Searching - A Web 2.0 Technique

The term Web 2.0 is used to denote a collection of techniques that are aimed at enhancing creativity, communication mechanisms, information exchange, security etc. on the web. It thus symbolizes the changing trends in web technology or the Internet. Some of the most popular concepts that have been initiated by Web 2.0 are social networking sites, Wikis, blogs etc. Web 2.0 intends to improve the interactivity of web delivered content. It has an Internet-centric policy, in the sense that applications will be built to suit the Internet and not the other way round. The popular techniques that have come to the Internet applications as a contribution of Web 2.0 are Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions and Signals.

Search allows you to find information based on any keyword that you know. Search could be carried out in two ways – searching all the websites for information, or searching within a specific site for information. Popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and lots of others provide the search functionality.

Search based on Web 2.0 is different from the traditional search. Traditional search engines are based on the concept of information retrieval. They use a variety of techniques such as proximity searches, text relevance, Boolean queries etc. to find the required information. According to the technology used in employing search, the technologies may be categorized in to three generations. In the first generation, search is based on the page content of websites. In the second generation of search technologies, the structure of the Web is accounted for while analyzing links. Most recent third generation search combines both the aspects of scalability and relevancy models. To achieve this the third generation search technologies use various techniques such as user preferences, collective intelligence etc.

These customized and very personalized forms of searches aim at improving the interaction and experience of users while using the Internet. It drives up the customer satisfaction for any business.

Web 2.0 search aims at improving the quality of search through the use of what is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO improves the volume of traffic to a website along with its quality. SEO uses page-ranking algorithms to determine the ‘quality’ of a page in terms of its contents and relevance to the search key word. Based on these parameters, the web pages are ranked and indexed and the most relevant results are presented to the user in the order of decreasing relevance and quality. From the website side, SEO can be done by adding content that will be more relevant, by periodically the already existing contents and by adding key words. One parameter that is important in this regard is the keyword density, which is the number of keywords per a fixed number of lines.

There are many strategies that are used to beat the page ranking algorithms used by the search engines. A class of such techniques is called Black hat or Spamdexing. This method employs the strategy of inserting excessive and irrelevant key words to a site so that it will be indexed higher in a search. Search engines use a technique called crawling that extracts information from the links in a website to present information.

On the whole Web2.0 is a powerful tool for marketing as far as any business is concerned.