The end of honest search?

posted by Graham - 11:20 07/06/11

Why would the 3 big so-called search engines want to promote a new system of promoting content on your website? I may be cynical but I can’t help but feel it’s all about finding opportunities for even more money. Google would perhaps these days be better thought of as the world’s biggest advertising agency rather than a search engine.

Google’s attempts to ‘personalise’ your search results are at best misguided at worst driven by their own profit motives. Eli Pariser talks convincingly about the intrusion and the damaging effects of personalisation by search engines at his Ted talk entitled Beware online "filter bubbles".

An article about microdata and how the big 3 search companies want to change the way data is presented to them, was posted by Econsultancy yesterday. Following the links to learn more about Schema.org only led me to feel that we are about to enter a new era and the end of search as we know it. The new tagging system designed to help search engines learn more about the content of your site is centred around ‘things’. Schema quite specifically lists all the possible tags and their structure is based on them falling out from a ‘thing’ – so for example you have ... Thing>Event>Music event and a similar structure for shops and goods. It seems fine for a capitalist view of the world but less so for a socialist view; fine for ‘buy this great beer here’ and less good for a site about domestic violence say or dealing with the effects of too much of that ‘great beer’.

The econsultency article and the reader comments point to the potential abuse of the new system. It’s not hard to see why – particularly when you factor in Eli Pariser’s views it might well lead to abuse by the 3 ‘founder’s of this new system – Google, Bing and Yahoo. If those 3 come together you have to question their motives – is it about ‘honest search’ or is it about more income from advertising.