The Future of SEO? - Search Me!

I was one of the panellists at Chinwag's "Search is Dead, Long Live New Search" last night, where - ostensibly - we were talking about the rise of real time search and its impact on the older incumbents, ie Google. However, given that many on the panel (self excluded) and in the audience were from the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) industry, it more turned into a "Future of SEO" talk at times, which I found fascinating in itself.

As I was on the panel (other members of panel can be found in the Chinwag link above), I didn't have time to take copious notes on this discussion but overall the narrative gist - as best I got it - is:

- its been great over the last few years having just one incumbent - Google - to optimise against
- complications are that (i) much of the "80/20" knowledge is leaking to clients, and (ii) there are now many SEO operators so margins are declining
- the industry is being churlish enough to churn itself up, with new "old style" search plays rising (Bing) and a plethora of small but rapidly growing New Search styles emerging, Real Time being the most worrying tight now. This is making optimisation more complex and costly
- Netizens are getting better and better at seeing phoney results, and the future will be in real conversations, not artificial juggling of keywords
- Even worse, all sorts of outsiders - PR Co's and others - are muscling in as SEO becomes part of the overall media plan, further eroding pure SEO margins.

Not a great prognosis, all in all, it would seem. Anyway, I was there to talk about Search itself, so this was the gist of my stuff in answer to the various points raised (I know roughly what I said as I wrote it down on the proverbial back of a paper napkin ):

1. Big Changes in Search in last 5 years

The 5 year look back was the arms race between Google and SEO companies as Google Gnomes battled to keep the Google algorithms one step ahead of the optimisers. Sob stories of online Mom & Pop stores kicked into penury by Google algorithm adjustments were staple fare. The 3 year horizon saw the emergence of new types of media - blogs, video etc - as valid searchable items, which blindsided old school SEO for quite a while (and also Google' algorithmatists). We saw the rise of Technorati and early "social network" based search. The 1 year horizon is the rise of Real Time search, driven mainly by the opportunity provide by the first real time ecosystem, Twitter. (There were real time search engines before, its just that they were searching specific niches or corporate data as no real time consumer system existed, apart from the blogosphere)

2. What do we think is going on now and in the near future

Real Time search is still small, but fast growing - it punches above its weight as it is "on the zeitgeist" - you can see this in real time as Facebook, Google et al have been forced to respond with major changes in thier own architectures to something that is so small. However, real time it is not a replacement for more backward looking search, over time they will blend. The 1 year horizon is the continuing rise of real time and massive innovation in the space. The 3 year horizon is integration, as well as Google coming under increasing margin pressure from these new searchers and new "old style" searchers such as Bing. In 3 years time they will be losing market share and margin (but will be the heavyweight for at least 5 years, probably more like 10). In my view Google is acting increasingly like an incumbent (The Borg, but fluffier as another panelist put it ) and increasingly outsourcing (and buying) innovation, but a number of the other panellists disagreed on this.

But, the key in search is no longer "search" per se - that is to an extent commoditising. The key is filtering to get relevant results, and - in my view anyway - this is where the real battleground for search will be going forward, as relevance is what drives customer usage (which is why real time punches so far above its weight)

3. And 5 years out into the Future?

The 5 year horizon is the ability to search in the "Deep Web" (stuff not yet visible to search engines) as companies make more data accessible, and Filtering to maximise relevance and minimise cr*p.

I also noted my co-panelists responses to this one:

- Structured Data (metadata, semantic data eyc ) allowing far more useful searching
- Social Feeds - helping people get more relevant results
- Pay more for prominence - simple SEO is over and algorithms will get better at culling spamming, flacking etc
- Big bandwidth changes all - look at Korea for lessons of the future

On Big Bandwith, there was quite an interesting discussion on Video search, someone mentioned that YouTube is now the second biggest search engine by search after Google proper. We also had a useful exchange at the time (and afterwards over drinks) about how search and discovery would work for Web TV (in a world of millions of "channels" what does the "Online EPG" look like? In addition there was an aside into the interesting trend for TV to blend with real time ecosystems, eg people commenting via Twitter on programs they were watching at the time (eg #bbcgqt - BBC Question Time - for example - see our notes at the time) and whether TV could align itself with real time systems to counter the Web TV threat.

As always, a fascinating evening, and conversations afterwards at the bar were also very good value - measuring the sociality of websites anyone? - and I look forward to seeing others' writeups which I'll link to as I see them.