People Just Want Answers

For more than 30 years, discovery has been one of the fundamental challenges of the commercial web. But discovery means two different things, depending on which side of the fence you sit.

People are trying to discover an answer to a question, a solution to a problem, a product they need, or a business that can help them. On the other side of the fence, businesses are trying to be discovered by those people.

Much of the evolution of the web — and much of what we now call digital marketing — can be viewed through the relationship between those two objectives. The technology connecting them has changed enormously, but the underlying need hasn’t really changed: People just want answers.

In this article, I want to explore how online discovery has evolved, what those changes have meant for people trying to discover and businesses trying to be discovered, and what they might tell us about where we’re heading next.

I’ve spent much of my working life watching that relationship evolve. So let’s start more than 30 years ago, when simply finding anything useful online could be a challenge in itself.

Part 1: Browse — Where do I find?

In the 1990s, if you wanted to use the Internet to find the answer to a question or the solution to a problem, you first had to get online.

And that meant dialling up.

Once online, finding anything useful was another challenge. Before search engines became the front door to the web, much of online discovery involved browsing human-created directories — websites organised into categories and subcategories to help you find your way around.

One of the earliest — and by far the most famous — was Yahoo!

By the mid-to-late 1990s, Yahoo had become the dominant directory of the web. At the time, it was difficult to imagine a more comprehensive or efficient way of organising everything the Internet had to offer.

As the web grew, trying to organise everything into categories and subcategories became increasingly difficult. At the same time, two different approaches to solving the discovery problem were developing alongside one another.

• Search engines were becoming increasingly useful. AltaVista, launched in 1995, allowed people to search across a vast index of web pages rather than relying entirely on someone else’s directory structure.
• Nevertheless, specialist directories and portals were also appearing, focused on particular industries, interests and audiences. Rather than trying to organise the entire web, they could concentrate on helping a particular group of people find the information most relevant to them.

But the two approaches weren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, I became involved in a project that combined them.

In the late 1990s, I was Production Manager of MIS, an established Australian magazine for IT Managers. We knew our readers were increasingly using the Internet for research, but we didn’t want to simply reproduce the magazine online.

We wanted to create something that could stand on its own — a resource designed specifically to help IT Managers with their online research.

MISweb had its own team of researchers. They used search engines such as AltaVista to find useful information, then curated the most relevant material into directories and specialist “Resource Centres” organised around the needs of IT Managers.

Every resource they selected came with a description written by an MISweb researcher, helping the reader understand what it contained and whether it might be useful.

In other words, search helped us find the information. Human curation helped our readers make sense of it.

But to create something genuinely useful, we first needed to understand what those readers actually wanted.

So the publisher and editor did something that, in retrospect, seems rather important: They asked them.

A roundtable was organised with a group of senior IT Managers to understand how they were using the Internet, what they were looking for and how something like MISweb might actually help.

I can’t remember his exact words nearly 30 years later, but one comment has stayed with me ever since. One of the IT Managers essentially asked:

“Why don’t you just ask us what we need help with?”

At the time, we were still thinking largely in terms of helping people find and navigate useful information. But online discovery itself was already beginning to change.

Search engines such as AltaVista meant people no longer had to rely on somebody else deciding where a website or document belonged. Instead of navigating through a hierarchy of categories and subcategories, they could type what they were looking for and search across an enormous index of web pages.

The question was beginning to shift from:

“Where do I find it?”

to:

“What should I search for?”

But another service took a rather different approach. Ask Jeeves, launched in 1996, invited people to enter a question in everyday language. Rather than deciding which category to browse — or even which keywords to search for — the promise was tantalisingly simple: Just ask.

The technology wasn’t yet capable of delivering everything that idea promised. But the idea itself was remarkably prescient.

In less than a decade, three very different approaches to online discovery had emerged:

• Yahoo organised the web so we could browse it.
• AltaVista indexed the web so we could search it.
• Ask Jeeves invited us to simply ask a question.

Browse. Search. Ask.

All three ideas were already there.

But one of them was about to dominate online discovery for the next two decades.

Part 2: Search — What should I search for?

That approach was search.

As the web became too large and too dynamic to organise effectively by hand, search engines changed the discovery problem. Instead of needing to know where information might be found, we could increasingly describe what we were looking for and let an algorithm find it for us.

And then came Google.

Google wasn’t the first search engine. But its ability to rank pages according to their relevance and authority helped transform search from one way of navigating the web into the dominant way of doing it.

For people looking for answers, the behaviour became second nature.

Think of what you want. Turn it into a few words. Type those words into a box.

The question had changed from:

“Where do I find it?”

to:

“What should I search for?”

And on the other side of the discovery fence, businesses faced the mirror image of that question.

If people were using search engines to find answers, products and businesses, how could you make sure they found you?

