The Internet has been described as a huge library since at least the early days of the World Wide Web. But it’s not just any library; it’s not even the Library of Congress. It’s more like all of the largest libraries in the world, without a good means of sifting the tomes of wisdom from the scribbling of crackpots, and it’s receiving more material continuously. How do you avoid getting lost in all of that?
Perhaps that's a slightly extreme comparison. After all, Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines are supposed to serve as our reference librarians to finding all the material we need, right? Well, according to research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), they're not doing as good a job of it as many of us would like. At the very least, the researchers think they could be doing a better job when it comes to finding key web sites covering the sciences.
The researchers, all from the Oxford Internet Institute, were studying how the Internet is changing the way people look for authoritative science information. In particular, it focused on academic researchers studying topics such as HIV/AIDS, climate change, terrorism, and the Internet and society. The researchers doing the study discovered that many of the organizations considered to be of high importance to the academics studying those fields didn't show up in the top 30 results in Google.
Let's look at the first example, HIV/AIDS. Academic researchers studying that field used certain "national journals, charity organizations, statistics and public sector organizations" for source material, according to the press release from ESRC. However, none of those specific items appeared in the top 30 results in Google for generic key words. Now you can argue that someone who is an academic researcher probably wouldn't be using generic key words, but that may not be entirely fair. If the information is on topic, why shouldn't the sites turn up respectably near the top for a generic key word search?
One possible answer is that at least some of those who run scientific web sites don't have a clear conception of SEO, or the need for it. Here's a point from the ESRC press release that I think most SEOs will find to be intuitively true: "A fundamental observation was that, despite popular perception, the Web is far from being a neutral source of information. It has a particular structure that steers the search in directions that may not be intended by the user and so makes some sites more accessible than others. Search engines such as Google play an increasingly important gate-keeping role that will influence the information that is found. They can shape 'winners and losers' by means that are not always apparent and moreover do so in a manner which can vary according to subject matter."
Search Optimization 
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