I read an interesting article in the New York Times today that really got me thinking about my job. The world of SEO is very complicated and yet very simple in its complexity. Most of your time is spent fixing broken links, updating tags, and streamlining the in/out flow of your website's traffic. All of this is done in the attempts to make the merciless Google or the more benevolent Yahoo! web deities grant their favor upon your particular tome of insight. The job can be trying at times and at others, extremely repetitive and borderline insane, but once you have achieved the level of "Top o' the SERPs" (SERP = Search Engine Results Page) or even the, just as respectable, "First Page o' the SERPs" moment of glory it becomes totally worth it. (Word of Advice: Don't get complacent... keep at it. Trust me.) After reading this article however, the days of SEO tedium and insanity may be numbered... A new search engine is in the works right now under the combined efforts of the Online Computer Library Center and the Universities of Washington and Syracuse. With the help of some grant money get the project started, the goal is to create a search engine that ranks results on a site's "expertise and creditability" based on the views of librarians from all over the world. In theory, this could be a great alternative to the vastly complicated and many times extremely infuriating Google PageRank system. Personally, I think the idea is brilliant. Get a bunch of librarians, people who help other people find information on a daily basis, collectively decide whether or not your website is relevant to other similar information on the web. This may not mean the "END OF SEO AS WE KNOW IT", but it could result in a great advantage to the little sites out there that are abundant with quality information. According to one of the project partners, R. David Lankes, the site will use "real questions around the world" to create its directory map. The idea is that with the more questions that get answered, the more the engine will be able to grow and learn a greater vocabulary increasing the accuracy and relevance of its results. It is not trying to be a direct search engine competitor, but the fact that user searches in the major engines will potentially pull up articles from Reference Extract, makes it globally helpful either way. Reference Extract's goal is not to provide facts, but to answer questions, just like a librarian would. We will have to see how it all pans out closer to the projects completion, but the idea of adding real human credibility to the results or your query is an excellent way to take search engine technology into the future. In the end it probably won't dethrone the mighty Google from high atop its Mount Olympus, but it may just shake up the net enough to help some of the smaller information sites get a big time boost. Who knows it may eventually change the face of modern SEO? Only time will tell...
