Comments on: Future of search rides on relevance

Search engine companies agree that their success is contingent on becoming more important in people's daily lives.

Barking up the wrong tree with personalized search

In my opinion, if the search engine marketers think people need search engines that know more about their needs, habits, and preferences, then they are totally missing what people really want.

In most cases, search is based on very diverse short term needs. For example, one moment I am looking to buy a house, next a new pair of shoes, the next I need to learn the side effects of a new prescription, the next I need an answer to a legal question. A few days or a few weeks later, my needs are completely different. For any of these example searches, how will it help to know more about me personally? I can tell you now that it won't. Are you going to record my preferences for a 2 bedroom versus a 3 bedroom home? Well, next time I search I may want a 4 bedroom home because there is another baby on the way. You can't keep up with me in a relevant way. You will be wasting your time and my time.

Instead, I suggest that search engines should focus more on understanding what I am looking for in a particular query. I'm suggesting that they need to go way beyond merely matching keywords. The trouble is that this is a very difficult problem and there is no easy answer, like collecting more personal information about me.

There are two places at which understanding must occur:
1.) In my query text there is an idea (a concept) of what I want to find.
2.) In the database that is being searched, there is a massively large collection of ideas (concepts), of which only a small part is relevant to my query. Let's call that small part X.

So, what I really want and need is for the search engine to give me as much of X and as little of non-X as possible.

I'm sure that this is so obvious it is almost not worth stating, but I am mentioning it because I think the search engine marketers are losing sight of this obvious goal. They are looking for something else because they think that this part of the problem has been taken as far as it can be taken. Yet, this is far from the truth. Current search technology barely scratches the surface of the true possibilities. Continue to focus on the real problem and you will deliver real benefits and that will be the measure of success: deliver to me what I ask for (not what you think I need) and save me from having to look through hundreds or maybe even thousands of erroneous search results.

What's lacking is a steering wheel.

You've hit the nail on the head. Immediate information needs cannot be intuited from past activities or personal profiles. Our company's research has indicated that not only are short term search needs unique, but they change as the user learns more about their topic. They may start our wanting to know what ocular melanoma is, but quickly switch to wanting to know about the state of the art in treatment - a subtle shift that implicit personalization will totally miss. Yet that's what people do. What's missing is a relevancy steering wheel - a way to feed back to the search engine what's of interest and what's not.

Google is now too big to hear users voices.

Sadly, the demise of Google as a useful search engine is complete. A victim of its own success, Google was great at returning relevant links when it was a relatively unknown search engine used mainly by academics and IT workers. In the push to become the biggest, Google has indexed a lot of pages, but most of the links returned from any given search will be irrelevant. I now use Yahoo! at least as often as Google, and always check failed Google searches at Yahoo! because it is common that a failed search on Google! will be successful on Yahoo!

I first got clued in to the problem when I realized that Google wasn't indexing a hobby site of mine that had been on the Web for years. Even searching Google with the exact url turned up nothing. I e-mailed Google about it repeatedly, and have never received a reply, and the site has never been indexed. After discovering that problem, I began checking my Google searches against other engines and began to find many such omissions.

Google needs to get back to its roots, focus on relevance, and take a break from cranking out nifty new utilities that are of questionable value.

Word to the wise - if your search fails on Google, try another search engine.