How important are web searches to your business? How does it contribute toward better customer relations and satisfaction? As another small challenge, take a sticky note pad and write 3 headings across it for a small experiment: Searches/Found, Searches/Not Found, and Casual. For the next 10 days put a mark in the appropriate column and count how many times you turn to searching the web for something, probably answers to questions that come up.This will give you a sense of importance compared to other things you do on your computer all day long. Casual searches are non-business related or recreational queries.
While the popular press has high praise for the likes of Google and Yahoo and who has bragging rights regarding the billions of pages indexed by their products, how often are we stymied by failed search results? The Web is deep, you know it has to be out there somewhere. In fact I have found documents that I wanted to come back to read later, did not bookmark them, did not save it to my Desktop figuring I could find it a 2nd time only to discover it lost in the sea because I might not have remembered the right keywords used in the original search.
Probably the reason I cannot find an important piece of information on your web site is the entire SEO efforts have been in overkill mode. The 1st page or 2 of results are someone selling a product or they are pages of no significance to me. I cannot tell without looking at hundreds of pages of results where the info is located.
I can recount many times getting successful search results that have won the day. The missing link,supporting evidence, confirmation of government regulations or simple due diligence. So it does not take much to realize the value in a successful search.
In the commercial real estate business you may save time and money if you do some deep dredging operations on the web for data. But how do you go about it? Just like mining for minerals you need some heavy duty equipment. And I do not mean your run of the mill search engines. I talking about Semantic Web Search Engines. Most of these are still in the experimental stages. However, if you have used any your comments on them here would be appreciated. The thing about this type of engine is it locating information for you intelligently rather than through the use of keywords of text containing no context or meaning.
One such engine is Swoogle. At Swoogle.org sponsored research at the University level has sparked the idea of returning relative results that actually have meaning. If you type in a search though the results will not impress you. For example enter "commercial real estate" and click on a "document" search. When you look at a result that it returns it looks very AI or Geek like and really does not mean much. If you click on the document you will see unfamiliar text that is difficult to read and your browser just is not the tool to take advantage of what you found. This is where Piggy-Bank might come in handy because you can scrape the document it returns, Piggy-Bank can transform the RDF and if you like the result you can collect or save it for future reference. (See previous blog articles about the Piggy-Bank extension from the Simile project at MIT)
Now 1 other thing that is a surprise on the very last page of results item 88 I found a Real Estate Firms web site in Las Vegas.
http://www.finehomeslv.com/blog/tag/las+vegas+commercial+real+estate
Low and below it is a Semantic Web Document because they embedded RDF/XML. Obviously Swoogle found and indexed it.
Oddly enough we hear about SEO services but who really knows how to do the deep searches optimized to return results? In the next article I will mention a few dredging methods you are probably not aware of that are available to you.
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