The Webmaster Place

I read in the recent issue of the Trafficology print newsletter that “most web searchers find Google to be less-and-less helpful every day”. People have been saying “Google AdSense is dead” lately. That is an exageration but there are serious concerns about AdSense. But Google’s search engine itself becoming less helpful? How could anyone say that about the #1 search engine by far?

Well, they said it and after reading it I agree. Basically they said people are leaving the search engines in favor of social bookmarking sites like Technorati or Del.icio.us. This makes sense — Google was the first to use the idea that links to a page prove that it is a relevent page. Social bookmarking is similar, but just the next step.

Now that spammers and link farms have destroyed the original Google model of relevent linking Google and other major search engines have been working hard to stay ahead of the game. Too hard. The answer is in going back to what humans are picking, and the social bookmarking sites are doing that. For now at least they are mostly spam free so Google will have to create their own social bookmarking site or buy one to keep up. I am betting on the latter since they have so much money. If they don’t do either they are going to be in trouble.

For those of us who rely on search engine traffic, we need to get into these social bookmarking sites ASAP.

You heard it here first.

Add to: | del.icio.us | digg | Furl | Reddit | YahooMyWeb |

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Search engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.