The Orion Effect - How Google's Latest Acquisition May Affect Your Website
Israeli student, Ori Allon, is rich. He got that way when Google recently bought Allon’s search engine algorithm – tagged Orion – and hired him to work at the company’s Mountain View HQ.
Allon, a student at the University of New South Wales in Australia, had been working on the revolutionary new weighting criteria as part of his post-graduate work. While Orion has made Ori a very wealthy 26-year old, the purchase raises some interesting questions about how Orion changes the digital landscape.
Google’s Algorithm Today
A search engine algorithm is simply a mathematical formula that weights various aspects of web sites to determine their usefulness, or relevance, to a user’s query. Google’s current SE algorithm is protected like Fort Knox but experience shows what Google spiders consider important. Keyword density, inbound links, fresh, informational content, no spamglish – all are factors in determining how sites are ranked on Google’s current search engine results pages (SERPs).
Experienced site owners and SEOs know what Google spiders want to see and build their sites accordingly, often compromising accessibility, quality and relevance. Keyword dense text may appeal to spiders but it’s pretty dry when read by real humans.
The goal of any search engine is to deliver the highest quality, most relevant results to users, and some experts say that’s why Google bought Orion. Others suggest that Orion was snapped up to keep it out of the hands of other SEs, which raises the interesting possibility that Google may never actually deploy Orion.
However, even if the company never uses Allon’s algo (still in the development stages) the impact of Allon’s well-publicized proclamations of Orion’s power have already made an impact on everything from site design to SEO.
SE 2.0
You might call it SE 2.0 – the next generation of search engine spider. The big weakness in today’s search engines is relevancy, or rather the lack of relevancy. Relevant SERPs are the goal of any search engine and the SE that does it best wins.
Today’s search engine algorithms are limited. They read letter strings, count up the number of times letters are repeated (keywords), assess links and hope for the best. Let’s face it, SE bots aren’t bright and making subjective judgments about the real usefulness of a letter string is non-existent.
Higher Quality SERPs
When sites are indexed, spiders don’t know good text from bad, useful from a waste of time. If there are enough keywords linked in an accepted format (SEO text), current technology will deliver the site link to the SE user, regardless of the quality of the content and its relevance to the user’s query.
Orion moves SE technology to the next level by enabling SE spiders to not only count keywords, but to also assess the quality of the content and, ultimately, deliver more relevant SERPs. How Orion assesses quality – an elusive concept to say the least – is still under wraps and will be for the next 18 months while Ori and the rest of the Google team develop and define Orion’s rules and conditions for determining PR.
Expanded Searches
Another aspect of the Orion algo is its ability to suggest alternative searches based on a user’s initial query. This enables any SE user to expand a search, even if s/he knows nothing about the topic. And that increases the power of Google’s SE by creating more search options (and more revenue).
Expanded Extracts
A press release issued by Ori Allon before being hired by Google suggests that the Orion algorithm will be pulling more content from actual web pages for display on Google’s SERPs.
Allon states, “The results to the query are displayed immediately in the form of expanded text extracts, giving you the relevant information without having to go to the website.” Now whether this is actually the case, or whether Allon was just trying to drum up some notoriety, expanded extracts are sure to create copyright issues for Google. Site content has an owner and that owner has the right to protect intellectual property.
The Orion Effect
It’s coming. The next generation of search engine spider is in development and site owners, webmasters, site designers and SEOs had better take note – now. If you wait to make changes to your site, you may just find yourself buried in the backwash of Google SERPs wondering where your business went.
How will the Orion Effect manifest itself?
Current SEO text – thick with keywords and of little use to SE users – will have to be rewritten. Remember, SE 2.0 is capable of judging quality and if a home page doesn’t deliver quality, relevant, useful content it’s going to lose points with Google.
Changes in site keywords are almost inevitable. This new technology recommends keywords and search paths to SE users – some of which may need to be added to your HTML keyword tags. An expanded search function may also divert traffic from your site if keywords aren’t selected with absolute precision.
Content protection will become a critical consideration if and when Orion is launched. With expanded extracts, users will find the relevant content without actually visiting your site. All search engines are moving toward providing content to users as well as pointing users to additional resources – a potential problem for owners of sites deep in informational content.
Then there’s the question of what extracts you want shown on SERPs. Today, SERPs display the contents of an HTML description tag under SERPs links, giving the site owner or designer control over how the site is presented to SE users. With the prospect of expanded extracts, we all run the risk of having our sites misrepresented by SE spiders who extracted an “out of context” block of text. Placement of extraction content will become another challenge for SEOs.
And there are sure to be other effects on site design and SEO. And those site owners who ignore the inevitable will simply become invisible in the dawn of The Orion Effect and SE 2.0.
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