Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Search Engines as Leeches on the Web: Jakob Nielsen: Search engines extract too much of the Web's value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors. (Via Slashdot.) Oh, my, what strong language. Leeches, confiscate, skim off. Nielsen neglects to note that any website that feels exploited can easily keep out the mean search engines with a robots.txt. Finally, he deigns to step down from his high horse to recommend that sites can “liberate” themselves by attracting repeat visits the old-fashioned way. What a revelation. I buy outdoors gear from several good suppliers. Then email me notices of sales. Guess what? I actually buy in those sales (just today, I received a new soft-shell ski jacket bought that way), after doing a bit of comparison shopping with search engines to see if there is a better sale going at some other supplier. On the other hand, I would not have known of most of these suppliers were it not for search engines. Nor of various backcountry guiding operations in North and South America that I have happily spent a lot of money with. Nielsen agitates for a false conflict where in fact there is an extraordinary synergy. Most of those vendors of products and services are too small to reach me reliably by traditional means, but were very easy to find with appropriately crafted search queries. They benefitted, the search engines benefitted, I benefitted. What's wrong with this non-zero-sum picture? Nothing, except for those sites that don't sell anything of concrete value (good gear, great experiences) but instead want to monetize their paltry aggregation or review “content.” Guess what, opinions and middlemen are a dime a dozen. The search engines, with their much broader coverage and relative neutrality do something much more effective than the middlemen who try to convince us that we are incapable of making our own choices given the full range of possibilities and the ability to craft queries to narrow the answers down to what we really want. 2:11:04 PM