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Editor’s Note: Pinko is proud to Welcome Margot as our latest contributor. Margot will be writing on the shady pentagon origins of the internet and other high tech conspiracies. Enjoy.

Google “Druid”. The resulting hits order themselves like the scores of a popularity contest rather than an unbiased search through the labyrinthine halls of the World Wide Web.

Web searching is a game, contradictory and complicated as American Football, and at its heart is a tactic called “search engine optimization.’”

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing technique designed to increase the number of visitors to a website from algorithmic or “organic” search engine listings.

Put another way, SEO is a way to appeal to Internet algorithms that increases your search relevance and subsequently web traffic. Think of magnet strength. The more potent the magnetic charge the more objects it can attract and hold. If you are a website, the better you market yourself directly to the machine algorithms influencing Internet rankings, the stronger your appeal and the more web traffic you shall yield.

(Nerd Alert: Know the etymology of “algorithm?” It doesn’t refer to Al Gore’s Rhythm, as much as I would like it to. It dates back to around 800 CE, to an Islamic mathematician named al-KhwarizmI. Algorithm simply refers to the steps or procedure for solving a mathematical problem.)

SEO also refers to search engine optimizers—the well-dressed and well-pressed professionals paid to perform optimization projects for client websites.

Optimizing utilizes various methods: linking to other sites, tagging, amending site code, hyperlink analysis, semantic (word) analysis, and meta-data. Since search engines are not paid for traffic they reroute organically, search algorithms change often (technology is a forever a moving target). Also, many engines do not disclose their algorithms to keep searching agnostic and some engines adjust their code to keep aggressive webmasters in check. A few SEOs with obnoxious optimization campaigns have gotten their client websites blacklisted from some search engines.

I envisage a future with more than pedestrian text-and-tag searching that is less vulnerable to optimization. According to Microsoft, Internet users spend around 10 minutes on a typical search. Even five minutes is far too long to retrieve an answer to a query with the dizzying wealth of information sources available. In telemedicine, sophisticated search techniques are being employed for epidemiology, and studying scans at warp speed. We must demand similarly enhanced indexing techniques, improved clustering methods, better user interfaces, and more intent-based and semantic searches. Hakia is a promising “meaning-driven” search development. Developed by a nuclear scientist, www.hakia.com searches not with keywords but with direct questions to the oracle. Hakia then uses rich semantic analysis on the pages it crawls in concert with a proprietary mosaic indexing strategy called Query Detection and Extraction. Despite these impressive advances, Hakia does not return correct results every time.

I hope that within one year, voice searching, animation searching, and peripheral (mobile phone) content searching will be much more common. Cisco is making some lofty promises here with its vision of Internet 2.0, the ‘connected human network’. Meanwhile, I would dig a simplified technology platform that expedites custom searching. For example, the next time I find a scrap of paper of E. 2nd Street that could be “The Druid Guide to Magic,” I’ll take it a picture of it with my phone (or scan the paper on my desktop), convert it to a jpg with which to search the fractal of the World Wide Web, right into dusty library archives.

Aggregated algorithms would cross-reference my paper scrap’s text, texture, contours, and context with the infinite web stock to find the precise answer. And in six to eight years…I’ll be able to scan it and use its hologram to search physically (sort of….think of Tom Cruise in Minority Report moving the images in space. Philip K Dick was onto something). I’ll find its match like assembling a virtual (four dimensional) jigsaw puzzle.

But will the same rules of popularity apply, even then? What technology (or sensibility) will upend our pay-to-play web—a democracy wholly capitalist, information governed by cold hard cash?

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