That’s right, I said it. The Decline of the relevance of search.
As we move forward in the evolution of the internet, we have seen companies establish a strong online presence as a result of providing search. Google is the latest internet company to become a major player in the search game, and has managed to do it better than anyone, so far.
The search giant built the core of its business on providing the most relevant results for whatever you were looking for. It is the relevancy factor, and the fact that the Google homepage used to be just a search box, that propelled Google to the forefront. This allowed the platform to build a solid advertising platform based not only on providing relevant placements for advertisements, but on the fact that people began to appreciate the quality of the search results.
The income from the search based advertising would allow Google to explore other areas of the internet, seeking out more logical platforms for their advertising base. YouTube was probably the best acquisition Google could have made. Without knowing exact figures, I would easily guesstimate that YouTube viewers use the search quite a bit, and determining relevancy for a particular video category or music genre, to a particular product ad is a no brainer.
So now that Google has a strong presence in search and media, the next logical step is social. Facebook has to be the hands down winner in this field. Millions of people log on to facebook on a daily basis and share some very intimate details about their lives. This now allows Facebook to determine how relevant ads are to a particular user. I am always impressed at the ads that are served to me on Facebook. They are usually very relevant to my interests and have gleaned a click or two from yours truly.
Google was smart to pick up on this early and pushed out G+ to try to develop a social platform for the millions of users who log on to Google and check their Gmail every day. Gmail is an email service provided by Google. So as the search engine expands its platforms to be able to serve up ads wherever users go on the web, one has to wonder how is this going to affect search?
Well, the new Google is going to include items from your personal email and other online activities that Google keeps tabs on while users that are logged in. Sure, we all knew Google was keeping data on us, but it feels a little weird doing a search for a topic, and Google includes my emails. Maybe its just me.
That being said, I am now logging out of Google when I search to hopefully get back to those days of relevant searches.
There may be an opportunity here.
