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September 28, 2005
Site Searches
Robert Scoble (aka, the Scobleizer) has a recent blog entry that laments the current state of the art of web search technology. His gripe is mainly that the Toshiba site is not highly ranked (read highly relevant) in a search for "Toshiba Gigabeat". Dare Obasanjo follows up on this rant with the standard insightful and salient commentary on what "relevance" even means in the context of web search.
My very meager contribution here to both Scoble and the world is the well known hack to tell the search engine what site you are interested in. With Google you do this by adding "site:sitenamehere.com" to the search; below is the URL for the search in question with this minor modification ("site:toshiba.com"):
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Gigabeat+site%3Atoshiba.com&btnG=Google+Search
Interestingly, www.gigabeat.toshiba.com, the site he was looking for was first. The other major search engines must be capable of the same thing despite my complete disinterest in using a different engine.
While I am sure there are advances that can be made in search technology, the current state of the art is insanely better than the pre-Google days. I remember way back when (like 1997, remember Alta Vista?) telling my Dad that the web was such a melting pot of disorganized information that performing fine-grained research was like walking through the city dump with a metal detector. Fast forward to today and now I look up everything on Google (probably 10-15/searches per day), and I am consistently satisfied.
Today, the fine-grained tools are in place for advanced users (Click the advanced search link on major search pages) and the defaults, as Dare pointed out, are reasonable for the majority. Search technology has reached a very useful plateau and must now start working on making inferences on our searches in order to make the results more "relevant". This however requires the search engine to have a memory of your searches which brings in the problem of privacy and sheds a modicum of light on how complex this problem is. Until things get better though I am going to bask in the glory days we are living in: the days were nearly all the information I ever want is only 0.07 seconds away!
Posted by harris at September 28, 2005 08:38 AM
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Comments
Every search engine says its results are relevant but I think that as long as results are in Macro-content the results will always be mixed - relevant and irrelevant and the user will be frustrated.
see more on
http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/09/macro-content-relevance.html
Posted by: Zeev Barkan at September 30, 2005 06:41 AM