Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is creating a stir in the technology press with his plans to adapt Wikipedia’s “crowdsourcing” techniques to create a collaborative search engine — technically unnamed, but commonly referred to as Search Wikia. Details are sketchy, but presumably it will allow human beings to re-order search results so that the best stuff bubbles to the top — a la Digg.
Should Search Wikia overtake Google, it would completely rewrite the rules of online marketing. Right now, the web is the only medium in which you must create content which impresses machines — your creative ambtions held in check by the tyranny of Search Engine Optimization. With Search Wikia, no machines reviewing your content = no more SEO!
But will Search Wikia actually succeed? Why not, if Wikipedia has done so well?
As James Surowiecki explains in his book, “The Wisdom of Crowds“, the summation of small pieces of knowledge collectively held by a large enough group of people will nearly always converge on an objective truth. Hence, the success of Wikipedia. However, the key phrase here is “objective truth”. Wikipedia deals in truths. There is — theoretically, at least — an ideal answer to “What is a car?” But is there one true answer to “What is the correct ranking of the ten best pages about ‘car repair’?” Of course not. Your personal answer to this question depends upon what kind of car you have and what sort of repairs you’re interested in (and whether you’re looking for how-to advice or a repair shop).
Search Wikia will likely enjoy some degree of success, but just being “human powered” will not cause its search results to leap past Google in relevance. Given a problem with no perfect solution, the conclusions of a well thought out algorithm can easily compete with with the best efforts of human expertise (think Deep Blue).
So, continue to mind your term frequency and keyword densities, SEO will likely remain with us for a long time to come. And if you think about it, if human-powered and computer-powered search can provide pretty much equal results, why not go with the one in which the most ambitious company can work the system to get a leg up — surely that passion should count for something.
The other issue that worries SEO people is personalization of Google’s search results that will incorporate individual search histories into the display algorithm.
The tyranny of SEO? SEO is about writing for machines? SEO is an inhibition on ‘creativity’
No offense, but if you say this with a straight face, you have no business being online at all. Why don’t you just hang a big sign around your neck that says “We don’t get the web. We never will. We’re just waiting patiently while some kid with a laptop kills us and the dinosaurs we’re riding in on.”
I’ll tell you what, you can even use Flash to make the sign.
I’m a bit perplexed at what your argument is. Obviously, to determine the semantic value of a page, a search engine’s spider attempts to interpret it in roughly the way that a human would. Therefore the most fundamental type of Search Engine Optimization consists of making a page that is highly usable to humans.
Nonetheless, Google is ranking pages via a computer algorithm, not via an army of human readers, and therefore, it can be gamed. The “tyranny” comes from having to compete with sites that can always make use of one more trick than you do – creating an arms race of SEO “hacks”. The more “hacks” you have to work into your content to compete, the more your original message gets distorted. Hence the negative effect on creativity. The word “tyranny” was used as a bit of hyperbole – not entirely said “with a straight face”. Even so, how one makes the leap from that to “not getting the web” is a mystery to me.
While I\’d love to find out why you think what I said is such a mystery, I stand by my original statement – that anyone who seriously claims SEO is an impediment to creativity, or characterizes the web as a medium where you must \’impress machines\’ doesn\’t really understand what SEO is, and has no business whatsoever marketing on the web.
Absolutely there are some \”hacks\” in SEO, but its absolutely wrong to characterize the field as one where the person with the most alt tags wins. While true in 2001, SEO, at least good SEO, is now much more about audience targeting, content strategy, brand messaging, content development, and web site promotion.
What’s more, it is absolutely disingenuous to even suggest that this SEO ‘arms race’ impairs creativity. Web analytics, usability, and accessibility each place a much greater burden on creativity than SEO, and what’s more, any designer or agency whose creativity is unduly burdened by SEO guidelines likely doesn’t have the professional competence to be in web marketing to begin with.
Lastly, as far as gaming goes, Google is absolutely vulnerable to gaming, but no more or no less than Digg or Wikipedia. Well, maybe wikipedia…..
While we will clearly have to agree to disagree on several things here, I’m going to stand firmly by the idea that Search Engine Optimization is the art of, well, Optimizing for Search Engines.
“Audience targeting, content strategy, brand messaging, content development, and web site promotion” are all vital parts of good online marketing, but they are not Search Engine Optimization except in that good content is inherently good for search engine rankings.
OK, maybe “web site promotion” can be considered SEO, in that impressing people enough to link to your site builds your PageRank — but, still, it’s PageRank itself that is boosting your search ranking — hence, you’re still “impressing a machine”. That machine just happens to be impressed by how well you impress humans!
Look, I was just having a bit of fun exaggerating how excited someone might get if SEO were completely unnecessary. Nothing I wrote seriously expressed any real attitudes of myself or the agency. I’m sorry if this was misinterpreted.
My favorite SEO guys are a group of hard to find 20-somethings somewhere in Finland (or Norway?) Send them a big check, and watch your Page Rank go through the roof. There are SEO firms and then there are SEO firms.
SEO drives me nuts when I see lots of sites with multiple paragraphs of light grey text on the home page repeating the metadata such as site description, tags, etc.
I agree with Jeff that Jason is mixing online marketing at the meta-level with SEO, apples to oranges comparison.
The arms race has just started, wait until major corporations start funding click-fraud campaigns on a large scale.
Wikia is not going to do so well.