I was really lucky to be able to gain access to the Chinwag ‘Search is Dead. Long live search.’ event held in Soho, London last week.
The event was based around the statement ‘search is dead’ – and all the connotations that this statement presented. I believe that the main topic that the discussion brought up was the fact that search is certainly not dead but it is changing, and the way people search is changing too.
With the introduction of real time conversational platforms such as Twitter, we are able to find out what’s going on right now. It’s hard to believe that one single online entity such as Twitter can make such a huge difference to the way we engage in digital conversation but it has. Twitter is massive.
Google have started to index Twitters real time updates once every 6 minutes down from once every 6 days, showing the true growth of microblogging and how Google themselves are starting to place more weighting and importance on their existence. With the pending implementation of Google Caffeine on the horizon, search is about to get a whole lot different; with more importance being placed on links which have the most activity, rather than links just existing is going to change the way companys engage in SEO.
Although i believe that link building will still have an effect on the search rankings, Caffeine will be placing more importance on those links which experience lots of user interaction; therefore making social media marketing an important area for web based companies wishing to gain more presence. The more conversations online using and sharing your links, the higher those links will rank you.
One person pointed something very interesting out though. While it’s easy to compare Twitter with Google in terms of searching for information in the same way you would with a search engine, real time conversational platforms such as Twitter are more suited to be branded ‘discovery engines’ rather than a substitute to a search engine just because it’s live.
When something newsworthy occurs, people tweet about it because its breaking news. The more people who tweet about it, the higher it climbs on trending topics and therefore bringing it to peoples attention. As we speak, i checked out the trending topics and find ‘Chealsea’ there – i click on it and find that after 45 minutes their game vs Liverpool is still 0 – 0.
This information has been discovered through people talking about it and therefore i’ve discovered this information without searching for it.
The main thing that fired off heated debate was that Twitter will replace Google’s ’outdated’ design with it’s real time search capabilities – making search obsolete. I believe this is simply not the case and many others would agree too. The focus should be on adapting to the way people search and optimising pages for enhanced search indexing rather than trying to replace search all together.
Ciaran Norris, a panel member commented by bringing up mobile search as an emerging search behaviour. People search for different things on the go using different terms as they would if they were at a desktop – something which has started to be embraced through the use of the iPhone clocking your location for map searches and apps from the app store which offer location based services.
Overall a highly valuable experience, learned a whole lot about search and its future – if i tried to get it all down here i’d be here for hours and the post would run on more than it has now. Was fascinating to listen to what the panel members had to say, and was really quite inspirational too.
