Here is a noteworthy look by Farhad Manjoo over at Slate about the deeper significance of AOL and Huffpo joining forces.

He has some fascinating things to say about Search Engine Optimization, ie the way Google and the other web search algorithms currently set about their business (and how business scrambles to keep up, so as to be more ‘findable’ by would-be customers):

Not all SEO is bad, and not all HuffPo articles employ shady SEO, but some of the tricks that HuffPo uses to gin up search traffic are pretty sketchy. These tricks include: stuffing articles with strings of meaningless keywords (HuffPo does this on every piece), repeating potential search queries at the top of a story, and carefully engineering articles in response to rising search terms.

These tactics exploit obvious weaknesses in Google and other search engines. If Google’s mission is to provide search results that you—a human being—find useful, then HuffPo’s keyword-glutted pieces don’t belong, because no human being considers a list of synonyms an interesting way to start an article.

But, he argues, Google is on to this and is going to get better at ignoring these banal tricks. Meanwhile Twitter/Facebook are taking on a life of their own in search terms:

Those social networking links are becoming a bigger share of every news site’s traffic; as one of my Slate colleagues pointed out, in the Twitter age, "optimizing for Google results is a little like going out and buying the best VCR on the market."

And here’s something I did not know:

… all Google search results are personalised – links you see in response to a specific query may be different from the ones I see for the same query

Read the whole thing and the links, if you want to have some modest insight into what is happening in your own emerging e-life.