Search engines are a huge part of the modern world. This intermediary between us and the vast back of information that is the internet is essential to filter off what’s important to us, and it also influences us with is display of adverts and media. As such it is both a tool, and something that manipulates us. To deny its effect on the individual is unreasonable – it may even change what we think of as individual.
What exactly takes place when you perform a search using Google? Well, there’s a simple algorithm in place that takes the key words of the search and then assesses, in lightning fast time, how many links there are to sites on the subject, and in turn how many sites are linked to them. Through this web of links it should be possible to assess how useful a site is for the user’s purposes.
The principle is that the most popular site in terms of links, rather than viewers, should be most suitable for your search. Within this fairly straightforward system there are a multitude of complications, not least the fact that businesses are constantly struggling to improve their internet profile in the face of competition. This has become the realm of SEO specialists, whose job it is to best make a company’s website visible.
Search engines offer a wide range of choice with information, and they give clips of the information before you select anything. It’s the speed involved with these selections that is changing the way we think as well. By having options of media, so easily accessible, people become conditioned to change their attention after shorter spaces of time. The internet, and search engines in particular, is recoding our attention spans – making it harder to focus for long periods.
It’s not all doom and gloom though. Young people on average today read more than ever before, and interpret vast amounts of data in short spaces of time. They’re better at multitasking, and they have the potential at least to see more media than has ever been possible in civilisation. It’s search engines that make this possible.
SEO London can help you on all search engines
