The End of Search As We Know It

Search is changing the way we think about the web.  It’s also changing how we perceive the organic results that we see today.  In the not-so-distant future, SEO will cease to exist, at least it won’t exist as we know it today.

The fundamentals of how search engines like Google display search results are shifting.  With the creation of Universal Search last year, Google opened up Pandora’s Box in the search world.  Prior to then, everything was fairly predictable.  You execute a search, the results show up from top to bottom in order of the most relevant web sites.  With Universal Search, Google began to incorporate Video results, Product results, Book results, News results, and Social Media results, to name a few.  This action paved the way for what we believe will be the next phase in search engine evolution: Personal results.

You are already beginning to see this on search engines like Amazon.com’s A9 and within Google itself if you are logged into your Google Account when you execute your search.  Today, you’ll occasionally see Local search come into play when Google knows where you are located.  But let’s take that to the next level.  Personal results will take everything that a search engine knows about you (not just your location) and tweak the algorithm ever so slightly so that items/pages are very specifically relevant to you and you only. This means that when you execute a search for “holiday gifts”, you will get a list of items/pages that are very uniquely suited to you and only you. Everyone else, however, will get an entirely different result set.

Now think about that from the standpoint of a company like G4 Commerce.  We optimize web sites for a living.  Our clients pay us to get them to the front page of Google for their important keywords.  How will we possibly do that for each of the millions of users of Google each day?  It’s a good thing we are multi-talented