So I have been involved with web related work for 14 years now. I have always found it fascinating and the pace of growth has been amazing. My biggest problem with the web though, has always been to try and find the information or the tools that is relevant to what I'd like to do.
I can remember when Altavista was the search engine of choice for me for general stuff, then there was Ananzi to search for South African sites and Astalavista to find the not-so-legal type of serial and/or registration numbers or software cracks....yes, I was one of those during my early web years....
Luckily Google came along and really took it up a notch. Let's face it, suddenly Google made it so simple, no more searching and paging through pages and pages of useless information over your high speed - faster than a cheetah - dial up line, before you eventually found what you were looking for. There was a year or three of absolute search bliss, where it was so much easier to find exactly what you were looking for, and you thought to yourself, damn this is so much fun!
But like all good things, it wasn't meant to last...."they" or "someone", call them the "middlemen" would figure out a way to manipulate the useful information. The "middelmen" worked out how Google indexed web sites and they started to essentially flood the search system. By creating confusing links and confusing web sites where similar information to the original web site would be available, but with some important changes that benefits them, like Google AdSense advertising, affiliate tracking and some other information that would help them make money and confuse you. That way you would still basically be lead to where you wanted to go anyway, but with a detour, forcing you to pass through their "middleman" links. Frustrating isn't it??
Well Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's Live search have certainly improved their indexing over the last couple of years, crawling and ranking mechanisms, trying to stay ahead of the "middlemen".
There is a catch though...there's always a catch....
As site owners/developers/webmasters and administrators, we have a lot more responsibilities to make sure our websites are ranked and displayed correctly in search engines, than was previously the case....no longer can you get away with a "build it, submit it and they will come". No, these days we have to build our site a certain way, to certain specifications, make sure people link to us, tell Google what the links and images are, have titles that is a certain length, meta tags that ....etc etc...the list goes on...
In my next entry I'll explain some of these specifications, how you can change your web site to accommodate the search engine specifications, tools that you can use to make SEO(search engine optimization) easier, so that in the end you can have a higher search engine ranking and hopefully be listed above the "middleman" sites that flood the search engines. If we all build our web sites to these specifications, we should all benefit by finding the relevant information faster....easier.
Who knows maybe we can have another few years of Internet search engine bliss....
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