According to Edelman Digital, in July 2008, Google registered 7.23 billion searches. The main use of the internet has become searches. Google was created as a noun and has evolved into an verb. You want to figure something out simply “Google” it.
Search Engine Visibility, an Edelman Insights paper looks at ways to get noticed in this age of Google. The authors state that the majority of people never click to the second page after the results of a search come up. This means that if you want to get noticed, you have to show up in that first page. The paper offered insites and suggestions to getting noticed in the search engine world. I personally found several things in this paper to be helpful and new. Here is a little summary about what I gathered from reading this paper:
1. What did I learn?
- There are four search engine visibility disciplines: paid search, optimized search, reputational search and social search.
- Links are very important when searching and when trying to get something moved to the top of a search engine list.
- Making a list of key words that people use while using a search engine can help you more up the charts if you use those key words in titles.
- Twitter Search and Facebook have become reliable search tools.
- In Reputational Search, there are three very basic components involved: research/planning, content development and measurement.
2. What surprised me?
- Some companies set up fake websites called “link farms” in order to help them move up on search engine pages.
- More people use Twitter Search rather than Google News when breaking news occurs.
- Social searches are becoming more necessary in the existence of search engines.
- “The average American visited 111 domains and 2,554 pages in March 2009.”
- There are five simple steps to be more visible online: research, teamwork, planning, experimentation and benevolence.
3. What do I want to know more about?
- What are the latest statistics regarding Google and other search engines?
- How are search engines dealing with “link farms?”
- Google has become synonymous with the word search. How are other search engines competing with Google?
Social Media and PR 
After reading Search Engine Visibility, I noticed many of the same things that you did. I think it is so interesting that the majority of people never click to the second page after the results of a search come up. People always want to click on the first thing they see, and it is competitive and hard to get to the top of the Google search engine. I also wanted to know what the latest statistics were when it came to Google and other search engines. It would be interesting to see how much things had changed in only two years.
I found it interesting as well that more people now use Twitter search than Google search for news, I couldn’t believe that, that many people were involved with Twitter. In addition, after reading the position paper I also was shocked reading that social searches are becoming more necessary in the existence of search engines. Also that people rarely click after the first page of searching, I know that this is true with myself… but I never knew other did that as well. I also agree with you and Alli and I think it would be nice to see the stats now for Google search engines.
One way that google deals with the link farms is they do not like websites that are linking to each other within the same IP address. So if you have a hosting account with a lot of sites and have them all linked to each other through pages they will most likely notice this and then take action to lower your ranking, possibly sand box your site, or not list you as high.