About the latest buzz term in the blogosphere is “over optimization” as in search engine optimization.

It would seem that now that we’ve been taking all the advice we’ve been given about making our websites more palatable to search engines, the results are less than what the folks who run search engines, and for that matter, we as consumers of web information, would want.  Google now doesn’t want you cramming key words into your copy or slathering advertisements above your fold.  All well and good, and sites such as Wikipedia are scrambling to codify policy against such things in an effort to continue to bask in Google’s search engine smile.  Certainly, it’s needed.  The cutting-edge scam artists who seem to work the search engine social services system the best often seem to be the ones concealing the least amount of solid content.  This in the context of a medium that for all its promise of two decades ago, has devolved into a wasteland of recycled information, half-baked opinions, cat pictures, plagiarism, and misspellings.

And except perhaps for the cat pictures, there is little new in that.

Recycling, opinions, and plagiarism didn’t need the Internet;

they’ve been around and proliferating for a long time.  They are what make up much of the graffiti found in Roman ruins.  Because there is a compulsion on the part of humans to communicate, there has always been a compulsion on the part of humans to over communicate.  And what drove that compulsion, say, in Roman times?  I’ll just bet you the same things drove graffiti wiseasses in the times of gladiators as drives blogging bloat cases now:  An overwrought sense of self-importance and search engine optimization.

Since the invention of writing, documentation has been piling up exponentially, and we’ve always—ALWAYS—needed something or someone to help us sort it all out.

I take back what I said about cat pictures; actually the ancient Egyptians used a form of mass communication (relatively speaking) that was image heavy: pictographic writing.

It was complex; it was nuanced; it was mass communication in the sense that it was used to run huge empires, but in fact, only a thin top layer of the population was in any way literate.  And much of the pictures featured cats.

Search engines didn’t work on it, and the reason for that is that its atomic particles weren’t composed of an alphabet.  In that respect it was cumbersome, but since so few of the population were involved with high-tech in those days (you know, writing—that and astronomy), it probably wasn’t deemed priority the fix it.  The vast majority of the population was too busy dragging great stones to build pyramids, growing wheat, and running people down with advanced chariots—and looking at cat sculptures.

The great technological advance that permitted search engines was brought about by the Phoenicians, and that, of course, was the alphabet.

However, don’t get too excited and start jumping around a lot because the sort of alphabet the Phoenicians came up with had only consonants.  You see, there’s a natural tendency in humans to ordinate things, and consonants tend to grab the shotgun seat over vowels.  In defense of the Phoenicians and others, however, I should point out that many vowels in many languages do tend to sound alike, so, if you’re like me, and before Spellcheck you found yourself reaching for the dictionary frequently over the final vowel in words such as “development” and “consonant,” you realize that same fact, and you can guess that when the Phoenician alphabet was still in the R&D stage, Phoenician alphabet engineers probably thought to heck with it (or to huck with it), and said, “We just won’t use vowels.”

The Greeks were the ones who came up with a full-deck alphabet,

and while the Greeks weren’t as interested in cats as were the Egyptians, they were interested in Egypt, at least as real estate, and in 332 B.C. the Greeks conquered Egypt—well, to be more precise, a Greek-speaking Macedonian by the name of Alexander, with middle name The and the last name Great, did—after, I might add, trashing Phoenicia on the way over.  The Egyptians looked upon Alexander as a liberator from the Persians, and even if they hadn’t they wouldn’t have taken his conquering of them all that personally because he had by then already conquered a pretty large chunk of the known world.  In the course of this, he founded several cities, which he named after himself—think that sort of thing doesn’t happen today?  The Republicans are trying to get a lot of airports in the U. S. named after Ronald Reagan.  Coincidence?  I think not.  Anyway, one of those cities was Alexandria-by-the-Sea, in newly conquered Egypt.  Not long after Alexander’s awfully early death at age 32 from too much smoking, too many three-martini lunches, his vast empire began to fall apart, but in Egypt he left behind him a family dynasty, the Ptolemys—and just so you know, Cleopatra was a Ptolemy—and they founded the Library at Alexandria, at its height a collection of data so great that it just about took the Internet to rival it.

