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Search Relevance is Dead!

posted on March 7, 2006


I’ve been saying for a long time that the race for “relevance” among search engines is over. If you take the top 5 search engines, you’ll see that they all do about the same job of providing accurate search results. Instead, the race has moved on to who can launch the most features and products.

Anyway, a new study out of France confirms that Yahoo and Google are pretty much the same. The most interesting data is that, while true that most search engines are equal in relevance, they still all do a pretty poor job in satisfaction.

Google and Yahoo tied for first place, with a rating of 2.3, but the most striking result is undoubtedly the extremely low level of user satisfaction. None of the search engines even passed (2.5 out of 5)

Via Battelle.


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  • http://www.blogger.com/profile/18579833 K T Cat

    Excellent post. I would also suggest a follow up article analyzing the relative value of search engines to corporate websites vs. blogs.

    My own research from watching statistics from Site Meter indicates that search engines are of little value to a blog.

  • http://mynull.blogspot.com Vasiliy Kiryanov

    I agree with you Andy, I have made few simple tests and got the same result. But I think we need to understand that relevance according to Search-engine and according to user are 2 diffirent things. Search-engines simply depends on algorithms but user want user-rated results. We have something close to it with StumbleUpon community.

  • http://www.cocking.co.uk Romilly Cocking

    The results of the quoted survey say that the race for relevance is far from over. According to the survey, both Yahoo and Google’s relevance scores are appalling.

    The race has not yet started!

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