I see powerful things in Digg, Slashdot, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Wikipedia, forums of all types, and other sites that attract people because of a common interest or activity. These sites are "communities" of visitors or authors. These sites drive massive traffic in a short blast or massive traffic that is cumulative over time.
My guess is that these highly popular websites will grow in number - and these activities will start cutting into search volume simply because they consume a person's time spent online. Furthermore, at the present time, how many people now go to Wikipedia instead of searching, how many go to forums and ask a question rather than searching? Or maybe they simply use the search utility at Wiki or their forum? Information search has some real competition here.
Retail search has some strong competition too. Once people locate a nice website that sells what they want at good prices perhaps they just go straight to that site instead of searching. Sites like amazon and newegg - once you buy from them and have gotten a good deal you go there and use the site search instead of Google or MSN or Yahoo!. Maybe you will use a price comparison site instead of search. Value and trust become strong magnets - so who needs search once you have found comfort?
But one of the more important variables is "frustration". How many times will a person search for something and get turned off by spam until they simply to a navigational search by typing WalMart into the query box?
Offline media is also undercutting retail search. Print catalogs now are just lures to online retail sites, TV ads now seem to be driving you to a website instead of your phone or a store downtown. If the URLs where you can buy what you want are already loaded in your head - why search?
I don't have any data to verify the above - this is simply a call from logic and reason - maybe I am totally wrong. But I think that search engines are in their heyday right now.
Even if I am 100% wrong, getting top position in the SERPs is going to be an awful lot harder because the number of websites is expanding rapidly and the good ones are locking down turf. Competition is going to be insane ten years out.
With all of this happening, what should a webmaster be doing today so that he/she is still prospering ten years down the road?
Evolution and change are inevitable. I'm on the way old side of that age range that Rand was speaking about. But I see main stream acceptance of what was youth oriented activities when I was young.
One thing that may evolve and change quickly is connected to local search.
Currently you can find better, more thorough choices for local vendors by going to your local yellow pages than by looking at alternatives on the web.
Yet use of the yellow pages is withering away. The YP vendors are still selling their services but small businesses like mine and many others aren't seeing the volume of calls from the yellow pages that were their in pre web days.
Local business information on the web and presentation of it is inferior and a fraction of the volume and choice you can find in YP.
Whoever masters this first is going to win big.
It will require endless entry of immeasurable volume of businesses into an internet forum, a way to monetise it, and most importantly lots of volume of usage.
Currently we generate about 1/3 of our search traffic through wide ranging/long tail descriptions of our service with relevant geo descriptions. This is our most relevant area of search conversions. Current usage of web Yellow page visits is negligible. Usage of local Y, MSN, or G is neglible. We are fortunate and ahead of the curve in managing high rankings for lots of these long tail phrases.
Yet this is an area with lots of opportunity. I suspect lots of changes in the future. I just don't where they are coming from! (hope they don't cost too much!!!!!)
Dave
I think you are all forgetting that the internet hasn't changed all that much in the last decade. The basics still exist. Chat rooms, instant messaging, e-mail, online shopping, directories, forums, personal home pages, and search are STILL there. They haven't died. I always thought forums were a bit boring, but they are still there. Sure, they are a bit easier on the eyes, but they are so much more valuable now than they were 10 years ago because of advertising and traffic is expanding so much.
MySpace is just a replacement for Geocities and Tripod. It's still just a whole bunch of ugly webpages that users have and link to each other. They are easy to update and they are filled with crappy music and horribly graphics. There's a bit less animated fire now than there was 10 years ago, but still it's the same basic idea.
Search won't be big in 10 years? Couldn't the same thing have been said 7 years ago when portals were the rage and Yahoo! didn't care about search as much? If anything, it will be more important 10 years from now than it is now. The algorithms will change, but search is a need that has existed since the dawn of mankind when the earliest caveman needed to find his sharpened stone. Saying that people might use Wikipedia or Amazon directly is valid, but the internet is built with a very long tail and people's needs and desires are as wide-reaching as the universe. People don't go looking on Amazon for a book that has been out of print for 30 years. Or, what if they can't find it on Amazon? They might try eBay or they might just Google it. Odds are they will just Google it to begin with.
