Whalespeak

When you look for something on Google, it returns ten results on the first page. For the majority of people, this is all they ever see. They pick one and they move on.

For most search terms, there are millions of results, but most of them are never seen. This is a good thing. We can’t handle too much choice. By limiting what we see, Google has made their search engine much more pleasant for our minds. The abstract notion of trillions of web pages hangs in the back of our minds, but in front of our eyes lie ten simple alternatives, ten short lines of text.

This is good for the searcher, but less useful for the potential searchee. That is why, for so long as this remains the case, SEOs will fret over those top ten spaces.