The internet is a place of constant, almost dizzying change. What is revolutionary today becomes a relic tomorrow. It’s fascinating to look back at old ideas and see how they hold up. I was recently going through my archives and stumbled upon a note I wrote back in 2013, a tactical plan for dominating search engine results.
The Long Tail Strategy
In an email to my colleague, Shalaka, titled Long Tail / Jobs, I outlined a rather ambitious idea. The goal was to create a single webpage on our website designed to be a magnet for search engine spiders. My thought was to populate this one page with millions of links and keywords related to “Jobs” and “Job Advts.” The logic was straightforward: by creating such an immense density of relevant terms on a single URL, we would inevitably climb to the top of Google, Yahoo, and Bing for those high-volume searches. It was a brute-force approach to SEO, but one rooted in understanding how search indexing worked at the time.
I also proposed a parallel experiment: using the Google Search Appliance API to index our internal database of several hundred thousand resumes. For years, we had relied on an offline tool called ISYS. My question was simple: could Google’s powerful search technology, applied to our own private data, outperform the system we had used for over a decade? It was a test of bringing external, cutting-edge technology in-house to solve a long-standing operational challenge.
A Reflection on Early Insights
The core idea I wanted to convey then, and which strikes me now, is how my thinking was geared towards leveraging the fundamental architecture of information systems. I had brought up this suggestion years ago, predicting that a deep understanding of keyword indexing was the key to visibility. I had even proposed a solution—a head-to-head test between our legacy system and Google's powerful new tool.
Seeing how search and enterprise data management have evolved, it's striking how relevant that earlier insight still is. Today's AI-driven semantic search is far more sophisticated, yet the principle remains the same: organizing information in a way that is most accessible to the retrieval system. Reflecting on it now, I feel a sense of validation. That early instinct to harness the power of a dominant search platform for internal data was a step towards the integrated, intelligent enterprise search solutions we see today. It renews my conviction that the most powerful ideas are often simple, direct applications of a core technological truth.
Regards,
Hemen Parekh
Of course, if you wish, you can debate this topic with my Virtual Avatar at : hemenparekh.ai
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