Web 2.0 Search: Mind Meets mathsMunaz Anjum
Leading Internet search engines have begun incorporating social media tools to meet the nicheneeds of the 'long tail' market
Move over SEO,SMOhas arrived. With Internet users contributing, tagging and ranking content
in Web 2.0, search engines likeGoogle, Yahoo, MSN and Altavista have been compelled to re-engineer theiralgorithms to incorporate social media search. As a result,search engine
optimization(SEO) is giving way to social media optimization (SMO).
Before the advent of Web 2.0, Internet users depended heavily on search engines that crawledthe web, looked for ‘meta tags’ and threw up results on the basis of ‘key words’ ‘key phrases’and in-bound and out-bound ‘links’. This logic gave rise to the burgeoning business of stuffing websites with ‘key words’ and‘incestuous link-exchange’ alliances with a view to ensuring a good search engine result page.Web 2.0 has changed all this. With Internet users starting to play key role in generating and ranking content, websites thatdrew power from stuffedkeywordsbecame ‘untouchable’. Search engines were quick to detectthis fraudulent way of websites to gain top page rankings and started treating them as ‘spam’. After all, the prime role of search engines is to meet the information needs of Internet users.Realizing that ‘spamming’ was becoming a scourge of theInternet, search engines werecompelled to study the behaviour patterns of users.A close study of user behaviour prompted leading search engines to reformulate theiralgorithms to incorporate what is known as ‘semantic’ search. The search behaviour of usershas become the determining factor for deciding the algorithms of most of the popular searchengines.Many global players are trying to incorporatesocial searchin their search tools to drive hightraffic. For instance, Yahoo's My Web 2.0social search service looks at search through an
entirely new lens.Common to all Web searchtoday is emphasis on ‘link analysis’: the more incoming links to a
given site, the greater its weight insearch results. However, Yahoo's social search has shiftedthe emphasis to the opinions of a searcher's friends and colleagues from the links of other Webpublishers. Similarly, MSN too plans to unveil its social search tool in near future.The popular Wikipedia, which has almost caused the death for Encyclopedia, too is planning tocome up with a search engine, ‘wikia search’, that follows the semantic map of user’sbehaviour.In the face of rising social searches, what then brings traffic to a website is the focus onlong tail keywords, popular tags, and an in-depth research of the behavior of social sites.
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