Wikiasari – humans become algorithms!

Seen by many as the latest sign of the relentless ‘rise of the machines’, Wikiasari is a search engine taking the next evolutionary leap forward to where human meets algorithm!

It was nearly three years ago that the professional web design and SEM industry heard Wikipedia announce they were going to build Wikiasari – a new search engine for the web. Promising a revolution in search engine capability, it would be programmed to find and display results based on what humans think are the most important!

At first it was thought that this would be the beginning of the end of search engine optimisation, recognised as standard for any website to function efficiently, especially amongst ecommerce businesses in Cheshire and the North West.

Currently, search results are based on complex algorithms. Over the past decade an entireSEO industry has developed out of the need for businesses to gain an edge and appear higher up the PageRankings than their competitors.

Online marketing means creating ever more persuasive methods for more visitors to find your website. “If they can’t find you on Google, then you might as well not exist”, has become a well-known phrase!

The key method to get to the top of the search rankings has been to optimise your content around keywords (the phrases users type into the Google box to find you) to ensure the ‘search engine spiders’ associate your site with those words.

Wikiasari are proposing that humans and not algorithms will now be taking the critical decisions of what is relevant ’quality’ keyword content.

However, SEO already incorporates usability and users’ opinions! To date, search engines have understood the importance of getting users’ opinions factored in and Wikiasari is just an obvious progression of this. Search engines have basically always tried to mirror what users want.

Thus, the number of inbound links a site has plays a major part in its search engine ranking. Every link to your site essentially represents a vote for your website – the more votes (especially from quality sites) the higher in the rankings your site will appear.

Again, search engines rank sites with well-written content containing good spelling and grammar, higher than those without. Google Analytics enables detailed assessment of sites which have the most conversions, and are effectively votes for that site by users to be ranked higher.

Bookmarking sites are all about user generated content. The best sites are voted for and then promoted to the front page.

search engine optimisation is and always has been ‘content usability’ and is essential to achieve high ranking. Users’ opinions have always been important and Wikiasari is the next natural step forward.