The SEO Future is ...You!

Be prepared to get very busy in the next ten years. A previously unheard of movement is in the works that is going to make an SEO a popular commodity. And not just in the world of commerce. There are rumblings, and now glimpses of a process that will add an entirely new dimension to searching. If you haven't checked out Spock.com yet, its because you haven't been invited to. If you haven't heard of them yet, so far, it is a one-way relationship, because they have heard of you. They know all about you....

You see Spock.com is a search engine that you will be talking about a whole lot very soon. It is not an information search engine....it is a PEOPLE search engine. Based in Redwood City, CA. it has actively been gathering information on individuals since 2006 and hopes to document every single human on the planet. It is currently adding about 1 million new individuals every day. When it is up and running, its goal is that a searcher can go on there and find out about anyone.

But there is so much more. Want to search by name? Of course that will be no problem. How about by email address? Yup. But then it gets interesting. Search by tag, such as "pacifist" or "inventor". After that it gets downright complex and hence the need for a qualified seo, because you will be able to search by such themes as: Drunk Driver; Sex Symbol, etc. And to keep someone off the dirty laundry list, it will require that a competent seo will actively be drowning out the bad news on the web with the good news. Some seo optimists are already engaged in such Reputation Management and I expect that this will be an activity that all of us will be engaged in rather quickly.

The pool of information Spock.com is gleaning is from all corners of the web. Wherever a profile of you exists, it is gathering that information and associating it with other remnants of your footprints. Including photographs, mind you. Pretty soon, if you want to know about your neighbor, you will just enter his name into Spock.com and an individualized serp will give you everything about that person that is on the web.

Oh No! Does that mean they will figure out my pseudonyms? Will CattMutts be outed? (Not really worried about that, any seo could easily put that one together.) But what about the privacy issues?! THIS is going to be a can of worms. Big worms.

And what would a MontereySEO Blog post be without my obligatory Google warning? I mean all of us know that Spock.com, if successful, will eventually be Goobled by Google, right? I mean, I am still baffled by Google's ogreish, selfish air wave ambitions, and it ticks me off to no end; but would we not all expect Google, the friendly search engine company, to want to capture people search to add to its quiver? That one is a natural. It wouldn't even tick me off as much because it is involved with search. Not that I approve of the whole concept, just that if someone was doing it, I would expect Google would get in the game.

But either way, the fact that people search is coming means that individuals are going to need to have their profiles managed. Whether your new job in seo is called Reputation Management or Profile Management will be up to you, but the times, they are a-changing. And I wonder which one of us will be the first one to get a call from Lindsay Lohan?