With a few clicks of the mouse, you can travel anywhere in the world through the wonders of the internet. You can see the cathedrals of Rome, look for authentic Italian cooking recipes, gaze upon the wonders of Italian Renaissance art–all without leaving your comfy couch. But while you may be surfing through the pleasures of Italian art and culture, you are becoming more lethargic. Perhaps, all this searching online has made us lazy.
Have search engines made people lazy? This seems like a weird concept that searching for something would make people lazy but perhaps it’s true. It seems like the search engines are not good at doing what they are supposed to be doing, or people aren’t good at following them.
How many times have you put something like “car insurance online“ in the search engine and then clicked on the first thing you saw? Chances are this happens to you all the time, and the companies who are at the top know this. They are paying big money to stay there.
Positioning on search engine sites is a big deal, and companies big and small are shelling out a pretty penny to get in on the action. For instance, a company may pay another group to help create content to drive up the number of visitors it gets. This, of course, will create a higher positioning in the search engine, which will increase the visibility of their company. So, if you are searching for Italian Renaissance Art certain websites are buying their way to the top of your search.
There are some search engines, however, that you can pay directly for qualified results. This seems a bit dishonest, but in the free market there is nothing that is sacred. It seems many big businesses have already found a loophole in people’s search habits anyway. No one is searching for the best, just the most popular. They figure that if everyone else is using it, then they should use it as well.
If people were more diligent in looking beyond the first page of a search engine, then there wouldn’t be so much fighting for that top spot. As it stands, once you are on the second page you might as well not be on the search results at all.
