Search Ubiquity

“I want to know the phone number of the Edgewater hotel across the street from Bell Harbor,” says Danny Sullivan. “What’s the first thing that came to your mind?”

He clicks on his slide. “How many people thought: ‘Google it’?”

Hands go up all over the room.

“411?” Two hands. “Yellow pages?” Laughs.

Today I am at Gnomedex, Lockergnome’s annual conference at Bell Harbor in Seattle. Sullivan is a Search Engine Optimization guru from Search Engine Land, and he’s currently on stage talking about search ubiquity.

It’s a very important concept, that Danny correctly says is still under appreciated:

Search is everywhere.

Search is still growing – more and more is being indexed and made available for people to search, and weird things start to happen when search and real life collide. One example Danny uses is how Google needs to have a policy on what to label disputed country names or bodies of water.

More importantly, though, search is becoming (has become?) the default method of finding information.

This means that if you want to be found, you need to spend a lot of time thinking about how you can be ready for the search that will lead people there. And publishers definitely want their content to be found.

Getting found

On one level, that means engineering your site to be friendly with search engine crawl bots.

On another level, that means being familiar with where search is going. I asked Sullivan about how he thinks search will evolve on a social level, and he pointed me to his post on Search 4.0, but then elaborated a little on how he thinks search results will begin to be customized based on your social networks.

The upshot is that search is going to become more real and more social – people are using Urbanspoon on their iPhones for, essentially, search (”What restaurant should I eat at?”). It is beyond important that your content is searchable.

Furthermore, there are still opportunities to be the search medium, especially as search expands from “that thing you do on a computer,” to an activity that sneaks its way into other parts of your life, like finding restaurants on your phone.

You can see the slides from Danny Sullivan’s presentation on his personal blog, here.