Being discovered

An entire industry grew around answering that question.

Search Engine Optimisation — SEO — helped businesses make their websites easier for search engines to find, understand and rank. Keywords, links, content, authority and technical optimisation all became part of the process of competing for visibility.

Paid search offered another route. Instead of earning a prominent position in the results, businesses could pay to appear when someone searched for particular words or phrases.

For businesses, the discovery problem had fundamentally changed.

It was no longer primarily:

“Where should we be listed?”

It had become:

“How do we appear when somebody searches?”

Then, as search results became ever more crowded:

“How do we appear above our competitors when somebody searches?”

And for a long time, that worked extraordinarily well.

Someone had a problem. They searched Google. Google presented a list of possible answers. The person chose one.

But somewhere along the way, an important distinction became increasingly easy to forget.

People weren’t searching because they wanted search results. They were searching because they wanted answers.

When being discovered becomes the objective

SEO became so important that, for many businesses, being discovered began to look like the objective rather than the means to an objective.

We researched what people searched for.

↓

We identified keywords with traffic.

↓

We created pages and articles targeting those keywords.

↓

We built links to them.

↓

We monitored rankings.

↓

We celebrated reaching page one.

None of that is inherently wrong. Search engines need some way of deciding which information is useful and relevant, and businesses obviously need to make themselves discoverable.

But it can encourage us to look at discovery from the wrong side of the fence.

The business asks:

“How do we rank for this search?”

The person searching is still asking:

“Can somebody help me with this?”

The challenge was matching one question with the other.

As search results became more competitive, businesses became increasingly focused on rankings, keywords and visibility. But better visibility didn’t necessarily mean a better match between what the person actually needed and what the business could provide.

I’ve watched this change myself

For years, search was an important way people discovered Finlayson Digital.

Five or more years ago, I could write a genuinely useful article answering a fairly specific question about Klaviyo and have a reasonable chance of appearing prominently in Google for someone searching for that answer.

That created a fairly simple relationship.

Someone had a question. I wrote something useful about it. Google helped them find it.

That still happens.

But the search results themselves have changed.

Today, the same query might produce advertising, Google’s own features, an AI-generated answer, documentation from Klaviyo itself and results from larger or more authoritative websites before the person ever reaches an article written by an independent consultant.

The familiar list of ten blue links hasn’t disappeared, but it no longer has the stage to itself.

Search isn’t disappearing

It would be easy at this point to declare that AI is going to kill Google, or that SEO is dead.

I don’t think either conclusion is particularly useful.

Search remains enormously important. People will continue searching for products, businesses, information and answers. Search engines themselves are incorporating AI, while conversational AI systems can use information discovered and indexed from the web.

The boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred.

What matters is the change in how much work the person has to do to express what they actually want.

Directories required us to understand somebody else’s structure:

Which category should I browse?

Search engines required us to translate our need into a query:

What should I search for?

And we became remarkably good at it.

We learned to strip complicated questions down to a handful of keywords. We tried different combinations. We added quotation marks, locations, product names and other qualifiers. Then we opened several results and decided for ourselves which one best answered the question.

For more than two decades, that became so normal that we barely noticed we were doing it.

But remember Ask Jeeves?

Back in the 1990s, it had suggested something tantalisingly different.

Instead of navigating categories or constructing the perfect search query: Just ask.

At the time, the technology couldn’t really deliver on that promise.

Now it increasingly can.

Search taught us how to ask machines for information in a language they could understand.

The next phase of online discovery is increasingly about machines understanding the language we naturally use.

And that changes the question again.

From:

“What should I search for?”

to:

“What do I need to know?”

Part 3: Ask — What do I need to know?

For more than two decades, search dominated online discovery.

Then something changed.

Instead of learning how to phrase a search query, we could increasingly just explain what we wanted.

Not:

best running shoes flat feet

but:

I need a pair of running shoes for a heavier runner with flat feet. I mostly run 5–10km on roads, I’ve had problems with knee pain, and I’d rather prioritise comfort over speed. What should I consider?

That’s a fundamentally different interaction.

The person hasn’t become better at searching. The technology has become better at understanding the person.

There’s another important difference here: context. Take a simple word like “nursery”. It could mean somewhere you leave your children for the day, somewhere you buy plants, or a room you’re preparing for a baby.

Search engines have become remarkably good at trying to infer which one we mean, but we’ve also learned to help them by adding more keywords and qualifiers. With AI, we can simply explain what we mean:

“I’m decorating a nursery and need curtains that will keep the room dark enough for daytime naps.”

The ambiguity disappears. Keywords tell us what someone typed. Context helps us understand what they meant.

And that brings us back to an idea from almost 30 years ago.

Browse: Where do I find?
Search: What should I search for?
Ask: What do I need to know?

