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Yes, Google Search does get better the more people use it. There are three reasons: 1) The actual search gets more signal. Literally from activity on the sear
by frabcus 12y ago
Yes, Google Search does get better the more people use it.
There are three reasons:
1) The actual search gets more signal. Literally from activity on the search engine, but also from many other places Google gets data.
2) The more popular Google is as a traffic source, the more people pay attention to getting that traffic. Website owners put effort into specifically making Google search results good.
Some of that is bad SEO, but a lot of SEO (i.e. making good websites) delivers lots of value, and it is basically all Google-targeted right now.
As a very simple (negative!) example - think of sites with a robots.txt that allows only a small number of search engines.
3) Advertising. Google's marketplace for ads gets better the more people use it, on both sides of the two sided market. Why's this matter? Because it generates money, more effectively than any competitor. And they use that money to buy engineers to improve the search experience (and, indeed, the ad relevance experience!)
To me, that's a very clear network effect.
- magicalist 12y ago> The more popular Google is as a traffic source, the more people pay attention to getting that traffic. Website owners put effort into specifically making Google search results good I see this a lot and while it's true, it's also true that it's not all that difficult to keep the googlebot happy, you'd still be trying to keep crawlers happy if Google wasn't the most popular search engine, and, in fact, what you have to do for the google crawler is basically exactly the same as what you have to do for everyone else[1] (and not in the sense that everyone else just follows Google's lead in what they require because it's all pretty straightforward and generic advice and is, again, not all that difficult to follow). [1] http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fb...
- pgeorgi 12y agoeven if there are engine specific optimizations (like the #! javascript single page application path thing they promoted for a while), the major engines usually converge towards a single format quickly. And the fringe engines (YACY and the like) had no idea how to work with SPAs in the first place, so no loss there...
- nickik 12y agoAbout SEO. In the beginning SEO was easy but now it is hard, so hard that doing SEO actually forces you to make good websites. I have worked in a startup and we have talked at length with SEO experts and lots of things that you do knowdays to improve your result is actually good stuff, adding good metadata, writting storys that actually capture peoples attention. Sure with enougth money you can still hire tons of people who spam you all over the internet. So it seams to me that because google search is so good, it forces people to actually make better websites.