• Tom Anderson, co-founder and ex-president of MySpace has suggested that Google+ looks good enough to beat Facebook and other social networking websites.
• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg joins Google+ and one of his early connections is current Facebook CTO Bret Taylor.
• The networking model of Google+ is more real. Circles help you distinguish between family, close friends and acquaintances, claims Google.

These are the popular stories of web world today. These stories are making noise because the wonder ball is now open. Google has launched Google+ [to few limited users]. And, it has started creating buzz in the industry. People were guessing about a similar product for long. Few leaked stories also talked about names like loop, circles, etc; but now we know it’s Google Plus. It’s not just another product from Google; they promote it as the future of Google. It’s not buzz or wave. This time they are much more serious and much more prepared.

But, as most of us ask in our circle – the real question is, why Google needed a product like this? The answer is simple. They want to dominate internet market. They are leaders in search, video sharing, emailing and they want to spread their wings to other spaces like photo sharing, group discussion, and social networking. They had products like orkut, buzz, wave but people at Google were not serious about this business, at least till the time Facebook storm took the internet to a new level. Facebook not only emerged as the leader in social networking space but it also become a threat for the core business of Google, emailing [Facebook’s social inbox] and search [Social Search]. Google had to response. And, they responded with a bang this time.

The challenges for others like Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster are different. They have to build everything from scratch. But, Google doesn’t face this problem. It has YouTube for video, Picasa for photo sharing, Google docs for document management, Gmail for email service, Android for mobile services and many more utility products. What they needed was a product which can integrate all these utilities and give users a platform to plug and play at a single dashboard. They seem to be winning this race by launching Google+ . Yes, it does provide a single dashboard, a simple look, filled with some powerful features.

But, it doesn’t mean they don’t have challenges. They do have challenges. The challenge for Google+ is not to attract users but to maintain the simplicity it has right now. People have started liking this product because it is simple. It is not clustered and it is not noisy. But, that could be because there are not much people. And, there are not much applications. Going forward when there would be a crowd of users, developers and applications – the real test of Google+ will begin.

Type SEO in Google and you’ll get around 26 million results in less than a second. Wow. Isn’t that amazing? Look at the volume. How much content has been created around this concept? But, is it really that important? Or, it’s just because of a hype created around this term?

Why SEO?

SEO is a process to improve the visibility of a website in search engines. It starts from the design and development phase and continues till entire life span of the website. You want your website to top the list in a contextual search at search engines. You want your web page to be more relevant, more attractive, and more friendly to search engine crawlers. You want your customers, potential customers and other stakeholders to find you easily through Google. And, you want more traffic to your website. To achieve all this, you go for SEO.

Who requires SEO?

Remarkable websites like Facebook and Twitter don’t require SEO. They have enough meat to grab million eyeballs. They concentrate more on providing engaging stuffs rather than focusing on adding more meta tags and keywords. Quality writers also don’t care  about SEO. Set Godin would focus more on his next blog post rather than finding a way to top the Google rank, the rank which itself is overhyped.

So, who requires SEO? Average websites having average stuffs require SEO to manipulate the rankings in different search engines. You want to build a remarkable product – focus on the problem you are trying to solve. If your solution is brilliant enough to be recommended – search engines will follow you.

How traffic comes to your website?

When your website is new, most of your traffic comes from direct links. You give this link to your friends, your acquaintances, send emails to your contacts and people visit your website directly. That’s direct traffic. Next stage comes when you have people subscribed to your website. You achieve this by creating quality content, posting interesting stuffs on a regular basis. Once you have significant numbers of subscribers, your search rankings will automatically start improving.

Should I stop SEO?

No. I never suggested that. Keeping few basic items intact is required. Meaningful keywords, tags, URLs, titles, etc add value to your website. It helps in better organization of content. It also improves your internal search. Doing all this is not a rocket science. You just need to have some common sense.

Social Search vs Traditional Search

Facebook drives more traffic to major websites than Google. If you follow the latest trend around web traffic you must have noticed this news. One of the major traffic analysis firms Compete made this statement early last year. They said Facebook drives 13% of web traffic to major websites like Yahoo, MSN, AOL while Google generates only 7%.

What does it mean? All your effort to get higher rank in Google is a waste when social media channels are going to drive more traffic to websites.

Is it happening with all the websites? No. Not Yet. But, going forward social media is going to be the major source of web traffic. In that case, social media optimization will have more value than SEO.

