WWW and SEO
The advent of the world wide web changed the way humans shared and accessed information, but at its core, it is simply a structured digraph of web pages connected by links. As of today (Tuesday October 25, 2016), the web contains at least 4.83 billion pages. The web’s exponential growth has made search engine functionality a priority for navigating it. The basic structure of a search function is that a “spider” or “crawler” follows the links on a set of seed URLs and searches for keywords. These words are added to the “index” or “catalog” of the search engine. Other characteristics like index coverage, update frequency, and content are taken into consideration when these pages are indexed. From there the search engine searches and ranks web pages based on these characteristics in order of relevance.
With the incessant growth of web tracking, and the ability for even amateur web developers to publish content on the web, search engine optimization has become a key strategy in putting a website at the top. However, the web has come a long way since keywords and H1 tags and links, and SEO has become about things like AI and ML. Semantic search refers to understanding meanings behind words and relationships between them. This means that pages with longer explanation of a certain query will rank higher than another that simply just had the word. Thus while content has been and always will be one of the major indicators of a page’s rank in a search,
I think this shift in SEO has a lot to do with the kind of people who traffic the internet nowadays. When search engines were first introduced, the queries were very specific. However, now people type in questions into google or incomplete phrases, and look to google to give them the answer. When people ask a question and someone responds “just google it”, this is a clear indication of how human search engines like Google have become.
http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/~fwitschel/vorlP2P/literatur/Gupta.pdf http://searchengineland.com/seo-not-dead-just-shapeshifter-261188