Who’s asking?
I am no search engine expert. I am not even a blogger! I love to read the Moz Blog, and I especially love Whiteboard Friday. While I have heard it elsewhere as well, one analogy I received from WBF was the concept of a “Blind Surfer.” Makes sense, and thus far it has made a killer engine. The algorithm is based on the theory of a blind surfer, a surfer randomly clicking through the Internet. But tonight I got to thinking about what the search experience might be like if Google could implement other surfers into its algorithms? There are infinite types of surfers, and some of them act like each other:
A stupid surfer, a non-human surfer (robots), a social surfer, a racially biased surfer, a shopping surfer, a surfer learning a new computer language, or a surfer who’s late for work, etc.
Google may some day be able to learn from its users in a more intelligent way. It may one day be able to recognize very quickly through my session behavior, or even over time, or even through my own Google settings, that I am a surfer who:
- is learning PHP
- relies on Google to search PHP.net rather than doing it himself
- he does this because he uses Firefox, and uses the address bar as an all in one shortcut to navigate the net
- is somewhat informed, looking for something specific
- trusts Google to show a relevant snippet of the site to show EXACTLY what he’s looking for, or he will search again because this is faster.
This really is me. The whole basis of this blog idea came from a session with Google that I did (in fact, experienced tonight) before giving in and searching the PHP.net manual.
I asked Google (in one “session”, in this order):
- php this
- php $this
- php $this.something
- php what does this mean
- php tutorial this
- php this tutorial
- php $this tutorial -“this site”
- php $this tutorial -“this site” -“this tutorial”
I don’t know if the Google toolbar is evolved enough to see all of the results of these pages:
…and relate them together, and I certainly don’t know if it assigned special weight to how far on each results page I scrolled down. If not already… one day, this could be a feature. Who knows? It certainly seems possible to me.
Perhaps some of you search engine savvy people can improve upon my example below, but the idea remains the same. The idea is that Google would then be trying to understand me and my search. To clarify: I don’t mean Google as a company, but as a search engine. As a company they do this every day. An evolved search engine might one day see:
(Anonymous US Firefox Surfer #4,506,387,017) :
The Google of today returns results mostly on PHP.net and their bugs section, which isn’t relevant. My search experience was not so great this time.
The Google of tomorrow returns
” A pseudo-variable, $this is available when a method is called from within an object context. $this is a reference to the calling object (usually the object to which the method belongs, but can be another object, if the method is called statically from the context of a secondary object). This is illustrated in the following examples:”
From: http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.basic.php
So then what if one day, a search engine taught itself new trends by spidering its own logs? Surely after 3.0, or 4.0 or Version X, an evolved Google might be given the ability to truly understand. What if by crawling its own algorithm, and own results, and its own database of information- with a comparable analytical zeal it currently exerts to crawl the web- it might at one point begin to show signs of true intelligence, much like we do as people? Our brains work a lot like search engines in many ways. Why can’t the search engine become smart like the human?
