What Should You Expect From a Search Engine?

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Maybe the question is, why should you expect anything? Bing-Duane-ForresterThe truth is that inside an engine is a high traffic area. I spent nearly six years representing a search engine in the SEO industry and I can tell you that contrary to many search engine optimization conspiracy theories, neither Bing nor Google have any plans to harm businesses. However, both have profit motives just like you. Updates happen because…pause for drum roll… something undesirable is happening! What drives search engines? Research suggests that WordPress powers about 25 percent of World Wide Web sites. More and more websites are using WordPress, but of those that do, they are not “higher traffic” sites. OK, that makes sense – WordPress primarily powers blogs, we can loosely infer. Say, for example, someone has created a WordPress plugin that manages ads across a quarter of the internet. And this WordPress plugin placed the ads above the content of a page.

Obviously, at the individual level, this is a recipe for increasing income. But taken across the entire user base, if even a fraction of WordPress sites are adopting the plugin, it results in a worrying trend. If the engine is judged by users on the quality of the experience the user sees after clicking on a result, this puts the engine in a difficult position. Do you police for quality or "throw it over the fence" and say it's not your problem? But see, it 's the engine problem. Google faces ever-increasing competition. A competition that is winning, albeit slowly, and in some ways seeking to change the game. Bing faces a similar problem on the other side of the coin: satisfying searchers enough to convert them. Either way, the common ground makes seekers happy. Read this again, as it is a critical and often overlooked point. Engines don't exist to satisfy a business. They exist to satisfy researchers. More subtly, they exist to develop revenue, to source data, and to feed that data into interdependent systems in the companies that operate them. When do search engines update? So when buy mass sms someone creates a popular plugin for WordPress, again, and it shows a trend that goes against the goal of satisfied searchers, the engines act. In this example, Google gave us the layout algorithm in 2012.

On the Bing side of the graph, although updates aren't named or made public, they do happen. Indeed, they happen frequently. So often, in fact, that it just doesn't make sense to announce everything. It's important to note here that, in many cases, updates aren't about "fixing something that's broken." Updates are a move from one state to a more advanced state. all-about-usefulness-today-and-going-forward-duane-forrester-400It may be a matter of perspective, but if you ask me about links again today, I'd say your perspective is wrong. Things change over time, and with thousands of smart people looking to improve a product daily, things tend to change. At the scale at which these projects operate, this may take time to manifest, but I have seen the changes at Bing firsthand. If you think of Google as a highway, you will occasionally encounter a speed bump. It can be shocking. Everything goes well, then suddenly WHAM! you press an update. Bing, on the other hand, takes a different approach. The road surface in Bing is slightly less smooth overall, but once you get up to it you don't notice the slight irregularities in the surface. It feels smoother. That's not to say things aren't happening, just that your perception is that it's smoother.