by John C. Dvorak

It's called SEO—search engine optimization—and it's pretty much all
anyone working with Web sites ever talks about nowadays. You may
think it consists of ways to trick the search engines, Google in
particular, into giving you higher than usual page rankings. But in
fact, it centers around the idea that Google sucks so much that
companies think they need to use SEO to get the results they deserve.


By reverse-engineering the way Google operates, SEO experts can see
how the process works. From a user's perspective, once you learn how
Google does what it does, it's a miracle that you ever get the right
results. And from my experience, the right results in many
circumstances are nearly impossible to obtain—and may never be
obtainable in the future.

Let's look at some of the problems that have developed over the years.

Inability to identify a home site. All the search engines have this
habit, but often it is laughable. You'd think that if I were looking
for Art Jenkins, and Art Jenkins had a Web site named Artjenkins.com,
search engines would list that first, right? Most often this page is
never listed anywhere.

Too much commerce, not enough information. There seems to be an
underlying belief, especially at Google, that the only reason you go
online is to buy something. People merely looking for information are
a nuisance. This is made apparent anytime you look for information
about a popular product. All you find are sites trying to sell you
the product. Hey, here's a challenge: Ask Google to find you a site
that honestly compares cell-phone plans and tells you which is best.
Try it! All you get are thousands of sites with fake comparisons
promoting something they are selling.

What's particularly bad about this is that the few honest sites
trying to present information without SEO and all the trickery needed
to get attention are put out of business; nobody ever finds those
sites. The site you are pointed to should be the best site, not a
mediocre popular site. This is the biggest flaw with page ranking.

Parked sites. Have you ever gone to look for something and found what
seems like the perfect site near the top of the Google results? You
click on it only to find one of those fake "parked" sites, where
people park domain names, pack them with links to other sites, and
hope for random clicks that pay them 10 cents each. How does page
ranking, if it works, ever manage to give these bogus sites a high
number?

Unrepeatable search results. Ever run a search a week later and get
completely different results? In the end, you have to use the search
history and hope you can find it. Can things change so drastically
day-to-day that the search results vary to an extreme month-to-month?
This is compounded by the weird results you get when you are logged
in to Google. These are somehow customized for you? In what way?

Google sign-in changes a query's results to an extreme with no
discernible benefit. Often two people are on a call trying to discuss
something and both will try finding something online. The
conversation often goes like this: "Here it is, I found it. Type in
the search term 'ABCD Fix' and it's the fourth result listed." "I
don't see it. The fourth one down is a pill company." "You typed in
ABCD Fix, right?" "Yeah." This goes on for a while until you realize
that one of the two people is logged into Google.

The solution to this entire mess, which is slowly worsening, is
to "wikify" search results somehow without overdoing it. Yahoo! had a
good idea when its search engine was actually a directory with
segments "owned" by communities of experts. These people could
isolate the best of breed, something Google has never managed to do.
The basis for Google page-ranking is to equate popularity with
quality, and once you look at the information developed by SEO
experts, you learn that this strategy barely works.

We have to suffer until something better comes along, but there is at
least one crucial fix that could be easily implemented: user
flagging. Parked sites, for instance, could be flagged the way you
flag spam on a message board or a miscategorized post on craigslist.
The risk here is that creeps trying to shut down a specific site
could swamp Google with false flags, so maintaining integrity would
be difficult. People with their own agendas have already infiltrated
and controlled aspects of craigslist and Wikipedia, unfortunately. On
Wikipedia, for example, a group pushing the global-warming agenda
prevents almost any post with contrary data or opinions, no matter
how minor the point.

One suggestion floating around involves the semantic Web, which
anticipates even more SEO tricks—and requires a certain level of
honesty that can never be maintained. I suggest rethinking the basic
organization of the Web itself, using the Google News concept. In
other words, compartmentalize the Web to an extreme. Tagging might
help. But you should be able just to search through a subsegment and
check a box that eliminates merchants with faux-informational sites.

And speaking of check boxes, over the years there have been numerous
attempts at creating an advanced search mechanism utilizing check
boxes and a question-and-response AI network. You'd think that idea
would have gotten further than it has. Hopefully, someone will
conceptualize something new that works better than what we have
today. The situation is just deteriorating too fast.

Courtesy- http://www.pcmag.com/