| Introduction
Page 10
Search
Engines Deserve Respect
Search
engines are big business. The stats show that people are very dependent
on search engines to find information or entertainment. About 85%
of Web users use search engines to find new Web sites. They even
use them to find Web sites they’ve been to many times before.
Bad memory? Addiction? Well, no one has actually studied that yet
There are
very few people who haven’t used a search engine, but rest
assured that they will learn and become very sophisticated in using
it. Search engines continue to improve and become more user-friendly
in design. Even the uneducated and elderly will find their lives
transformed by a program that finds everything they want. That’s
the goal of all good search engines, to locate things for searchers.
The more
educated we are, the more reliant we become on the efficiency and
omnipotence of search engines to help us make decisions and get
our work done quicker. They’ve become extensions of our constant
search for dollar value and for our intellectual ambitions and learning
needs. To be unable to use a search engine is certainly a limiting
factor for any career and personal development plan. Despite their
shortcomings, search engines are the best personal assistant people
can afford today.
Stats show
that most online purchases begin with a visit to a search engine
or directory and these visitors tend to spend more at the sites
they visit. It’s still not easy to convert them to into real
money spending customers, but the end dollar value can be staggering
for some companies.
There are
even things called personal bots. These robots with wanderlust roam
the web on their own searching for the information and products
their owners seek. They can collect information and even complete
transactions automatically based on the owner’s instructions,
which are written into the bots’ software. It’s a machine
driven, automated procedure that search engines and personal bots
follow. We owe it to ourselves as marketers, writers and designers
to understand this digital realm of bots.
Even though
Google is powering more and more enterprise level search services
such as Intranets and extranets, they will have unique algorithms
for those search indexes. With an understanding of the basics of
how that database of documents is organized, you’ll be able
to make your documents more accessible and effective in meeting
their information needs.
There
is a huge body of information contained in documents behind computer
firewalls. This has been called the invisible web. It may be your
job to make some or all of this information publicly available.
Online publishers must make some of their articles and research
available to search engines too. They must be strategic in which
documents are made available. Publishers now want users to pay for
current and archived content, yet they must make some material indexable
to Web search engines in order to acquire traffic. That can be a
difficult job and it’s faught with risk since search engines
don’t want their users baited with a seemingly free resource
only to be faced with a pay per subscription page. But this is the
Web as it is right now. There are a lot of opportunities and tasks
to face.
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