Search Changes Will Rock the Content World

At the iBreakfast this morning in New York focused on search – where it's going and what's different. Stephen Arnold a researching consultant and analyst who seems to spend a lot of this time following Google, especially its patents and technologies, said that Google will change the way it indexes over the next 18 months and those who don't follow what it demands will be left in the cold.

Gone, he said, will be the days of typical search engine optimization via not only key words but also headlines, image tags and so on, and instead will be a requirement that you feed .xml into the Google algorithm in a way it demands. Wil Reynolds of ThinkSEER seemed more firmly rooted in the present but said something we should know: If you do what you're supposed to, make your page as relevant as possible to your core audience, you'll get better results. It's spoofing and faking and all that that will get you into trouble. Whatever hold you find in the search engine capability will eventually get plugged, and you'll be bumped waaaay to the bottom of results.

Was also an intriguing presentation from a company called Hakia doing "semantic search" -- which they claim is much more intelligent and natural than the indexing methods of Google, Yahoo, Ask and others. More on them next week.