GoogleGuy - 5:44 am on Jun 12, 2003 (gmt 0)

Q: Does Google ever consider that the vast majority of web designers (graphic designers, advertisers, web design professors, web design authors) do not design web sites around search engine queries, thus leaving out important words like the type of product they sell?

A: Absolutely. I think two important challenges for the future are discovering user intent and uncovering webmaster intent. User queries are often short, and it can be really hard to determine what the user is looking for. In the same way, a webmasters might not think of what words a user would type, or they might have to work under constraints that they can’t change (e.g. the title for every page might have to be the same). Lots of web designers don’t think about how search engines will see a site (lots of session ID’s, or framesets, or dynamic urls, etc.). I think one of search engines' big jobs will be indexing a site intelligently even if the site wasn’t designed with search engines in mind. Our bots do a pretty good job, but it would always be nice to do more so that people (users and web designers) don’t have to think as much about search engines and how they work.