Google's New Blog, called "The Keyword"

[engine]

LOL, that just seems so ironic that we talk about keywords all the time, and that keywords feature less and less on their own, yet, Google has decided to call its own new blog, "The Keyword" in recognition of its origins. I would have thought it'd be called "The PageRank" ;)

Where you’re from is an important part of who you are, and the name “The Keyword” is a nod to the origins of search.

[blog.google...]

[Robert Charlton]

ironic... that keywords feature less and less on their own

I wouldn't be surprised if Google discussed this irony in the course of renaming. ;)

On the referenced blog post....

(Plus, we like that it has “word” in it.)

Alphabets generate words.

It could also be that over time, this usage will tend to broaden the idea of "keyword"... ever so slightly... to cover "concepts". I've never liked the name "keyword" as the generic search target... have always felt that it should be something like "search terms".

[phranque]

it's only blogs for the more "public facing" products.
blogs for Analytics, Webmaster Central, Adsense, etc are still on googleblog.com.
at this point they aren't redirecting legacy blog posts to the new blog.google.com hostname.

[tangor]

Where's the Animal Farm blog? That one might generate real interest!

[martinibuster]

>>> have always felt that it should be something like "search terms".

That's what information retrieval researchers call it.

The Keyword is an unfortunate name given that it's reflective of the past, as they acknowledge. Is the intent of the blog to keep the SEO community firmly in the past?

A good name would reflect the future or at least the present. Why look back at the past?

a nod to the origins of search.

Google was the revolutionary in that that links identified authority which made it possible to return better results. Google was predicated on the idea that identifying authority using links would help retrieve the best answer. In the nineties it was known that identifying authorities (and hubs) could help relevance. But it was PageRank that took the idea a step further.

The more profound revolution was figuring out that satisfying users was paramount. Thus, they didn't turn into a Yahoo portal, they kept it simple, then rolled out relevant ads, email with ten gigs of storage and so on. Imo, the revolutionary idea of putting the user first is one of their most important breakthroughs.

Naming this blog The Keyword... did Larry Page know about this?