What will the next form of search be?

• May. 8, 2003

With the recent globalization of the major search engines or search results providers, we begin to wonder just what’s up with the web.  For instance, the WWW didn’t really represent World Wide Web until the past couple of years, when the major players moved into non North American markets.  Since its inception the web has been controlled primarily by Americans.  It was built by Americans, and most of the servers which maintain its structure are located in the US(10 of the 13 root DNS servers are in America).

That’s not to say that others haven’t been able to make an impact on the web, but it does show us that there is a definite American influence on the web as a whole.  The globalization factor is influencing this a lot, however, as more and more website owners are trying to design their sites with the global community in mind.  Many sites have multilingual portals, so that they are accessible by more people.  Some sites even go so far as to write content which reflects the grammatical style of different regions.

That being said, what do we think is the next big search offering on the horizon?  Regional search – kind of like the yellow pages, but web based.

Now I know what your saying – why are the major sites going to offer regional search when they are busy trying to conquer the world market?  Well, some sites already do have a regional search – Yahoo! offers it through their directory, so does Google in a way through their directory results.  But what I’m talking is, when you perform a search for something generic like “movie theaters” the engine will be smart enough to know which region you want to look in.  You don’t necessarily want theater listings for Los Angeles or Toronto; you want listings for your home town.  And if the theater in your area has a website, or at least a place on the web to display this night’s features, you want to know what it is without having to formulate some complex search query, then surfing through hundreds of results to find the page you want.  You want your home town’s theater to be in the top 3.

Now, to a certain extent, search engines do this already – if you search for something along with the name of your town, there’s a good chance you’ll find what you want.  But peppered in those results are other results which probably aren’t relevant to what you want.   For example, if I search for a plumber in my area using the name of my town and the word plumber, the first result is the personal website of a guy named plumber who lives here, the next 5 or 6 results are newspapers in town who have had stories on plumbers, and the next 4 or 5 are job listings from the classified ads of these same papers looking for plumbers.  In fact, as I go deeper into the results I start seeing pages from other parts in the world which are no where near what I want.  As you can see, nothing on the first page of results suits my needs.

In my opinion the search engines will need to be able to better target their results to capture the regional markets.  Sure, if I search for information on how to fix my plumbing problem I can find thousands of pages describing my problem and detailing how to fix it, but if I’m not that handy of a person, or don’t have the time to fix it, this does me no good.  Therefore I want a plumber in my area, which as I’ve described is almost impossible to find in today’s web.

That is why, for the web to provide its customers (because lets face it – in the end you are a customer whether you use Yahoo!, MSN or Google).  In order to keep you coming back to them, they have to give you what you want.

That also means that as the web becomes more mature, and users become more web savvy, we as search engine marketers have to be aware of the fact that this regionalization should come about, and we should help it.  We need to prepare for it and adjust what we do so that Joe the plumber from my town gets the traffic when I search for a plumber in my town.  Much like if I flip to “plumbers” in the yellow pages, I am provided with a list of plumbers in my area.

Once the engines get the “conquer the world before my competitor” phase out of the way, I think you may start to see the regionalization factors start to influence results.

Rob Sullivan
Production Supervisor
Searchengineposition.com
Search Engine Positioning
specialists