Finding holes in the Google index
by Miriam
January 28th, 2007
Greetings All,
A recent post over at SEO by the Sea got me thinking about Difficult Queries and Identifying Missing Content in Search Engines. I sincerely advise anyone who builds websites to read Bill Slawski’s article in full, particularly because it will explain how a recent patent application he describes suggests how this topic might be viewed and handled by the people who build search engines. From my own point of view, as a web designer/SEO, the implications of this patent take on a particular meaning in relationship to seeking out niches of content that have yet to be saturated.
To quote Bill:
“That last benefit is something that creators of web pages should pay attention to also. If information in a certain field or market tends to be hidden behind user logins or appears upon pages that aren’t very search engine friendly, search results for queries for that information may be not very competitive. ”
The reason SEO exists is for the very fact that people continue to build pages that are not search engine friendly. Therefore, should you discover that an important subject is only being featured on Flash/Dynamic-type websites, making the move to serve up content on the subject on nice, clean, easy-to-index pages could prove quite lucrative. Keeping your eye out for this type of situation is a smart idea, but I feel you may also run into indicators of holes in the Google index in daily Internet use. I know I have.
A bit of history
In brief, about 2 years ago, my husband and I were parked at a crosswalk while some pedestrians were crossing the street. While stopped there, we were rear-ended by a driver who wasn’t looking where they were going. I sustained some serious soft tissue injuries that have yet to clear up entirely, and that affect my capacity to do anything that involves my neck being held up (birdwatching) or down (working on my computer!). Being a complete novice when it comes to anything legal, I figured I’d better hire a lawyer to help me make a claim for pain and suffering.
Unfortunately, things have not gone well. Because insurance companies have decided that most people claiming soft tissue injuries are probably big fat liars, attorneys don’t like to take on clients in these cases. So, the insurance companies don’t want to give money to people injured in this way, and lawyers don’t want to take on cases that don’t offer the chance for big earnings. Great, huh? In point of fact, I was only able to discover one lawyer in my whole area of California who was willing to take on my case. I was so happy to have found this guy!
Until I signed a contract with him.
This attorney simply will not return my phone calls. I leave him a message once a week, and have now not heard from him for 6 months. I don’t know if he’s filed my claim. I don’t know if he’s living in Mexico now. I only know that his receptionist will only tell me that she’ll let him know I’ve called. She makes clucking and sighing noises when I express my concerns and distress that her boss is failing to communicate with me. The statute of limitations is up on my claim next month. I’m worried. The receptionist will be sure to let him know this, she says.
I’m betting you can hear the mounting frustration in my words here.
I’m not a litigious person and don’t come from a litigious family. I haven’t been able to get any personal advice about what to do about this dismissive attorney. So, I turned to Google and looked up “negligent lawyer california” hoping to find out what a California resident should do if their lawyer is ignoring them in this manner.
And that’s how I discovered a hole in the Google index.
Google thinks I’m looking for something completely different - a ‘negligence lawyer’; someone who handles cases involving neglect of children, the elderly, etc. Google’s top 30 doesn’t contain a single listing for the subject I’m trying to research - a lawyer who is neglecting me and my claim. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do in this situation I find myself. Do I contact a citizens’ advocacy group? I can’t find one in Google in my area. Or, is one supposed to contact the California Bar Association? I just don’t know, and I can’t find a website devoted to this important subject.
Subsequent searches worded in other manners did yield a few results for ‘lawyer won’t return phone calls’, but none of them are geotargeted to my region. That’s the problem…every state has its own laws and policies, so how such matters are handled in Arkansas may have nothing to do with our rules in California for ethical attorney behavior. Frankly, most of the information my search has yielded has been very poorly written snippets by clients who are expressing their anger about lawyers in either vulgar or joking terms…not a big help!
At any rate, what my experience of hunting for advice about what my options are for dealing with this inconsiderate lawyer has lead me to see is that the Google index does not currently contain an authority source on the subject. If I had a client who was a California lawyer, I’d seriously be suggesting that he/she develop a section of content about this very topic. The legal services field is certainly one of those tough ones to get high rankings for, but here is an opening, waiting to be explored by a smart developer.