And something else has been happening at the same time. People have started finding businesses like mine without searching Google at all. I’ve had prospective clients arrive at Finlayson Digital after asking ChatGPT for help or recommendations.

Think about how different that interaction is.

They haven’t necessarily searched for:

Klaviyo consultant Australia

or:

Klaviyo expert ecommerce

They can describe the actual situation: What they’re trying to achieve. What isn’t working. What technology they’re using. What sort of help they need.

The machine can interpret far more of the context behind the question.

From ranking in the results to becoming part of the answer

For businesses, this creates another change in the discovery problem.

In the directory era, the question was:

Where should we be listed?

In the search era:

How do we rank when somebody searches?

Now another question is emerging:

How does our business, product or expertise become relevant enough to be included in the answer?

I don’t think that means SEO is dead.

Nor do I think we’re about to stop using Google.

Search engines are incorporating AI. AI systems use information from the web. People will continue moving between search engines, websites, social platforms, marketplaces, recommendations and AI assistants depending on what they’re trying to accomplish.

The boundaries between searching and asking are already becoming blurred.

So replacing one set of optimisation tactics with another — SEO with AEO, GEO or whatever acronym comes next — risks missing the bigger point.

People still just want answers.

If your business genuinely understands the questions its customers are asking and provides useful, credible answers, the technology used to connect those two things is secondary.

The technology isn’t the strategy.

Understanding the customer is.

Discovery doesn’t end when somebody finds your website

There’s another part of this story that I think is easily overlooked. We tend to talk about discovery as though it ends when somebody clicks through to a website.

It doesn’t.

Imagine somebody looking for window furnishings. They might discover a retailer through Google, an advertisement, social media, a recommendation or, increasingly, an AI conversation. But arriving at the website doesn’t mean their discovery problem has been solved.

They may still need to understand:

• Which type of window furnishing is right for their room?
• What is the difference between the available products?
• Which materials suit their needs?
• How should they measure?
• What does the terminology mean?
• Which option fits their budget?
• What should they do next?

They’ve discovered the business.

Now they need to discover the solution.

And yet most websites present essentially the same experience to everybody and expect the visitor to work it out for themselves.

• Menus
• Categories
• Filters
• Search boxes
• Product pages

In some respects, we’ve recreated the directory.

Why don’t you just ask us?

Which takes me back to that MISweb roundtable in the late 1990s.

We were trying to understand how IT Managers used the Internet for research and how we could organise information to make that process easier.

I can’t remember the exact words, but one of them essentially said:

“Why don’t you just ask us what we need help with?”

Nearly 30 years later, I keep coming back to that comment.

We spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to infer intent.

• We analyse keywords.
• We analyse clicks.
• We analyse browsing behaviour.
• We build audiences and segments.
• We use increasingly sophisticated algorithms and AI to predict what somebody might want.

Sometimes that’s useful.

But sometimes there is a much simpler option: Ask them.

If somebody arrives on a website looking for window furnishings, perhaps the website can ask which room they’re working on.

If they’re buying a gift, perhaps it can ask who they’re buying for.

If they’re evaluating software, perhaps it can ask what problem they’re trying to solve.

And if we already know something about their intent — perhaps from the page they landed on, the search that brought them there or something they’ve previously told us — we don’t necessarily need to ask the same question again.

The objective isn’t to interrogate visitors.

It’s to understand enough about what they’re trying to accomplish to help them find a useful answer.

This is one reason I’ve become interested in tools such as RightMessage, which allow websites to ask questions and adapt the experience according to the answers.

But the tool is not the important part.

The principle is.

Before you can provide an answer, you need to understand the question.

The technology changed. People still just want answers.

More than 30 years of online discovery has given us radically different ways of connecting people with information, products and businesses.

Directories attempted to organise the relationship. Search engines attempted to rank it. AI is increasingly attempting to understand it.

For businesses, the temptation throughout has been to focus on whatever technology happens to sit in the middle: get listed in Yahoo, rank in Google, get mentioned by ChatGPT.

But those are mechanisms of discovery, not the reason discovery exists.

At one end of the relationship is somebody trying to accomplish something. At the other may be a business, product, service or piece of information that can help them. The challenge is connecting the two.

And that suggests a practical place to start: discover the questions your customers are actually trying to answer.

Those questions can inform the content you create, the language you use and the answers you provide. They can help you become more discoverable through search and AI — and help you provide a more relevant experience once somebody reaches your website.

In other words, understanding the customer shouldn’t just help you respond to discovery. It should help drive discovery in the first place.

The opportunity isn’t to replace an SEO strategy with an AI strategy. It’s to use the available technology to better understand what people are trying to accomplish — and help connect them with the right answer.

The technology should support the strategy — not become the strategy.

And perhaps the most useful lesson from more than 30 years of technological change is also the simplest: People just want answers.