Singularity Vs. SEO’s: When Will We No Longer Be Able to “Manipulate” Search Engines?

Posted by admin on May 30, 2009 in Blog, SEO | 5 comments

I like Physics and Math.

That probably has a lot to do with why I choose SEO as a profession. It’s constantly changing, and there is always someone coming up with cool new ideas about how we can understand the way search engines work. In a way, SEO’s are the Scientists of marketing.

But how long will be it be before the Search Engines essentially get smarter than the SEO’s who are trying to get them to work in their favor?

Let’s take a look at a few things before I jump in to that…

The History of the Internet and The First Search Engines

Hopefully, everyone reading this knows that Al Gore did not invent the Internet…

The internet was actually invented by Tim Berners Lee around 1989 while working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN. [Yep, Dan Brown wasn't making that up when we wrote "Angels & Demons"]. Tim Berners Lee also in turn created the first directory of web pages called the Virtual Library to catalog all other websites, which at the time consisted mostly of colleges.

In 1993, Mathew Gray of MIT created the first “bot” called the World Wide Web Wanderer to measure the size and scope of the entire internet, and placed it into a directory known as Wandex.  Later in 1993, many bot driven search engines popped up, like Jump Station. They searched the web for Titles and Headers of web pages, and listed them in the order that the bot found them, making it reletively useless to find something you didnt already know the URL for.

Then came Excite. This was the first search engine to use the statistical analysis of word relationships to make searching the content of web pages more reliable.

This was when we first saw the VERY early stages of what today would be called “SEO”. People were cloaking their webpages with hidden keywords the same color as the background, stuffing their title tags, and all sorts of other misleading tricks to get more site visitors.

Search Engines like Alta Vista, Inktomi, Lycos, and most importantly Infoseek, came next. Infoseek gained popularity because it was the featured search engine on Netscape, and it allowed webmasters to submit their websites in real time…which made a lot of spammers very very happy.

Then came Google and Yahoo. The rest is history, so to speak.

The Equation of Change

It might seem like I’m skipping a lot here, but as SEO’s, I’m sure we all know how much the search engines have changed over the years. The notable thing about the change that has already occurred is the time span in which those changes have happened. It used to be every year…then every six months…then every month…then every week…and at the point we are at currently we can sit back everyday it seems like and watch how something has changed in the way that we have to do our jobs almost daily. And they will only keep changing faster.

The Point of Singularity for Search Engines

I’m no physicist, so I’m not even going to try and explain this theory in my words. Wikipedia, like most always, I think explains technological singularity best: “The technological singularity is the theoretical future point which takes place during a period of accelerating change sometime after the creation of a super intelligence.

I. J. Good first wrote of an “intelligence explosion”, suggesting that if machines could even slightly surpass human intellect, they could improve their own designs in ways unforeseen by their designers, and thus recursively augment themselves into far greater intelligences. The first such improvements might be small, but as the machine became more intelligent it would become better at becoming more intelligent, which could lead to an exponential and quite sudden growth in intelligence.”

[Sounds kinda like "Terminator", huh?]

In a nutshell, what this means is that search engine algorithms eventually will evolve so much that is as smart, if not smarter, than it’s creators.

As I said before, I’m no physicist, so I’m not going to try to defend the integrity of this theory. However, it does get me thinking about the field of SEO.

What’s Going to Happen to the Field of SEO?

Search engine’s algorithms are changing at a rapid pace, and that pace keeps multiplying. Little by little, these changes are becoming more frequent, and more advanced. Will there ever be a point to where search engines are smarter than SEO’s, and we simply can do nothing to increase traffic and rankings of websites through them?

I’d like to hear what you all think about this topic, cause quite frankly, I don’t think I can answer that…