3rd page of search
Charlene Li of Forrester research had this interesting page about “3rd page of search”.
Her primary observation was about intermediaries. Folks who aggregate content on the web and SEO it to rank high in google results. Her hypothesis is that businesses will be built around become the 3rd page of search. That is, vertical search products draw traffic from web search products.
I thought about this a little bit. If i am building a web search product (disclaimer: I am not part of search core team), here would be my goals
- Point to THE page(s) that gives what user seeks
- In case you cannot definitively find such page(s), point to a page that could point to the right answer.
- Keep advancing your technology so that you can always do (1).
Fundamentally, web search products are interested in getting user to their goal without the 3rd page of search. They will invest and are investing huge amounts to eliminate the need for it. As the crawling, extraction techniques advance, the big web search engines will be able to avoid pointing to the “3rd pages” which have limited value add other than Search Engine Optimization.
This is not to say vertical search companies are dead. But that they are competing with Google, Yahoo, MSN. This is not going to be a happy eco system, where GYM will encourage vertical search companies. To the extent that the vertical search companies provide aggregated, search engine optimized pages and nothing else, they will be eliminated quickly.
I had the post written till above last night and i didn’t publish it. This morning, I found out that Google Base is launched. To me google base validates what I was trying to say above.
