Why do search engine tools such as Baidu and Sogou fail?

It is often assumed that tools will evolve with the times and technological advances, but this is not the case. Search engines have a history of more than 20 years of development, but after the start of the mobile Internet, the value of search engines has gradually decreased, especially in terms of effectiveness as a tool, it is facing the dilemma of failure.

Including Baidu, Headline Search, WeChat Search, Sogou, and 360 Search, it is becoming increasingly difficult for users to search for the information they want online. First, there is more and more information noise, even the content of the home page of the search engine, it is difficult to find a web page that matches the needs of users; the second is that advertising is everywhere, arbitrarily encroaching on the already crowded screen space; third, the content of each platform's own content crowds out the content of other web pages, making it difficult to display more accurate information.

In the PC era, search engines are the "entrance" to all websites, and without search engines, it is difficult for users to find the information they want from tens of thousands of websites. The mobile Internet has reconstructed the entire content industry, and each independent App has become an "information island" that is not interconnected with each other, such as WeChat public account, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Aiyouteng, etc. Users can obtain information through apps, and the "entrance" status of search engines has been completely broken.

To some extent, the "information island" of the App compresses the amount of content that the search engine can search, which also causes the lack of some content. Mobile Internet content penetration in all aspects, e-commerce, news and information products, WeChat public accounts, communities, etc. have begun to fully content, short videos, graphics and other content mixed in, millions of content industry practitioners in the relevant App to create content, although many of these content is low value information, but there is no lack of valuable content, but these content is not indexed by search engines.

Operating the website itself requires a lot of costs, for example, domain names and servers, for website developers, the development of the app is more likely to make money than the operation of the website, and the website hanging there can only lose money, therefore, more and more developers choose to close the website, which means that more and more website content is beginning to become less. According to CNNIC, as of December 2021, the number of mainland websites was 4.18 million, down 250,000 from December 2020, down 5.5% year-on-year and 1.15 million fewer than in 2017.

The reduction of a large amount of content is one of the factors that lead to the failure of search engines, the comprehensive invasion of SEO (search engine optimization) has also led to the failure of search engines, in the early days of the Internet industry, search engines are very welcome to SEO, which is conducive to search engines to better index the website, but also can make the long-tail words play a better effect.

But SEO penetration is everywhere, when users enter keywords in search engines, SEO content tends to be displayed first, and SEO content is either marketing content or purely to deceive traffic and attract users to click, and there is very little really valuable content.

In order to make more high-quality content displayed, search engines prefer original content, and a large number of SEOs have created a lot of pseudo-original content in order to deceive search engines, and these pseudo-original content is either a patchwork or a random compilation through tools, often the context does not read smoothly. In some professional network marketing teams, there may be specialized pseudo-original editors to create relevant content.

Search engines don't clean up this pseudo-original content, and due to the reduction of websites, this pseudo-original content is instead given the opportunity to be revealed.

Another area of SEO intrusion is the delivery of advertorial ads to news sites, where news network stations have a higher weight in search engines than regular websites, and SEO has long made news sites a marketing focus. The impact of SEO intrusion on the user side is that either it is difficult to search for the desired information, or most of the useless spam that is found. Search engines can't judge the quality of content, but it's easy for users to tell if it's valid.

The third factor in search engine failure is the loss of trust. Search engines are not responsible for the truth or falsity of information, but it is a tool for users to retrieve information, if the information browsed by users is false and useless, as a tool search engine is naturally also responsible, search engines can not only think of making money by overwhelming advertising, but turn a blind eye to inferior information.

Just like medical information, for many users, now through the search engine search engine search medical information often encounter a problem, no matter what the problem, online search, is all kinds of extreme cases, do not get it is "cancer", and many people may just headache brain fever and other small problems, not so exaggerated. In the long run, users will only lose trust in the information on the Internet, and even the search engine tool will no longer trust.

Some netizens will think that changing a search engine will be better than Baidu? Its practicality is not large, because many problems are common diseases in the search engine industry, Baidu does not have problems, other search engines may not be able to completely eliminate, considering the effectiveness of information, users may have to use Baidu.

The advantage of information flow is that users can naturally get interesting content, but it also gradually eliminates the user's curiosity, and users constantly wait for the platform to "feed" information, rather than looking for information through search engines. In the face of the strong impact of information flow, search engines have also had to embark on the road of information flow recommendation.

The failure of the search engine is also related to commercialization, the platform needs to consider the problem of making money, and the best way to monetize commercialization is advertising, and if the platform wants to make money, it can only increase the density of advertising. Initially, the ads only occupied 3 in the head of the search engine, 3 at the tail, and now the head may be as many as 8, and there will be two or three ads in the normal content display page, so the user experience is so low that users will only hate using it more and more.

Users want a retrieval tool, not an advertising machine.

Guo Jing's Internet circle

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