Going Back to the Village

The lady on the phone insisted for the third time: “You will get a real good position and only for this price.” After several calls, dozens of e-mails and talks she had with her manager for us, she offered ‘her’ reduction to me. All this service without being asked. She was selling ‘positions’ for a big search engine. For the good order: the positions are related to keywords, which people use when searching on the internet and which can be called the ‘core’ of the whole internet marketing.“Well, let me see my position then” I said. Following the instructions given by her I typed in the keywords. And there I was. Having not been on this search engine for a long time, I was surprised. Almost every part, every space of the result page was filled with links, banners, sponsored sites and ‘hikis and fikis’ or whatever it might be called. The results, for which a search engine is actually used for, looked like a land of borders: on the top, middle and bottom of the results were three sponsored links placed. I don’t know why, but suddenly this chaos on the screen reminded me of the metropolitan suburbs of developing countries.Only buildings next to each other; one higher or uglier than the other one. No matter if you have rented a room on the top, middle or on the first floor you easily get the feeling of suffocating only by watching. You would rather leave and never come back. How come, I am having the same feeling now? How fast did this happen? It was not long ago; maybe six or seven years, when the internet got integrated in daily life and I also started to use it. Without being disrupted I could go through to the tenth page of the results. While searching the feeling of being surprised by the expected results arose. It was like the results were your own, only yours. The cleanness of the pages surely supported such feelings. Later, surfing on the internet diminished to five or six pages. And by now I do not surf more than two pages of the results. This is amazing! Although meanwhile the amount of sites that have been created by people and the data of search engines have been growing in high speed, people are now not going further than the second page. Why? Is it because the search engines give better results within the first two pages? Or is it because of the tiredness that afflicts you while searching? I suppose it is more the second option. I would call this the effect of the ‘urbanization of internet’. Like the cities, the internet has grown fast, uncoordinated and hungry. As a result web-buildings don’t really differ from city-buildings in developing countries. You would like to leave as soon as possible. Billions of keyword combinations are offered for sale. The more popular the keywords, or lets say the more commercial the keywords, the faster a result page grows and the more expensive a place is getting there. Now she was offering me the possibility of renting a good position in one of these “suburbs” of the internet. And this for a good price for the next 12 months!The words, by themselves, flew out of my mouth: ‘I would rather go back to the village,’ I said. ‘The country side, you know?’, I repeated slowly.Probably, she couldn’t place my comments. She thought a bit and said: ‘Yes, yes. That is what all of us want to do in the end. But till then think about the usage of the keyword position I offered to you.”Well, what can I say: let’s think then about the keywords and positions that are so determined in our businesses and in our developments either as a company or as a daily user of this immense machine going on. Before the end, well to remember! (This article is written in the serial of ‘The urbanization of internet’ at http://www.tobook.com/newsletter/newsletter.asp)