Search engine prognosis for future development areas
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Predictions for Google’s development directions in 2010

Predictions for Google’s development directions in 2010 - answered by Matt Cutts

Summary:

There are some main direction that Google is trying to improve: comprehensiveness, relevance and freshness and it’s more likely they will be also a goal in the future. Another direction to make some improvements is user interface. For SEOs there will always be two choices to make: to go on path of malware and potential illegal stuff which usually are faster but not for a long period of time or to choose the path of white hat techniques which will stand the test of time.

 

Matt's answer:

Historically, Google is good at several different things. But some of the stuff that we’re especially good at is: comprehensiveness, relevance and freshness, how fast we can index information, and the sort of speed that we’re able to return the search results and the sort of user experience. I think we’re going to keep drilling down on all of those areas.

 

  • We’re going to keep working on our comprehensive.
  • We’re going to keep pushing the relevance line higher and higher.
  • We’re going to try to return information, basically, in real-time where you can do a search and almost immediately be able to search for it and find it.

 

Now, that’s a challenge because you want it to be relevant as well. You don’t want to just find whatever the last person who talked about a current event, what they said. You want to find the important stuff when you’re digging around in the real-time stream.

 

We’re going to keep working on different changes to user interface

We wouldn’t say that we’re done at any point. We’re going to keep running experiments. So, I think that’s what the future holds for Google. I think for the Web, the trend that I see in SEO continues to be this fork in the road where there’s hacking and malware and illegal stuff that’s going on, and so SEOs have to ask themselves, “Do I want to go down this route where things are potentially illegal, where I could go to jail if I were to host malware or hack sites to do malware? Or do I want to go more towards the white hat path?”

 

You don’t want to get the overnight drive-by sort of wins that don’t last very long

They don’t stand the test of time. And if you take that path, you’re more likely to be competing with people who are potentially doing illegal things, like hacking sites. So, I think that fork in the road will become more clear.

 

We’ve already seen hacking continue to be more of an issue in 2009 and I think it will be even more so in 2010. So, when we look at our stats about what people access in the webmaster documentation, my site got hacked, for example, and the last little bit had a real spike and people looking at that article. So, it’s definitely a trend. It will definitely continue to be a trend where a lot more hacking and then a lot more malware happens, but we’ll keep tackling it. The best thing you can do is keep your server patched. Make sure that you stay up-to-date, and hopefully, maybe by the end of 2010 we’ll see the light at the end of the tunnel on that particular trend.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: