CorpComms Magazine

When I announced that I was intending to go two months without using an Internet search engine, it raised a few eyebrows. I was called, among other less repeatable things, 'brave', 'bold' and, most commonly, 'crazy'. But now that it's over and I'm back in the land of Google, I can honestly say that the #NoSearch project was one of the best things I've ever done.

What it did was force me out of my comfort zone, to think differently and to use the web in new ways. I was amazed in the first week or so not how much I rely on the web, but just how easy it is to dive into a search engine without even realising you're doing it. Search engines are quite simply the glue that binds the web together, and when you take that glue away, everything starts to fall apart.

The experiment has taught me numerous things about the nature of search, how search engines operate and the psychology of the Internet, search engine optimisation (SEO), the use of social media, about how different social media platforms compare and contrast, and about the nature and value of online communities. In short, it's changed the way I think about the web, the advice I'm offering clients, and also my own behaviour on the Internet for good.

Key lessons I learned from the project:

1. The larger a network becomes, the less useful it becomes. It's not groundbreaking to state that social media isn't about numbers of followers and fans, but it would appear to me that further to that there's an inverse relationship between the size of a network and its value/usefulness. Common belief holds that the larger the number of connections in a network, the greater the collective intelligence and the greater the number and quality of interactions that occur. But the social web is extremely fragmented, and that makes developing beneficial relationships and finding relevant information far more difficult than it should be when the concept of the web in the first place was to connect us all.

2. Search engines have immense power over you, me and our customers, and the way we all perceive the world. We have absolute blind faith in search engine results and we virtually never question whether what Google or Bing or Yahoo! is showing us is most relevant to what we want. We quite simply trust that search engines give us back the best results. Google has become something of a cult to which we have unquestioning devotion. And search engines now push results to you via instant search, making them even more influential.

3. The quality of information that comes from a social network is far better than that which comes from a search engine. It's time-consuming and frustrating to ask a network for information, but unless you're after expediency, local knowledge or something very personal, social networks hold all the best answers.

4. Search engine optimisation has to evolve very fast to keep up with social media. Standard search results can be and are controlled by search engine optimisation professionals artificially generating and optimising backlinks, keyword stuffing and the like. But social search is becoming a reality, and this will take search to a whole new level. Very shortly it will become important to have a social element to back up what appears in the search engine results pages - a top three position will no longer be enough.

5. On-site search engines are vital. People don't hang around on websites, even if they're undertaking some stupid experiment where it takes them ages to find a site in the first place. So implementing blog-styled search and tagging on any website is a must when sites are redesigned.

6. Social bookmarking is one of the most overlooked and underrated elements of social media. The amount of information stored in Delicious and Digg is tremendous and, if recent reports are to be believed, the power of Stumbleupon in driving web traffic is huge. It's an area that more people and companies should start using actively.

There have been many more ways in which I've benefited from undertaking the #NoSearch project, and I'll be reporting on all of these over the coming weeks on my blog or on Facebook. In the meantime, I hope you're able to adapt what I've learned to use in your own organisation.

Find Paul at www.thesocialweb.co.uk or www.facebook.com/TheSocialWeb.co.uk

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