Persistent Search? Wave of the Future?

by Sapphire (March 31, 2005)

Forget your own sites for a minute, and think like a searcher. The web was designed for academics, originally, posting stuff to be archived. It wasn’t meant to be up-to-the-minute info. But thanks to dynamic programming and some people keen to make a profit, we’ve come to expect the net to give us immediate info.

Have you ever done a search for the latest info on some fairly big news story? Usually the very biggest stories will be updated regularly, but the moderately hot ones will lag days behind in the SERPS. You have to go to the actual news site to find it at all.

This is because the search engines are archivists, when you get right down to it. They take days, even months, to index sites. If you want to find out whether that shake you just felt was an earthquake or just very close thunder, the search engines definitely aren’t going to help.

In steps the concept of Persistent Search Tools. By focusing on the latest instead of waiting to see if a site stands the test of time, these guys stand to corner something the big SE’s have not as yet touched. Will it replace the more archival set-up we’re used to?

It could, so long as the quality of results is competitive (which, lately, in my opinion is not a high bar). But in either case, it should provide a very different and useful service.

Check out PubSub, who looks poised to lead the way.

Posted in SEO
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