Balkanization of the Web?

In today's MediaPost Search Insider blog, search engine marketing professional Steve Baldwin wrote about what he foresees as the "Balkanization of the Web."

He says that, in order for suppliers of premium web content to stay alive, they will begin to release their information only to those search engines that cut them the best deals. This will result in information being divided among the various search engines, such that certain content is exclusive to specific search engines. Thus users will find themselves pushed to one engine or another, depending on the content they are seeking.

Baldwin thinks that this is the only real method by which search engines can distinguish themselves, since users care about the relevance of search results (which is now basically uniform across search engines), not the bells and whistles of a given search engine.

Now I'm no SEM expert as Mr. Baldwin is, but I must disagree with his prediction. I cannot see how such splitting up of web content is a good idea for any party involved. Nor would it ever begin to happen. Here's why.

One, the providers of premium content to whom Mr. Baldwin refers (i.e. The New York Times) are in no position to bargain for "better deals" from search engines. They are dying. Their readership is declining. They are trying to figure out how to renew their relevance and attract more readers. That is why they engage in SEO and SEM in the first place - so that any and every potential reader can find them in any and every pertinent search on any and every search engine. Creating an artificial scarcity, or threatening to, would be shooting themselves in the foot.

Two, search engines will not want to restrict themselves to only certain types of information. In other industries, concentrating all of one's resources in one product category enables a business to become truly and distinctively excellent in that category. This is not true for search engines. For search engines, there is no competitive advantage to ignoring some topics in order to focus on others. Nor will the search engines be forced to do so by the content providers, because, as noted in reason #1 above, the content providers have no bargaining power.

Three, users won't stand for it. Sharing and finding information on the Web should be free and easy. Users won't want to try several different search engines before they find the information they want - not when they can use Google to find virtually everything. And, as noted in reason #2 above, Google (and every other search engine) has no motive to limit the kinds of information it can find for users; therefore, users will continue to be able to find everything there.

The search engines and the dying providers of premium content will need to find another way to monetize their offerings. Sorry, Mr. Baldwin, but artificially limiting their products won't work. If they want to make money, they should try providing services that consumers perceive as worth paying money for.

You've Seen Bing? Check Out Spezify

Since Microsoft's release of Bing last month, there has been much discussion from marketing, business, and technology news sources (or opinion sources) about how Bing performs. In particular, how Bing performs in comparison to #1 search engine Google.

At the risk of merely adding to the hullabaloo, I would like to recognize another newly debuted - and not yet as well-known - search engine, Spezify.

Spezify.com, released on June 15, takes a different approach to presenting information. Rather than showing search results as a list of text links, Spezify displays a non-linear collection of images, video, blogs, news feeds, tweets, and articles from all over the Web. The effect is a smorgasbord of content, arranged rather like a bulletin board. Spezify also generates a list of related search terms for probing further.

According to Spezify founders Felix af Ekenstam and Per Persson (both of Sweden), Spezify is about "Inspired Search." It certainly seems that Spezify is great for exploration - for learning and discovering information in various media from a plethora of sources.

Do I think that Spezify take over the likes of Google, Yahoo, Ask, Dogpile, and Bing? No; I think Spezify is suited for a different purpose. Spezify is perfect for gathering information and discovering interesting content from a variety of sources. However, since Spezify assigns no order of importance, relevance, or credibility to its search results (a task that arguably is responsible for Google's dominance among search engines), Spezify is not the place to search for, say, the website of your favorite musician, or directions for your road trip, or places to purchase a new laptop.

Perhaps this differentiation of purpose is the exact feature that will enable Spezify to thrive alongside, rather than compete with, Google.