I am in no way trying to slight the legal profession here. I am sure there are many fine people in this field and that I have been unlucky. Yet, at the same time, my search on this subject has made it abundantly clear to me that I am not the only unhappy client out there and that others searching for ‘negligent lawyer’ are not necessarily looking for an attorney to handle a negligence case. It is interesting that Google makes this assumption about my search term, and seems a strong indicator that search engines have a ways to go in truly refining queries to serve up correct, relevant content to the users.
In conclusion, if I was able to find this hole in the index by chance, web developers/designers will be likely to discover many more areas of similar opportunity if they are purposely seeking them, and this may be an excellent pursuit to begin exploring as the web continues to become ever more congested.
It’s not getting easier to get high rankings. We’ve got to get smarter about the niche, the long tail and specialization if we want to offer the very best and most creative services to our clients.
Next Article: 14th Colony New Phone Number Previous Article: Cooking Google
January 28th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
Hi Miriam,
Thanks, I found the concept of a search engine attempting to map out were content was irrelevant or missing to be fascinating. It’s one of the reasons I like looking at search related patents - because sometimes they provide a glimpse at issues from a search engineers perspective that we might only guess at.
One of the difficulties that we face as searchers is that we can have a lot of problems finding information about things that we don’t know much about. I think that’s another thing that SEOs do, and can do well - is help site owners understand that they have to actually use words on their pages that people will search for. The information that you are searching for is online, but the California Bar Association doesn’t understand that the words people will use to try to find their information aren’t the words that they are using to help them find it.
The URL for the page is one of the ugliest I’ve seen associated with a web page, so there may be some question as to whether it is spiderable, too.
Here’s part of what you are looking for, from a page of the California State Bar Association (Alternative Solutions Short of Filing a Complaint):
At this point, with the statute of limitations running so close to an end point, you may want to consider making another call to the office, sending a registered letter - quick action is reasonable in light of the pending end of the statute of limitations - and calling the State Bar Association at their number on this page:
Registering a complaint
January 31st, 2007 at 5:06 pm
Thanks so much, Bill!
Bill was kind enough to email me about this directly. I want to follow up to say that I’ve sent a registered letter to the attorney, and really, really appreciated this sound advice.
Miriam
February 27th, 2007 at 5:47 am
I think the problem here is twofold. Firstly, Google services the majority. And most people will be looking for what it’s returning (I’d have thought). So partly the problem is your keywords.
But this highlights another, much bigger problem. Semantics. What something means to me, and what something means to you may be different. We search out of context, with single key words, combined to make a short key phrase. That inherently limits what a search engine can do. And we search in this way because search engines are limited to being able to cope with that.
What we need is a search engine that can interpret natural language queries. Where I can ask it, “How should I go about getting legal advice and aid in claiming negligence against a bad lawyer” and it’ll return what I want. But again, there are problems. First, people are lazy and don’t want to type all that. And second, search engines can’t make heads or tails of something like that. It’s too big, with no weight on individual words so they can figure out what the important parts are.
That’s why the ability to search in natural language, with a human-based semantic cross referential index is the holy grail of search to me. A search engine that can take key words, extrapolate from them the semantics of what you’re actually looking for, based on word placement, pluralism, case, tense, and return results based on that… That would nuke Google, Yahoo! and everyone else.
February 28th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Pete,
I think what you’re saying is that what we need is a long-long-longtail search engine!
I wonder if this could ever happen. Language always seems to move in the direction of simplification rather than the opposite, and English speakers have gone from speaking a complex idiom to a far more simplistic, snippet-like one over the past 7 or so centuries. I’d bet that the search engines we have today are even contributing to this at this point. A couple of words typed into a search box supposedly represented a whole world of thoughts, feelings or ideas. In other words, people are lazy by nature when it comes to oral communication, and the Internet allows us to be lazy in a way that was never possible before with the written word. It’s hard to imagine going in the opposite direction now that we’ve started out this way.
Good comments. I really appreciated your astute feedback on this
March 12th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
Pete, there’s been such a search engine, either Haiku, Haike, or a similarly named one. I forgot the exact name. It’d give exact answers to questions.
Maybe Bill will remember that one, I believe we discussed it a tad.