Blog > July 2008

I’m doing some analysis using the public search engines and I’m being presented with a lot of pages that are not what I’m looking for. The date of publication is sometimes wrong when I search over a specific time period, or the information is weak – it takes a couple of minutes of my time to read the 2 lines of a blog in the search results, make the decision to open the page, wait for Firefox to load it properly then read enough of it to realise it’s rubbish and close the tab.

After a few of these, I’m beginning to get frustrated and bored. The other issue of course is spam – it’s everywhere. For a typical search, when I look beyond the first 20 results or so, it feels like almost half the rest are spam – auto-generated sites that infect the search indices. Blog search is particularly bad. Some of this spam is so well disguised, again it takes time to sift and filter.

What I do find though are pockets of goodness. Places you’ll find people in the know. They visit them directly or subscribe to their RSS feeds. I’m researching a company called Nobel Biocare and I find this site osseonews.com with the best site tag I’ve ever seen “The World of Implant Dentistry onlnine”. Fantastic. It reminded me of a guy I met years ago who just said when I asked him what his business did “carbonmonoxidekills dot com”. OK, it was a short conversation after that, but he hit the information thirst like a bacon sandwich hits hangover-hunger.

Back to dental implants – my point is that if you want to know about dentistry you go to osseonews.com. If you want to find something out about mortgages, you go to moneysavingexpert.com, not Google although if you check this out you can see that Google is making it easy to search MSE for you. (and try to get you to click somewhere else before you go so they can get some PPC revenues)

What does this mean long term? It means that Page Rank (and the other associated ways Google determines relevance) needs to be improved if search is Google isn’t going to start losing traffic share. How? By understanding more about what the user is trying to find so it can serve up more relevant information. That’s why Google encourages you to log in so it can track what you have been searching for in the past, get to know you better and give you more relevant results in the future. Can this rather subtle, behind-the-scenes approach deliver? Maybe, but it doesn’t seem to be working so far. It may be that a different approach would be better. Could a combination of some social search approaches (recommendations and crowd-ranking for instance) coupled with better data linking based on topics as well as hyperlinks deliver higher quality search results? Is this an opportunity for a Google killer?