It sometimes surprises me how little people consider how search engines choose which websites should rank highly.

Britain is a well-informed country – people select a newspaper which suits their opinions and watch different news programmes depending on whether they want to hear about Madonna or Mandela – yet very few seem to consider the power search portals hold over the information they receive.

I think that as an SEO professional, I sometimes forget that not everyone understands or has even considered the control the big search providers could exert over the internet if they chose to.

Now and again, a newspaper will illustrate that the majority of people do not understand the way search engines work by publishing a lengthy explanation of website optimisation, like this recent one in the Sunday Times (which described SEO as “part crystal-ball watching, part trial and error”).

It is unlikely that any search engine would ever threaten its commercial position – in the UK at least – by exercising an unhealthy level of editorial control or imposing a political slant on the information its users could easily access.

However, the general lack of awareness about the search portals we use everyday makes me glad there are so many companies and SEO professionals whose job it is to watch and analyse changes to the algorithms they use. There are thousands of sector workers who rapidly discover and discuss changes in the generation of search results through their blogs and various marketing forums. It can only be healthy.

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