The point is simply this. As much as people love to cry doom and gloom about one area of the internet or the other, the established functions of the internet will always exist in one form or another. The internet might mutate using Flash or AJAX or "Social Networking", but as webmasters and web marketers let's be honest with ourselves. The basic ideas of forums, chat, search, directories, and personal pages aren't going away.
The best thing that webmasters can do now is to build great sites and market them. It's just like any other business. You develop a product and then you market it. If you develop a great product and you do a great job of marketing it, people will buy it.
I think that we may be approaching a search traffic ceiling but not for several years. Even as user search preferences become more sophisticated a new generation of search newbies is plugging into the net.
Many analysts predict a second .com explosion in the next 5 years as high speed Internet access becomes an essential part of 1st world living.
I think that traffic through search engines will increase substantially before it begins to wain, but I agree that eventually the appeal of alternative portals and direct .com marketing will make the game difficult businesses that thrive on search engine traffic.
Egol, great conversation starter (and way to prod it along too with further questioning). Looks like online branding has been an issue for a few years now. In 2001 I picked up the book "Poor Richards: Branding Yourself Online", I still have yet to read it so I can't give you an honest review. But it might be what you are looking for. This thread has been insightful, I think I'll pick it up and read it this week finally (I'll let you know the verdict too).
I think Google is doing something right by providing more tools for webmasters. We've had fun with Trends. Most webmasters have sitemaps and/or analytics installed. These aren't just SEO tools, they are basic webmaster tools first. They must realize that search is only an extension of the "WWW" industry. By providing tools to the root of the scene, they will be able to capitalize quickly on any other movements the industry makes.
Also by providing tools like co-op, they are giving the savviest web users reason to return to google. I have digg and a few other sites at the top of my results now, so if instead of going to each URL individually, I can now go to Google and do my search and my favorites all load at the top of the results if they have something. Odd, this is what Google results were like 8 years ago when their index was much smaller. It's like they have come full circle.
Anyway, you hit it right on the head (for me at least). If I want pure info about a topic, I search wikipedia. If I want latest news or gossip, I search Technorati. If I need help with Wordpress, I search the Wordpress Wiki/codex. If I want tech news, I go to techmeme or digg. Looks like I'm now a statistic. :)
If I think the web 10 years from now I think it has suprisingly many elements it has today. They say that studying the history you can see to future, and I have to agree. After all, this is not the 1st time social bookmarking, communities etc. are a big hit...
When it comes to search markets I think the answer comes from placing home users vs business users, and what they need.
Business users usually want a specific information & for them time is money. There are already a variety of paid services where they can locate prefiltered information they need fast & accurately; and I think this will become a major trend. And yes, branding is going to be a major part to success in this area.
As for home users I think the situation remains on some areas pretty similar to current situation, while on others there will be huge jumps. The importance of localized and personalized marketing is IMO obious; they will become dominant in commercial search markets while on *generic information search* the current globalized search results will rule.
So your question on how to success is very dependant on what your target audience is, what you sell and where you sell.
We're all going to follow the money.
When search starts to lose ground to new social applications or other channels, those who are awake will follow the money and those that are really smart will have already been dipping their toes in that social tidepool.
The really smart overachievers among us will be the people providing new social applications and also selling them for big money to the search engines who will need to plug some holes in their bottom line at some point as search loses ground.
If you want to come full circle on the thought of creating a bran... I think the engines will have a hard time getting the user to see them as more than a search engine in the future. Re-branding might be considered more difficult than branding.
aquasparkle,
That seems reasonable when looking at current trends. How many small firms are being bought? Yahoo! bought Flickr and del.icio.us. Google bought Writely, etc. News Corp. bought MySpace.
Many search engines and media companies apparently think that it is better to buy technology than develop it themselves.
I want to be ahead of the money. Not necessarily be one of the overachievers. I just want to keep improving my turf situation and am anxious to start early.
I think that we'll see more personalized search, and that'll keep people using search as a means to navigate the World Wide Web. Search engines will track what kind of sites you visit -- which includes selecting sources from their SERPS, tools (like toolbar buttons), and clicking on certain ads -- to provide you with more relevant results for you. There are even custom search engines now like Eurekster's swicki. Not only will search engines personalize search results, but they will also enable web surfers to filter the information that they are presented to conform to their world view.
(While I don't see that much of a problem with personalizing shopping searches, I think it is scary to only present news and information based upon a person's narrow (we all have limited views, myself included) perception of the world. Can you imagine a day when someone could totally eliminate news and information that doesn't come from Fox News, talk radio sites, or conservative sources?)
