search engines google

Search Engine Optimisation is must for any business that wishes to stay above competition when it comes to search results, i.e. being ranked higher on the page. That’s today’s state of play, but what about in 2-3 years time? Many say that social networks will play a much greater part in ranking how website’s appear in search engines.

Social Graph Based Search

This is something I have been thinking about for a while now and just recently Robert Scoble (Technical evangelist) has sparked a bit of a controversy with his blog post Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years. In non-geeks talk this would read "Why Social Networks are going to change how we search for content on the internet". I think you could also class this as Web 3.0 search?

Using rich knowledge from Social Networks or what Robert Scoble describes as "Social Behaviours" can be used to build a powerful search engine that produces quality results over traditional algorithm based.

Think of it as a word of mouth search engine, real human elements recommending website’s.

Video

The video’s last over 30 minutes in total, but I think it’s well worth a watch, here is a taster of topics mention.

  • Quick explanation on how search engines such as Google currently work.
  • How these traditional search engines are reverse engineered by SEO, manipulated
  • Social Networks Search or Social Graph Based Search as Robert calls it, couldn’t be manipulated in the same manner.
  • Robert explains that website’s such as Techmeme and Mahalo offer a glance in to the future.
  • How Techmeme and Mahalo works, a foundation of trust between authorities blogs and users.
  • Facebook could become a Search Engine or be apart of it.
  • How Google will miss the boat like Microsoft and Yahoo did when Google came number one for search
  • Yahoo could make a come back because of its existing social network portfolio. (Delicious, Flickr etc) 

Part I of Social Graph Based Search. 14:41 minutes.
Part II of Social Graph Based Search. 15 minutes.
And a bonus round III. 6 minutes.

Controversy

But not everyone agrees with Robert…

I Used to Respect Robert Scoble’s Opinion…

Robert Scoble Checks Into Facebook Hotel: TechMeme, Mahalo Get Rooms Too
why mahalo, techmeme, and facebook will never replace google

Facebook Killing Google? Um, No

Mahalo, Techmeme, Facebook, Google, Scoble

 

What do you think?