There’s almost a temptation to suggest thank God the Romans and the Muslims burned down the Library at Alexandria, because if they hadn’t we wouldn’t know what to do with all the data written and rolled in the place.

It needed to be sorted out because there was a lot of it, and not all of it was good.  According to Seneca, troops of Caesar accidentally burned an estimated 40,000 volumes in the Library during the siege of Alexandria (some accident!).  Some of these were ledgers and books about the books in the library—in other words, the library’s search engine.  Before the Romans burned the Library they came up with the idea of alphabetization, a tool for organizing data such that you can find it again—a search engine, in a manner of speaking, and one that was in use in the Library of Alexandria.  Now, how much of a percentage of the total did those 40,000 volumes represent?  I don’t think it’s known, but we do know the Library built up its collection each time a ship would pull into the harbor, when Alexandrian authorities would search the captain’s quarters for books, which they would seize and return only after they’d made a copy.  Often the book they returned was, in fact, the copy they’d made.  One way the library accumulated originals was that the ship’s captain might not want to wait around for some scribe to finish hand-copying his books while his cargo of tropical fruits and slaves was going sour by the day so he’d say to hell with it and leave without his books.

Because that’s how you copied books in those days: by hand.  The people who made copies were part of the paper-thin strata of people who were literate.  These scribes were the IT guys of their day, and like the IT guys of today, they made mistakes—and they were snotty and arrogant, and . . . arrghh!  Don’t get me started!  They may not have admitted them; those mistakes may have gone unnoticed for centuries, but they made them.  What this amounts to is that not all those umpteen-thousand books in the Library of Alexandria were necessarily a good read or news that anybody could use.

When the Roman Empire supposedly fell—and that’s a BIG “supposedly”—it had a tough skeleton of administrative infrastructure that resurrected into the societies that followed, because by the time Rome fell it was Christian.

A little known fact is that the “barbarians” who brought down the curtain on the Roman Empire, those screaming Germans and Celts, were largely Christians themselves.  The Western Christian Church had by that time adopted Latin as its language and Roman administration as its operating policy, and nowadays, when you say something like “basilica” or “diocese” you’re using words that are part of the Christian lexicon but had their start in everyday Roman government administration.

From the roots of Rome on the Italian peninsula, Christianity grew and spread by way of monks throughout Europe, the monks bringing their IT guys with them.  That’s right; if you were a monk and you inked your letters well, you could improve your chances for advancement and avoid privy-mucking duty.  And make no mistake about it, there were technological advances to monkery:  Added to the now Latin alphabet, at about 400 AD, someone hit on the idea of using an old Greek invention called the punctuation mark, and as monkery continued through the first millennium, manuscripts became more and more sophisticated, using not only punctuation marks, but spaces between the words as well, this combined with advances in quill-pen cutting.  Also pictures—and not so much of cats.

Naturally, with all this scribbling going on, there were trends and mistakes, and an at times an overall erosion of quality.

It sounds a lot like the blogosphere now, and when it happened then, the major search engine, which at the time was the Christian Church—literature in Europe was either religious matter or literature approved of by the Church–would enact a policy to clean up some of the mess, just as now.  For the most part, the preferred method for this in those days was book-burning–sometimes it was writer burning.  Just as Google is doing now, the Christian Church attempted to straighten out what it considered the idiocy it saw through the use of controlling access to written material—only the term they used for it was “heresy.”  It shared something with its search engine descendent:  It didn’t work.

Next time:  The Printing Press.

The creation of this monster in a sense is one of Google’s own making. In trying to make its searches more relevant to users, Google decided to reward websites with higher rankings whose content was fresh, changing and up-to-date. No one wants to visit a website with stale content, or that is static.  But it’s easier to monitor quantity than quality, and so searching for well researched and intelligent information on the web has been challenging.

Website owners also have a challenge, and that is to not sacrifice the quality of their website while trying to connect with their potential customers.  The temptation may be not to stoop so low as article spinning, but not reach as high as we might to provide articles with a unique view, reflect our own personality, give an insight into our business or show some brilliance, or to give in to adding so many key words into our copy that is becomes unnatural, or cutting off our creativity to conform all with an eye to please the search engines.

In our Top Banana Web Design blog, we aspire to provide quality articles with originality. Search engines be damned!