It is me of this is kinda the norm for the mass now? I mean, most of newbies or not so curious people end up listening only to Fox / CNN and are brainwashed daily. I think that Internet is the only flagship of real news and opinions; this better not disappear.
10:1 odds that Rand is working on a top 10 Branding list as I type this :)
lol... I bet that he is working on something already. Actually I hope that he is writing that book I am salivating for.
what
I think the best item we could all remember is that a brand and attempts at branding can convey very meanings depending upon the audience.
Just as we look for niche marketing opportunities, we should also be looking at niche branding.
Great observation EGOL. Add cell phones to the threat list. I recently upgraded to a Motorola phone on which I run a app called VZ Navigator ($10/mo). This GPS app lets me look up any establishment by address, category (gas, hotel, retail, restaurants...), or proximity to my current location. This tool totally eliminated my use of search engine maps and local search. As a consumer it's great, as an SEO it's a little scary. Google is king of the hill today but, as Microosft learned, that can change very quickly.
I don't see any of the new social services catching on in the mainstream. There are a hugh number of people who have no idea what a blog is or a news feed and they probably will never want to know either. Search has been used since people started to use the web and I can't see people stopping using it.
Where I work 90% of the staff think that Google is the internet. Its set as the homepage and they just use google to get to places. The address bar in IE is never even used.
For the average site its going to be impossible to get a foothold in the new web2.0 arena and its dangerous for people like Matt Cutts to think that just because a site has excited the blogosphere its worth putting at the top of the serps.
I think we should analyze demographics:
Under 30 years of age, broadband connection, mid-high income These folks know what blogs are, they know what MySpace is, a good percentage use the Internet for almost everything in their daily lives. As you go younger, this becomes more and more prevalent - texting is second nature, web publishing is done as early as 12, search engines, video, bittorrent and computer games are an intricate part of daily life.
Outside of this realm, you're right - folks don't really "get" the Internet. But 10 years from now, the generation who "gets it" is going to be between 20-40 years of age - they'll dominate mindshare and dollar share. Playing to the current audience is good, but if you don't hedge your bets by playing to the future, I think you're going to be dissapointed (just like companies who didn't take advantage of the web at all in the '90s, when only the young and the geeky used it, only to find themselves playing catch-up for years).
Rand, ten years from now... will those 20-40 year olds be using search? Or will they know where to find what they want? What do I need to do to have my site on their radar? Geez.... maybe search will be replaced by some other utility that we can't imagine? Something that is "personalized" and knows what they want before they look for it?
Brand building - that would be my short answer.
Long answer - if your website: - isn't being bookmarked (socially or just in the browser settings) - isn't being emailed to friends & family - doesn't grab the attention of media (whether that's small time bloggers or big time reporters) - doesn't make for exciting conversation outside the SEO forums - can't attract links naturally from the "Linkerati" visitors
you're pretty screwed.
Maybe you'll scrape by, maybe you'll get very lucky and in your market, there won't be 20 other companies who do achieve those items above, maybe you'll succeed in spite of yourself (MySpace - what?), but why wouldn't you try to position yourself to have the best possible chance for success?
Thanks Rand, I need to learn more about Brand Building. I am looking for books at amazon. Searched a bit but didn't find a "textbook" quality site. Wikipedia has a little - but this is so important that we need to become *Experts*.
Anybody got a book, ebook or website to recommend?
I was hoping "Creating Passionate Users" would be that book, but it really didn't grab me. Nor did Seth Godin's much touted "Purple Cow."
Some of the best brand building help I've gotten has been through careful observation of case studies. I heard Meg Whitman talk about eBay and that was amazing and several of the interviews we did for the Web2.0 Awards were good on that front as well. But on the written front, I'm at a bit of a loss.
Maybe this is one of those "content vacuums"? How to establish a brand on the web! That's the book that I am looking for.
Most people who read this blog are a lot younger than me and this is ultra important for long term staying in the webmaster business. I doubt that buying a load of links or doing link trades will work for a crappy little site by the end of next year - time for a new game plan.
As far as branding websites go: https://www.brandingblog.com/
Books, Try: Brands and Branding The Economist Series
I personally did not care for 'Purple Cow'. All I got out of it at all was be unique and noteworthy, which is something that I think most would assume without reading it.