Who's asking?

I am no search engine expert. I am not even a blogger! I love to read the Moz Blog, and I especially love Whiteboard Friday.  While I have heard it elsewhere as well, one analogy I received from WBF was the concept of a "Blind Surfer." Makes sense, and thus far it has made a killer engine. The algorithm is based on the theory of a blind surfer, a surfer randomly clicking through the Internet. But tonight I got to thinking about what the search experience might be like if Google could implement other surfers into its algorithms? There are infinite types of surfers, and some of them act like each other:

A stupid surfer, a non-human surfer (robots), a social surfer, a racially biased surfer, a shopping surfer, a surfer learning a new computer language, or a surfer who's late for work, etc.

Google may some day be able to learn from its users in a more intelligent way. It may one day be able to recognize very quickly through my session behavior, or even over time, or even through my own Google settings, that I am a surfer who:

• is learning PHP
• relies on Google to search PHP.net rather than doing it himself
• he does this because he uses Firefox, and uses the address bar as an all in one shortcut to navigate the net
• is somewhat informed, looking for something specific
• trusts Google to show a relevant snippet of the site to show EXACTLY what he's looking for, or he will search again because this is faster.

This really is me. The whole basis of this blog idea came from a session with Google that I did (in fact, experienced tonight) before giving in and searching the PHP.net manual.

I asked Google (in one "session", in this order):

• php this
• php $this
• php $this.something
• php what does this mean
• php tutorial this
• php this tutorial
• php $this tutorial -"this site"
• php $this tutorial -"this site" -"this tutorial"

I don't know if the Google toolbar is evolved enough to see all of the results of these pages:

• php this - Google Search 
• -php $this - Google Search
• -php $this.something - Google Search
• -php how does this work - Google Search
• -php what does $this mean - Google Search
• -php what does "$this" mean - Google Search
• -php tutorial this - Google Search
• -php $this tutorial - Google Search
• -php $this tutorial -"this site" - Google Search
• -php $this tutorial -"this site" -"this tutorial" - Google Search
• -php $this tutorial - Google Search

...and relate them together, and I certainly don't know if it assigned special weight to how far on each results page I scrolled down. If not already... one day, this could be a feature.  Who knows? It certainly seems possible to me.

Perhaps some of you search engine savvy people can improve upon my example below, but the idea remains the same. The idea is that Google would then be trying to understand me and my search. To clarify: I don't mean Google as a company, but as a search engine. As a company they do this every day. An evolved search engine might one day see:

(Anonymous US Firefox Surfer #4,506,387,017) :

• php this - Google Search 
  • scrolled 3 results
• -php $this - Google Search
  • previous query similar, with added char $
• -php $this.something - Google Search
  • previous query similar, with added .something
• -php how does this work - Google Search
  • note, stupid evolved Google may see: "php" "how do things work," but that's another hurdle.
  • evolved Google might see php how does this work, or possibly "php this" "how does it work"
• -php what does $this mean - Google Search
  • well-evolved Google is now way too smart to miss the POSSIBILITY that the user wants to find stuff related to category:"how things work" AND category:"php" AND contains the text "$this"
  • this decision might be made by an algorithm that came from another algorithm that performs a statistical analysis of archived search result data... it might not... who knows?
  • perhaps then, evolved Google now has a HUNCH and then (because evolved Google is now curious) compares some of the results of Query(HUNCH) to the cached texts of some of the results from this particular user's previous queries. Any matches are stored as super relevant to this surfer.
  • Google relates this information in MANY ways, based on all the other information it has collected. 
  • I'd like to take a moment to address WHY Google even cares. Google is trying its damned hardest to bring up a relevant page for this stupid or lazy surfer. This satisfies lazy surfer, and brings him back. This improves the search experience.
• -php what does "$this" mean - Google Search
  • evolved Google knows "this" is obviously relevant
• -php tutorial this - Google Search
  • tutorial is now relevant
• -php $this tutorial - Google Search
• -php $this tutorial -"this site" - Google Search
  • "this" does not apply to "this site"
• -php $this tutorial -"this site" -"this tutorial" - Google Search
  • you get the picture.

The Google of today returns results mostly on PHP.net and their bugs section, which isn't relevant. My search experience was not so great this time.

The Google of tomorrow returns

" A pseudo-variable, $this is available when a method is called from within an object context. $this is a reference to the calling object (usually the object to which the method belongs, but can be another object, if the method is called statically from the context of a secondary object). This is illustrated in the following examples:"

From: http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.basic.php 

So then what if one day, a search engine taught itself new trends by spidering its own logs? Surely after 3.0, or 4.0 or Version X, an evolved Google might be given the ability to truly understand. What if by crawling its own algorithm, and own results, and its own database of information- with a comparable analytical zeal it currently exerts to crawl the web- it might at one point begin to show signs of true intelligence, much like we do as people? Our brains work a lot like search engines in many ways. Why can't the search engine become smart like the human?