Mediarun Search Marketing News

IBM trials tailored search engine tool

August 11th 2010

Search Engine Optimisation News

Could IBM enter the search engine fray and give Google, Yahoo and Bing another service to worry about?

Google's supremacy in the realm of search engine optimisation appears to be unshaken by the plethora of challenges from other IT giants, but if they keep coming, Google won't be able to just continue expanding its user base at the click of a button.

Fortunately for Google, the new IBM analytical search tool is in no way a direct challenge to Google's public-facing service, which is loved by consumers and SEO agencies the world over. It could, however, change the way that companies target search engines when they embark on a website optimisation strategy.

IBM developed its analytics-based search engine for North Carolina State University to reduce the amount of time and effort staff spent searching for firms to invest in their various technological innovations.

The university used two IBM applications, called Big Sheets and Language Ware, to systematically refine search engine results - dramatically reducing the amount of data staff had to sift through before stumbling upon something useful.

IBM's trial of its new tool revolved around finding investors for the university's recently developed salmonella vaccine and medication inhaler. By using standard search engines, the system collates huge amounts of data and then sifts through it, refining its output and improving the data's usefulness.

And so far, the tests have been successful, with university staff slashing search times from an average of four months to just one week.

While not commercially applicable at the moment, IBM's analytical search tool could change the way people search - and as a result the way SEO Companies implement search engine marketing strategies.

This is particularly true as web 2.0 technology and interactive content makes the world wide web a more engaging, but also more complex, place.

It isn't a huge leap to assume that consumers will soon customise their search criteria, dramatically narrowing down the results they are presented with when they search. This, in turn, would mean SEO agencies would have to make sure their search engine marketing initiatives were more tailored and targeted - so their content wouldn't get filtered out of search engine results page listings.

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