In his latest alertbox, Nielsen points out two things that are very remarkable. The first one concerns search engines and second one the future of intelligent devices.
"Search engines extract too much of the Web’s value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors."
I’m not quite sure what he means with ‘liberation from search depency’ because I used to think search engines were a tool that could improve your visibility on the web. If I get his point correctly, Nielsen says it would be a strategic imperative for a website or software vendor NOT to be indexed by search engines, aiming for direct hits. In one way he’s right, because once your brand is represented strongly enough, you could become independent from search engines and so internauts would just type in the name of your brand.com or service.com without feeling the need to research it first. Examples could be something like nike.com.
In another way, I don’t think Nielsen is right, because to reach such a status where you no longer need search engines to help drive traffic to your site or have users type in keywords to find you through a search engine, you actually need to be around for a long time already. Breeding awareness takes time and money, and if you can be found with some help (keywords), why would that not be a strategic imperative? Not every software vendor or website has the capacity to force that kind of brand awareness.
Nielsen is right when he says paid/sponsored results are sickening the search industry, making the owners of search engines richer while they sit down and wait for bidders to make higher bids for the same keywords. Indeed, skimming the cash seems easy. But let’s not forget that to run a search engine that is good enough for internauts to rely on, you also need to make massive investments, which would come from a generated income. If everything would be free, what would the search engines survive on? Diversification is an answer, but that’s also shot down by Nielsen, where he claims it takes the search engine away from its core business, offering free services to internauts/consumers. I fail to see the downside in this. Why can’t a company offer free services that aren’t directly related to its core business?
In a utopic view of this situation, you would expect users/internauts to bypass search engines and go directly to the wanted digital address. That would imply all of the consumer knowing all of the brands (websites and software vendors). What did I miss to not see this as a reality?
"In the future, we will see a large number of products that know where they are and what they are being pointed at. One likely development is to build this knowledge into cameras. For example, your camera would know that you are in Paris and shooting the Eiffel Tower, thus automatically tagging the photo with the relevant keywords, making retrieval easier."
I just think that would be so great. Intelligent digital toys turn me on. I love the idea. It’s so ‘web 2.0′ it has to become reality soon.
From [Nielsen's Alertbox].