IAB blog

Jack Wallington

Google Options and WolframAlpha are two significant announcements from the search world this week… kinda.

Google Options

First up is Google Options which joins the ranks of images, maps, video, blogs and more channels for finding content. To clarify, I don’t think search is too complicated for consumers – consumers get it. What this post is referring to is the other side, the complexities that website owners now face.

While there is no point trying to fool the search engines, there are lots of legitimate technical improvements you can make to your website to enhance your natural search results. There are now so many techniques, it can be overwhelming for search marketers and developers, let alone people new to search, to even begin to understand. Good luck trying to get video content on your site to consistently rank highly.

The search engines do offer lots of help and of course there are agencies for larger companies, but what about the average Joe? Every company is so dependent on the search engines that they can’t ignore the ways search engines want your sites to be structured. For instance, to make the most of Google Options or Yahoo!’s Search Monkey you have to add another few lines of code to your site. It’s not hard, but it is another thing to do – another step to insuring you do best in search results.

It will be interesting to see if this trend continues or if the engines will find new ways to rank the best content. If you don’t want to wait, you can try your luck with the likes of Digg and StumbleUpon.

Wolfram Alpha

WolframAlpha is being labelled as a new search engine, but actually, it’s not a search engine at all. It’s a website with an internal search engine as its primary means of navigation that is used to calculate, offer information on stocks, shares, towns etc. As it says in the top right hand corner, WolframAlpha is a “Web resource”, an incredibly useful and usable website that places search at the forefront of accessing its content.

However, despite mislabelling as irritating as “web 2.0” from the media, it is an interesting shift in acknowledgement of the general public’s now inherent ability to see a box, type in it and expect to get something useful in return. The announcement should really be “here’s an amazing new website for people to use to access complicated and mind-bending information.”

All of the content and tools on WolframAlpha are produced and managed by professional employees of the company. Personally I see this as a much needed breath of fresh air from the barrage of Wiki sites that can’t guarantee the quality or accuracy of their content. Scientists and geeks the world over should be giggling with joy.

Complications

On the one hand we have search engines trying to index the world’s online content – a job they do amazingly well – and on the other we have a website that scraps all of the rubbish and presents a clear, professional way of displaying content. Both are in the same boat of figuring out how to deliver the most accurate and relevant information to the person tapping away at a keyboard.

What these two examples really highlight is the now oftentimes overwhelming technical barrier that keeps getting raised for website owners. Search engines introduce more tools for people to add to their sites, while sites like WolframAlpha highlight the mammoth task it actually takes to produce a professional site to rival the dirge of Wiki sites.

It’s a sign of the internet growing up, but is it also a sign of technical elitism?