Comments on: Is Relevance . . . Relevant?

By: nmw

nmw — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 11:37:58 +0000

Yes, I too feel that relevance cannot be a differentiator (see also http://battellemedia.com/archives/004017.php#comment_125044 )

IMHO, Live search would do well to actuaclly deliver “live” results — other engines (such as Google) quite often return things that are either completely out of date or where the search engine’s cached copy does not match the actual data (and as webpages become more and more dynamic, such cached text may actually become less and less significant [note, BTW, that both Yahoo and Microsoft seem to be more successful than Google at indexing framesets -- which seems remarkable, considering how simple that should be]).

I also think that search engines might do well to hire more people with expertise in how people actually search for information, rather than pretending that pseudo-scientific algorithms actually work as well as they are “advertised”. Information retrieval is essentially a HUMAN issue (and — insofar as it is a LINGUISTIC problem — also a SOCIAL issue), not merely a mathematical tally of links — in sum: information retrieval is ANYTHING BUT trivial or simplistic.

By: J

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 15:38:29 +0000

It’s going to be very hard for MSFT to gain more search market share because Google just seems to be doing the right things.

It’s hard to convince me to use live search because somewhere deep inside I believe Google leads search so even if MSFT did something very good, the average user probably wouldn’t notice as they would still be happy with Google.

PS: Will live search results be more relevant than Google’s now?? Probably not.

By: Jordan McCollum

Jordan McCollum — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 06:47:26 +0000

@Ed—Actually, as I said above, “I’m not arguing that search engines should ignore relevance altogether. Of course they need to make an effort to understand the web pages they index.” The point that I made (pretty clearly, judging by most of the comments above) is that relevance isn’t a selling point for search engines anymore.

By: Ed Kohler

Ed Kohler — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:34:36 +0000

Until I ALWAYS click on the first result, search engines will have a ways to go in the relevance game. Are you confident enough to click “I’m feeling lucky” every time you search today?

By: Allen Taylor

Allen Taylor — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:56:44 +0000

Good points, Jordan. It’s a well-known marketing principle that the company who gets there first has a distinct advantage. Other companies can come along and do it better, but if the leader of the industry has a big enough lead before that happens then the best of breed will still be playing catch up for a very long time. That’s where we are right now in search. In order for a new market leader to take over from Google, one of two things will have to happen (and maybe both): Either Google will have to screw up royally, like changing its recipe for Coca Cola, and/or someone else will have to introduce a new development that fills a market need to such an extent that Google’s advantages will become disadvantages. True semantic search would be a good example.

By: rcjordan

rcjordan — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 18:09:42 +0000

>when Google started to grow and AltaVista was so bad

Regarding AV, the truly sad part is that some in the SEO industry were in direct contact with AV engineers and they [A] lied and/or [B] were in denial. Most of the time, it was “A.”

As for Google, times are different. We are well past the beginning of search’s own Eternal September and those who can actually gauge relevancy on a broad scale -though larger in sheer numbers- make up an increasingly smaller portion of the user base. It would take a catastrophic drop in actual relevancy before perceived relevancy would suffer among the general populace.

Besides, all any se needs to do is keep assuring everyone that it is relevant. “People flock to certainty and adopt the certainty as their own. –Scott Adams”

By: minicix

minicix — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:49:02 +0000

The only way for Google to loose marketshare and for its competitors to get some is Google to become really bad that users will leave it searching for something better. Like it happened in 98 when Google started to grow and AltaVista was so bad.

By: Selbourne Designing

Selbourne Designing — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 11:39:17 +0000

Relevancy of results will just need to be improved upon in the times to come and thats where one SE can beat the other.

By: Steven Bradley

Steven Bradley — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 06:17:09 +0000

What’s always been more important than relevancy in the results is the perception of relevancy in the results.

Unless you yourself already know what’s most relevant chances are the results presented will be a mix of useful and not so useful across all engines.

It’s the perception that one set of results is more relevant that leads you to use a particular search engine, not necessarily the actual relevancy.