By trade, I specialize in search engine marketing.  About four years ago, when I entered the field, search engine optimization was the marketing buzzphrase.  If you were good enough at it, you could get paid thousands of dollars for very little work.  I know because I did.

Below are the searches for “search engine optimization” (red line) from 2004-2008.  As you can see, interest in the subject has fallen year over year.

But for every marketing buzzword that dies a slow death, there are a dozen more ready to take its place.  At the moment, that seems to be “social media marketing” (blue line).

As someone recently told me, internet years are like dog years.  Online display advertising is on its last legs, search engine optimization, in demand only four years ago, is now a commodity, and not far behind it’s display cousin.

It took roughly two decades for the internet to kill newspapers.  How long before new delivery mechanisms kill old models and leave all of those unwilling to adapt out in the rain?

Photo credit: renatotarga

Let me start off by saying that I am not one of those people who gets a cheap thrill by writing about the next Google-killer, or iPhone-killer, or Twitter-killer, for that matter.  Google is not going  anywhere anytime soon.  Yahoo and MSN have a very long way to go before they’ll catch up.

But those services aren’t Google’s greatest competition.  I reserve that title for services like Delicious, Yahoo’s social bookmarking service.

Years ago, when I began researching search engine optimization, I went to Google and did a couple of searches.  The results were mainly SEO companies who did a good job using the tactics they were selling.  But I didn’t find a lot in terms of information about how to “do” SEO.  (For those unfamiliar with SEO, it used to be a lot more of a black (box) art than it is today.)

The few sites I did manage to find of real value were the likes of SEOBook and SEOMoz.  From there, I visited every single resource that Aaron Wall and Rand Fishkin proposed.

So, even then, I depended more on trusted referrals than on search engine results.

That is exactly the role that Delicious fills for me today.

The problem with Google is that, for a lot of major terms, the results aren’t a list of the “best” resources, but a list of the best SEO’d sites or the ones with the most purchased links.  (Can anyone think of another reason why TheGeneral.com appears on the first page of Google results for an ultra-competitive term like “auto insurance”?)

Today, when I am researching a topic, I head straight to Delicious.com.  There I am able to find what the “crowd” deems to be the best resources.

This is not to say that Google’s results aren’t up to par in some cases.  But even in such cases, Google cannot compete on the timeliness of the results.  When I go to Google, I am liable to see the same results for at least three months, if not more.

On Delicious.com, the crowd is always voting, ensuring that I have a combination of the most important and most recent resources available.

Google uses a complex algorithm to determine the importance of a web page.  Delicious uses the most complex computing mechanism of all, the human brain, to make the same determination.

Search engines killed the directory model, in which users had to scour the web and “index” (in the librarian sense) dozens of web sites, by automating it.

Social bookmarking sites are nothing more than the web 2.0 directories.  The major difference is that each user is “tagging” web sites out of self interest, which, unlike with directories, makes the process scalable and self-perpetuating.

Search engines are here to stay.  But could social bookmarking sites be the next evolution in the quest to index all of the net’s data?  Could a combination of the two models make today’s search engine results pages look quaint by comparison?

And finally, is Yahoo, as a result of its ownership of Delicious, indeed the best poised to dethrone the giant?

Photo credit: Bruce Turner