Blaming the Blogger?
We always Read About how people toy with search engines like Google or Yahoo, or whatever comes next, to achieve “top” position, more traffic and more advertising revenue.

All the ‘blame’ is placed on the ‘unscrupulous’ parties that toy with their content to achieve better output on search engines. I’m calling this bullshit by its real name: Bull Shit.

:SARCASM WARNING: You build a search engine that drives money, directly or indirectly, and expect people not to try to maximize it? Really?? Where were you born? Mars?? Omicron-Persei 8?? Were you raised in a subway station? Dropped form the crib?
This is beyond naive, this is delusional to the point of idiocy.

Why do people game the results? Because its a multiplication function: 10 hours of optimization work drives the equivalent of 1,000 hours of wages unoptimized. I can spend $500 optimizing my placement, then $500 on a campaign that nets me sales for $X, or directly spend $10,000 in an unoptimized campaign to net the same $X number in revenue. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the motivational driver for this behavior. Does it?

The problem is not that people do it. People do it because they maximize, that’s what everyone has been taught. The real problem here is the amplification mechanism: The search engine. A solution will never be found at the end point of the problem (the maximizer), you can only find temporary patches there -like putting a finger on the dam-. Real solutions come from fixing the real problem at the base of things: The search engine.

I’ll argue the simplest, most effective, efficient and positive way to eliminate this problem while enhancing service is one word: PERSONALIZATION.
Simply put, the search engine knows me. It has built over time a profile of who I am, perhaps linked to an anonymous User ID I give it voluntarily. It knows what I’ve searched for in the past, it knows what I clicked, it knows what I read, it knows what I skipped. Further, it uses this information to precisely tailor its results to me, and me only.

Not only does this personalization deliver the very best results I could hope for (at the optional trade of some privacy, potentially at least) but it also destroys the amplification factor it was creating by having a single “ranking” based on one-size-fits-all metrics. When I search for “John F Kennedy” it returns the names of educational institutions with than name, ranked by distance from my house, because it knows I’ve been doing a lot of reading about universities for my kids. When a student from Thailand searches for “John F Kennedy” it shows him links to school papers on the US President, because it knows he is been reading report after report, trying to find research material on the former president. Today’s problem comes from that idiotic one-size fits all approach to web searching What have I got in common with the kid in Thailand? With grandpa in Ireland? With anyone else? Giving everyone the same results is simply stuuuupid. When I type “credit report”, why ASS-U-ME that I have bad credit? Maybe I’m just searching for a business service and not debt consolidation, maybe I’m looking at how to interpret my GPA score. How would the engine know? It doesn’t! The search engine doesn’t assume, but the maximizers out there twist the engine into seemingly assuming what I want, based on what the maximizers and advertisers want me to consume. Nothing wrong with the advertisers, they’re doing whats expected of them. The ones letting me down are the search engine providers, by unwittingly giving me results that are irrelevant to my need, by not targeting me as an individual, and by amplifying the game of maximization.

With personalization of search results, the economics of maximizing still work, however they only work in the same way that traditional marketing dollars invested in the back end do: By improving targeting and message content – The opposite to the current approach: Maximization of coverage and deceptive hook phrases.

So stop the whining, and get personalizing search results. If there is an opportunity for a Goggle killer, this is it… If you can get there before Google does…