Search engine optimization (SEO) is a cousin, if not a twin, of the way ant colonies and neurons make decisions. A new article in SEED Magazine suggests how this can be true. The article is called Insect colonies offer insight into the mysterious conversations of neurons, illuminating how billions of individual brain cells work in concert to make a single decision.
Search engine spiders collect information about activity related to zillions of internet ants (keywords, etc.) and about what synapses (webpage links) are doing. Based on the concert of this activity search engines make decisions on ranking a webpage. I suggest that if you are interested in how emergent complexity creates findability on the internet, reading the SEED article will loosen up your synapses for pondering this fascinating topic. Here is a sample from SEED:
Choosing a new home, or house hunting, is the most complicated decision an ant colony makes. When an ant nest is overcrowded or damaged, scout ants begin searching for a new building site by making independent evaluations of different spots and reporting back to the colony. A decision is made when a “quorum” is reached, when a certain number of ants agree on a location.
This same process occurs among neurons in a monkey’s visual cortex when the animal performs a visual discrimination task. In the task, a monkey is flashed an image of dots moving in different directions and must decide which way the majority of them are going. When the image appears, neurons in the monkey’s visual cortex gather bits of information from the monkey’s eyes, much like ants evaluating a nest site. As more data is gathered, the neurons with the correct answer gradually increase their firing rate. When their activity reaches a certain threshold level, the monkey makes a decision.
Thus, decisions in both brains and ant colonies are based on thresholds that can be adjusted for either speed or accuracy. Understanding how these mechanisms work “will not only advance our understanding of collective decision making by social insects and individual decision making by vertebrates, but could potentially give us ways to design machines for tackling these kinds of problems,” [researcher James] Marshall says.
One of “these kinds of problems” is adjusting the thresholds of link placement on search engine results pages. Millions of people (think ants) at any moment in time are making decisions on which webpage to open and/or link to (think neuron). It is the collectivity of these decisions that determines online findability.
