Of course, there was a reason behind the question: “You know, as web search engines get better, people will stop creating links and simply use web search to locate the most relevant information [link directories, Yahoo's original business, are nearly dead today; for example]. But today’s search engines depend on links for their search quality.”

I think there’s a point here. It’s almost chicken-and-egg, but in reverse.

But then, I remembered SEO: a whole industry is out there, creating the right links! Dr H, however, differed “Well, a few years ago, when I searched for recipes, I’d find some special recipes created by people that they’d put on their homepage. Today, I reach a grocery store”.

Search engines want to make sure they aren’t being manipulated by SEO, so the practice has become a race of sorts between the SEO industry and search engines (Meta tag keywords are nearly useless now, for example). Grandmas with secret recipes don’t stand a chance in this gruesome battle.

This tussle between various entities which try and optimize search rankings for commercial interests, coupled with the tragedy of the commons (due to which “normal” people will slowly stop linking) creates an interesting scenario: I wonder if the search engines of tomorrow will be a lot less powerful than they are today. Maybe, they could reduce to a librarian of sorts– pointing you in the general direction where you could learn more, but leaving it to the reader to find the exact book she wants.

This is, of course, the opposite of Universal Search, the holy grail that major search providers are gravitating towards, but one can already see the signs of this development: when I wanted Wordpress themes for this blog, for instance, Google first pointed me to Smashing Magazine. Once at the site, I used Smashing’s search engine to find the theme (in the end I didn’t use it though: just went with a default for now)

I’m sure you’ve encountered similar situations yourself (searching for travel destinations, restaurant reviews, code samples…), and it would be interesting to know what you think of this problem too. Comment below.