Are Search Engines Losing Their Appeal?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Search engines have for many years been the king of online marketing and have led to the rise of the search engine optimization and search engine marketing industries. Are they, however, starting to lose their appeal and their relevancy?

There is so much in the way of competition at present that it is becoming impossible to really find what you want. Many search engines struggle to produce lists that satisfy the searchers queries. You can often undertake a search and find there 50 or 100 million pages that relate to that search query. However when you look a little closer, some of those entries are one or two years old ( or older). Either that or the search results bare little relationship to the question, an experience that often frustrates users.

Search engines such as Google are constantly trying to perfect their search results so that the user finds what they want, first time – so far with only limited success. Social media on the other hand may represent a different story into the future. Individuals are already using these sites to check for any information on products that they are interested in.

Anecdotal evidence from people who have used the products carries a lot of weight. A search results through any of the search engines carries little weight as a recommendation. Considering the difficulty, actual or perceived, of finding what you are looking for through a search engine, it is not difficult to understand why people are turning to these social sites for answers.

Search engines may well lose their appeal in the longer term as social sites becomes the pseudo search engines of the future. Unless Google and all the other search engines can find a way of delivering valuable links to each search query, they will continue to lose appeal.