Crux

People will appreciate your effort on your product / solution and not your effort on SEO. 

In my last post, I talked about the power of information and how relevant information is still not a reality in web world. Taking that discussion forward, the next question is, if search engines are not providing relevant information, who does?  The answer is nobody does it at this point of time. But, there are many players who are working on this model, including Google. In third quarter of 2009, Google launched its real time search engine. While launching this new search they stated.

Search is a natural starting point for discovering the world’s information, and we strive to bring you the freshest, most comprehensive and relevant search results over an ever expanding universe of content on the multitude of devices you use to access it.

Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it’s happening, even if it’s not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn’t know about it beforehand.

The point is, real time information may not be very popular but it’s relevant. There are many other players who are eyeing this market. Recently I was looking at a service socialmention. They have an interesting way to show search results. Along with real time search from across universe [that’s what they say]; they also show strength, sentiment, passion and reach of the searched object.

There is another service called whostalking. They have a different approach of showing search results. They categorize it with source. They have options like “Twitter”, “FriendFeed”, “Plurk”, “Wordpress”, etc. You can search your results from any of these sources.

If you look at many other small search engines, you will find they all are doing something innovative. They all are trying to grab a share of this emerging market. They all know – The Search Business is still open.

Around 26% of World’s population uses Internet and this phenomenon has grown 380% over last ten years. Billions of data are floating all over web but this technology is still into its beginning.  We all are moving in a high-tech society and those who have information will emerge as a winner. The concept is, Information is power – grab it as quickly as you can.

Information is power, true, but everybody doesn’t need everything available on internet. Digging into relevance, contextual information is the next step one needs to perform. Google, Yahoo, etc gives all the information you want for a specific topic but 90% of these results are not very useful. Also, they lack to provide categorical search.

For example, if I search for India in Google, it shows 42 billion results.

Do I need all of them? No – they all are not useful.

Then, how to get useful information out of it?

Can I have categorical information – something like, Sport, Politics, Business, etc?

When I search the same in WolframAlpha I get the knowledge related to India. Again, there’s nothing more than few statistical information. I tried this on search.twitter.com and all which I got was real time talks about India.  The point which I want to highlight is – they all are good in their own domain but users still don’t have lots of flexibility when it comes to internet search.

Going back to information – Internet is a major source. It has all the data we want but we do not have any tool to get relevant data out of it. Search Engines, Yes, they claim to crawl almost everything on Internet but that includes lots of junk data as well. They bring everything which they can. They can’t understand the context of search. Proactive search is something they simply don’t care to provide.

Recently we saw how Facebook surpasses Google as the most visited website on Internet. What does this mean? People are relying more on recommended information than searched information.

Does that give a signal of how Internet search is going to emerge in future?

Yes, it does. We need more social search than static search. We need to involve context with our search results. It could be in the form of region, interest, source, gender or any other broad category. We also need to provide this flexibility to users so that they can get data as they want. They should be able to configure their own search results.

Google is a giant in this business but going forward the power would shift to those who can provide relevant search, contextual search.

“Yes, we could make history, I guess”, the statement from Sergey Brin was not just a mere prediction. It changed the history of internet like never before.  Many players like, Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos were doing business, but it was Google who created history. It changed the way people were looking at search engines. It changed the way people were doing business through search engines.

In early years of this decade most of the web players were suspicious about a revenue model around search engine. The scene was looking very gloomy to them and then came the innovative search concept from Google, Page Rank. It gave Google an edge over others and Google never looked back thereafter.

As we say, “History repeats itself”, the scene around search engine market is changing again. This time there are some other new concepts which are gaining attention. No, I’m not talking about Microsoft’s Bing. I’m talking about Twitter, WolframAlpha and Scoopler.

A new trend called real-time search is getting popular on web. FriendFeed, Facebook and others have already started using it but two key players which are doing some real serious business in this area are Twitter and Scoopler. The idea behind Scoopler is to search entire web in real time. This would be a key concept for all future search requirements. We need to keep an eye on this. Check out one example of real time search here.

Stephen Wolfram says, “Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine with one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms.” Few experts claim that it should not be treated as a Google killer though going in details of this discussion gives a different view. Check out an article on this here.

Google still dominates the search engine market though the monopoly is not going to last for a long time now. Let’s hope to see some more innovative concepts.

[polldaddy poll="1805577"]