine with an infinite search space that is personalized for individuals based on their social preferences.

The understanding that social preferences hold the power to alter the search experience led me to take social sites much more seriously. After that, needless to say, I got much more serious with building my Twitter and Facebook followings. For anyone looking to obtain good rankings in the SERPS, working with social sites has become much more important, in my opinion, than that old mainstay of SEO, obtaining backlinks.

Quite simply, if you are not paying attention to the major social sites, you are in danger of becoming a dinosaur and we all know what happened to them. This means that SEO must also evolve to remain viable as a business concept. But, if you think about the above, you will come to realise that the game has changed significantly with the social dimension becoming a major factor in the search algorithm.

With the extra dimension that social signals can provide, we truly have the capacity to produce an infinite search space. Previously, there was only one search space; now there are as many as there are searchers. Each space is being continually honed by the actions of the individual searcher who chooses to ‘like’, ‘follow’ and ‘share’ various sites and interests.

Since the watchword of the modern Google is ‘relevance’, the quality of search results can become increasingly relevant – to the individual – as the search engine continually personalises the search experience based on known social factors. This is the main reason, in my opinion, why Google began Google+ and the +1 facility. It hopes this will become the new voting system that will ultimately displace backlinks as the major factor in search ranking.

In the meantime, whilst Google+ struggles to make ground against the more popular social sites that already have the market, Google will continue to pay attention to Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin (and other major social sites) as primary sources for search results personalisation.

Of course, there will be those who will argue that non of this makes any difference because, in order for Google to provide a unique search experience, you have to be logged into their site. This is true, but it is also true that with Gmail, Adsense, Adwords, Webmaster Tools, Google+ and a whole host of other services provided by the company, more and more of us are going to be doing just that in the future.

Article by Will Edwards of www.Monify.Me

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