As a web designer I would prefer to spend the majority of my time being creative and drawing pretty pictures. But due to the competitive nature of our society, and consequently of the Internet, I found myself spending an inordinate amount of time jostling for position with all the other people on the planet who are doing the same thing as I am.

Being a successful businessman as well as a web designer means securing a top ten search engine ranking with Google, Yahoo and MSN. It is not enough to sit at home and create inspiring designs for new websites – you also need to sell your services to the world.

Google has become the modern day equivalent of the Oracle at Delphi. If you wanted an answer to a question in ancient Greece you would visit the Oracle. Nowadays we ask Google. But how do we know that we can trust the answers we are given?

There is a tendency to think that Google’s answers equate to facts. But we must remember that Google’s answers are more like opinions that are based on certain beliefs, and that Google’s beliefs may not be ones that we share.

Say, for example, that you were looking for a web design company in Wiltshire (UK) and you went to Google and asked it to look for ‘web design Wiltshire’. Because it would find so many results, it would need to prioritise them according to some kind of system.

The method that Google currently employs is the ‘He Who Shouts Loudest’ method. Whoever can make the most noise about their website and generate the highest number of relevant links to their site will usually end up in the Google top ten. But will that help us to find the right website designer for you?

It’s difficult to see how this could be any other way; after all the search engines need to use some kind of evaluation system to determine who gets the coveted top slot in the search engine results, but I often wonder how things might turn out if Google used different criteria when it decides which answers to give us.

Imagine, for example a search engine that ranked websites based on creative originality or their ability to make us laugh or smile. Of course such search engines are highly unlikely because creativity, smiling and laughter are attributes we associate with being human and with having consciousness. Google of course does not have consciousness – it is a program, a machine, a robot. It knows nothing about intuition and it certainly can’t read your mind.

But imagine if you will, what form a search engine may take in the future. Might it be possible to have a sentient, intuitive search engine that could tell exactly what we were looking for, even if we could not accurately describe it? Think Dr. Who meets Google meets all-seeing-eye.

Could it be possible? I hope so. Then I could stop wasting time on search engine optimisation and get back to drawing pictures.

Rob Butler is a web designer living in Wiltshire, England, who likes to think the unthinkable. His web design work can be seen at: Web Design and Search Engine Optimisation in Wiltshire