The Internet is constantly growing, but in unpredictable ways, like a living organism.
For instance, ten years ago, blogs didn??™t exist; today, Technorati estimates that over
100,000 are created every day.4 Social networking sites have also changed how content
is distributed. Instead of people operating many small sites across millions of
domains, sites like Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn are collecting people??™s thoughts,
contacts, and interests like giant filing cabinets.
The Internet is decentralized. There is no master hierarchy or even pattern, so content
can only be regarded in context to other content. Search engines quickly evaluate
the relevance and importance of sites based on their relationship within the
network of content around it, and specifically how all those sites are linked to one
another. Through this, search engines help us understand which sites will serve
us best.
On the Web, there are two fundamental types of search: broad, web-wide searches conducted
through commercial search engines, and localized searches that confine queries to
a specific website. Marketing for the former is covered in Chapter 13.
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