It’s hard to imagine life without search engines. Where would we be if we couldn’t check our stocks with a few keystrokes, pull up a recipe for dinner, or order that new pair of shoes in a matter of minutes? But even the best things in life can be improved. We asked a panel of professionals to share their thoughts on what would make search engines even better. Here’s what they had to say.
Daniel Caughill

Daniel Caughill

Daniel Caughill is a professional journalist, marketer, and one of the co-founders of The Dog Tale. His work has been featured on Frontline Education, Yahoo! Finance, NASDAQ, NewsMax, ValuePenguin, LendingTree, LendEDU, Cheapism, and Smallpdf.

Adding Revenue-share Program

I’d add a revenue-share program to align the goals of content creators and search engines. Year-after-year, search engines take more away from content creators by scraping their content and displaying it in info cards and featured snippets. This results in no-click searches and robs small businesses of their hard-earned revenue.

A revenue-share program could have a Robin Hood effect on the web, diverting some of that revenue massive search engines earn at the SERP level and distributing it to the small businesses that made that SERP feature possible.

Page Preview

One of the most important goals [for] our own website is to please the search engines and get to the top of the search engine results pages (SERP). But as a user, I think I would love to have the option of having a preview of the page at the other side of the screen whenever my cursor lays over the link or title. This [would] save loading time and help the user avoid pages with identical content. Those links with the same title and content confuse and bait people to visit their sites without really providing useful information. They also make it to the top, beating websites with genuine publications and articles.

Sonya Schwartz

Sonya Schwartz

Sonya Schwartz, Founder of Her Norm.

Scot J Chrisman

Scot J Chrisman

Scot J Chrisman, founder and CEO at The Media House.

Search Filtering

Search engines have become a part of my everyday life, not only in business but also in my personal life. Whenever I come across something that I do not know, I just go to Google and search for it – then I’ve got what I need and I am one piece of information smarter. However, as good as search engines are already, I still wish that search engines [could] filter everything that they show as search results and have it validated for fact-checking. This would be of great help for the battle against fake news and the spread of derogatory information against people. This would also greatly improve the reliability of search results.

Ban Websites Placing Too Many Ads

Sometimes website content is good, but ad bombardment makes our visits annoying. So, search engines must implement strict criteria regarding user experience. They should un-index all the sites placing too many ads. These criteria should be for all website pages, not just the major ones; thus, websites giving higher importance to user experience would be encouraged. Contrarily, the ones focusing only on earning through ad placement would change their strategies. It would become the source of good ratings for search engines and motivate people to find better ways to earn. For example, AdSense has little potential to give money unless and until you have considerable traffic. Contrarily, selling digital products or signing for affiliate programs are big tickets!

Gintaras Steponkus

Gintaras Steponkus

Gintaras Steponkus, Blogger & Marketing Manager at Solidguides.
Petra Odak

Petra Odak

Petra Odak, Chief marketing officer at Better Proposals.

Voice Search Analytics Improvement

One thing that I would love to see improved is voice search analytics. By now, voice search has gone a long way and more people are using it than ever before. The problem is, we don’t know how many people search using voice, what they’re searching for, what percentage of total searches comes from voice search, and all other relevant data. For us, it would be beneficial to be able to optimize for voice search, but we currently don’t have any data to guide us. I hope this happens in the near future. It would really make us marketers happy.

This is a crowdsourced article. Contributors are not necessarily affiliated with this website and their statements do not necessarily reflect the opinion of this website, other people, businesses, or other contributors.