In the past few days I've been doing quite a bit of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and in the have begun to wonder just how good the search engine Google really is - and will be in the future. A recent conversation with a good friend really started me thinking - as I explained all the different techniques for optimizing a webpage, and the techniques that Google considers "Search Engine Spam", I kept receiving the same reply: "Man, that's dumb!"

The most repeated advice given out by professional SEO's is to follow Google's Information For Webmasters. Many of these guidelines can be filed either under common sense, or just plain best-practice. In general, these are things that you should be doing already. There are other things that affect a web page's listing in the search results that aren't covered in Google's information. One of the things that search engines including Google like, is pages with regularly updated content. While having a website where the content changes daily or even monthly might be useful to some, it doesn't work for all websites. Consider an article writen about a specific event, say the 9/11 attacks on the US. Should this content be changed often? And should this page be penalized for not being updated? Common sense says no, but unfortunately the search engines don't agree.

Another thing that search engines like are sites with many, many pages. My largest concern here is that with new technologies like AJAX picking up steam all over the web, we're beginning to see the end of sites with hundreds of individual pages. And since Google still can't index sites that use frames, which have been around forever, can we ever expect them to index sites that use AJAX? Personally I like the idea of being able to create a website that consists of a single page and have the content dynamically update or change without the user having to either wait for the page to reload or navigate to another page.

In other words, if a designer or SEO were to stay completely true to all of the guidelines and techniques to optimize a page, all of there sites would look like they were created in 1995. Seriously! Think about all the things search engines don't like or don't get along with. They love text links, they don't like images as links, they can't index frames or Flash, they don't like javascript, and they hate splash pages. All of these have become commonplace on the web today in order to enhance the user experience, and the search engine companies keep telling us to design sites for the user first. Looks to me that they are just adding insult to injury by setting us up for failure.

In my opinion, one of the biggest problems is companies like Google and Yahoo is that they are getting away from what they do best and what they were conceived to be - Search Engines. Although some of Google's tools like Desktop Search, Maps, Gmail, and Video are cool, they are distracting them from fixing some of the fundamental problems with search engine technology today.

I understand that Google isn't the only search engine out there but it is by far the most popular. Forget hits, just look at their earnings report and stock price. It is for this reason why most SEO's and web developers, including myself, optimize for Google first. If todays search engines, including the industry leader Google don't get their act together and figure out how to embrace and index sites that are using some of these new, and for that matter old, technologies, the question will be whether they will be of any use to us in the world of Web 2.0?