After my post yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised to hear an NPR story (“Search Engine Wars”) this morning about the cat and mouse game of search engine optimization. As NPR put it, it’s also known as ‘gaming Google.’

I recently wrote an article about ‘Google Intelligence’ for LMD magazine that put forward the idea that people pay too much importance to search engines, confusing the ability to find ‘any subject on earth’ with in-depth research. One reader wrote asking asked if I was making fun of the ‘knowledge’ she could now find online. After all, she said, we could never have found out so much so easily before the Internet gave us so much access.

She missed an important point. I had prefaced it by saying that:

“..this is not about knocking Google and Yahoo!, or showing up the inadequacies of search engines. This is about how the Internet keeps us happy with superficial knowledge gleaned off home pages. It makes us very lazy when it comes to digging deep for information –information that is increasingly managed, massaged, and ends up on a search engine.

And my point is? A search engine can be very smart, but we have to remember that we are only looking at a very limited world view. Just because something is or isn’t listed on Google or Yahoo does not prove or disprove its relevance. Sometimes we need to probe deeper than the bowels of a server.

Yesterday’s cool trick using Google, which I like a lot, proves my point. Google rankings mean nothing, sometimes, even if they tell you how ‘important’ something is at that moment in time.

Having said that, I have to put in a word for a brand new search engine called A9. It’s a division of Amazon, and has some very useful features. What I like most: the ability to keep ‘notes’ on a page reference you find! Check it out!

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