jotsheet

I think by now that just about everyone knows that search engine results are important. Where your site places in Google and Yahoo (and to a lesser extent, MSN) for important terms can make or break it, depending on the industry. People pay big bucks for SEO. People pay big bucks for text advertising, whether it’s AdWords or YPN.

But perhaps the importantance of SERPs—that’s “search engine results page” for the uninitiated—was never clearer to me than when I received an e-mail today from my mother. Mom’s competent enough with getting around the Web and doing word processing, but she doesn’t do much more than that. She’s a typical Internet user. Today, she was doing some research on gas exploration leases, and this is what she wrote:

If you “google” gas fact sheet.pub, you’ll find an informative article from Cornell in New York about gas leases.

Also, if you google shale gas doc, you’ll find interesting info on how they actually extract gas, along with pictures of wells and rigs.

A message board of people discussing gas exploration leasing can be found by googling Naro forum.

I wrote her back and asked why she hadn’t included URLs to the sites she mentioned. The simple answer. She didn’t know how.

I’m not writing to embarrass my mother, of course. (And truth be told, I wrote this up without asking her permission first. Pretty rude of me, eh?) But think about that: the practice of search has so permeated our use of the Web that some users have no idea what a URL is anymore. They speak of sites not in reference to their name, or their URL, but their placement and key terms returned on a Google search.