Full circle with a difference

There is nothing new under the sun and this is true even for the bran-spanking-new world of search engine technology. Forums became all the rave back in the early days when having a forum was instant search engine bait and in 2006 Google took note and introduced a filter which discounted sites which had, up to that point, over 5,000 forum pages. The result was chaos as the organic Google index became a bloody playground where those who had relied on forum posts to benefit from organic Google traffic suddenly found their sites dropping to page 50 and beyond.

Then the web got bigger and bigger and as the volume of information increased the struggle for relevancy and finding the information you want when you want it became the hottest topic of conversation in search engine research circles. Since the days when Google and its rivals sought to find a way to filter out spam content the stakes have been upped with the struggle going towards the development of heuristics which lean towards the holy grail of the search world: an AI-based search engine which will augur the start of the semantic web.

Until we get to that stage however Google is busy bringing back filters designed to undo the work of its previous ones but filter the results so that relevancy is preserved. The latest development here is Google's introduction of the Forum Post filter designed to help bring up Forum postings in the organic index results. This is now taking us back to the old days of the web when Google trawled everything with the exception that, this time, the content itself is filtered for relevancy.

About the author Dana Jay

Danna Jay is a senior editor for Web Direct Studio. She has worked for finance companies as a web trend analyst and used her background in publishing and computers to head, for a while, an eBook start up. She follows digital trends and writes long papers analysing their impact on business and is responsible for the POD division of Web Direct Studio. She lives, mostly, in London and cybercommutes to work though she says it feels good to sometimes look at people face to face rather than just a face on a computer screen.More about Dana Jay