Oxford SEO Studies Blog

Marrisa Mayer is Google’s VP of Google’s search products.  In an interview with Bambi Fransisco of Vatornews, Mayer does her best to down play the importance of natural search optimisation tactics as well as the emergence of the new Semantic oriented search engines.  Ofcourse she would, as VP for Google  products, her job is to undercut Google’s competition or any hint of rising competitors.  Not that Google has any real competition, but as Mayer points out herself, the Internet is a place where things change at jet speed and Google’s popularity is down to the fact that Google works and is very useful.  Google will remain at the top of brand popularity as long as it is the most useful search tool.  But that doesn’t stop other engines, other coders, other companies and most importantly, other re-searchers from trying to develop useful tools themselves.

I think it’s called healthy competition: the father (if not the mother) of innovation.

Mayer’s downplay of Semantic search is that Google’s index database is so huge that it effectively does the job of intuitive or semantic linking anyway.  In other words, we don’t need another methodology for searching with algorithms because Google’s index is so big, they already have the ground covered.

Hey, who needs new antibiotics when we’ve already got penicillin?  Who needs automobiles when we’ve already got so many horses?

Mayer is generous with her criticism of cuil.com by asserting that it’s too early to judge cuil.com because it’s still early days in their indexing which isn’t as far along as say, (just for sake of argument), oh, Google, for example.

Mayer’s slight condescension is understandable; after all, her job is promoting Google’s Search products and she’s not going to go out of her way to endorse any potential competition, no matter how miniscule. However, the very fact that through Mayer, Google would even bother to dismiss Semantic Search as largely irrelevant because the territory is already covered, is taking a giant step towards validation of the methodology considering Google over the past couple of years has made a discreet point of not even talking about Semantic search; or at least not very loudly.

Some of us had thought that Google’s strategy was going to be to ignore Semantic Search publically and just adjust their algorithms in anticipation of when and where that quantum shift in data architecture towards Semantic indexing occurred.

But, Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
Maybe it’s not as easy to retune your algorithms as one might have thought.
Maybe Tim Berners Lee is on to something after all.

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