Every once in a while I read an article or a blog post that makes me feel like I was just hit in the head with a hammer. I don’t mean a bad kind
of hammer here – you know, like an “Ouch, that writing was so bad, I’m now
experiencing physical pain.” I’m talking about a good kind of hammer that gives
a soft, gentle thump to clear out the cobwebs and nudge those seldom-used
portions of my brain into action.
I had one of those head-bonking moments yesterday when
reading a post on Seth Godin’s blog about search engines and information density. The first line of Godin’s post says it all,
“Memo to search engines: we’re smart enough to look at more than five search
results above the fold.” That’s when it hit me. Have we all become so obsessed
with the importance of quality that we’ve forgotten quantity plays a critical
role as well?
I started thinking about the way I perform a search.
Granted, I probably spend a lot more time researching topics than the average
searcher, but I still wouldn’t be surprised if many people approach the task
the same way I do. After putting in a search term, I usually scan the results
on the first page, go to the second page and scan those, move on to page three
and do the same, and then page back and forth a couple of times before finally
clicking on something I want to read. Then, if I find out that site wasn’t what
I wanted after all, I back out of the page and start the whole process over. I guess I know now why it's called "re-search."
So, why don’t I just change the number of results that show
up on a page of search engine results? I’ve tried that a couple of times and
found it to be an even more inefficient method. I end up scrolling so much that
I lose track of the links that my mind is filtering out as potentially
clickable. Basically, it’s easier to locate the top, middle and bottom of a
page with a list of 10 results as opposed to a list of 50 results when those
results are presented in a long single-column format.
Godin offers a potential alternative that sounds very
attractive to me. Instead of one column listing 10 results per page, what about
three columns on each page so you can see 30 results at a time? Godin calls this a “power search” option, but
I suspect a lot more people than just power users would like it.
Search engine developers (particularly those from Google)
have spent a lot of time over the past year talking about changes that are
supposed to give users higher quality and more relevant results. Here’s the
thing, though. No algorithm – no matter how personalized it is – is ever going
to be able to conquer the relevancy issue to the satisfaction of the majority
of searchers if we’re limited to the number of results we can efficiently scan
per page. And, the relevancy problem is just going to increase as more and more
information is produced and distributed via digital means.
The relevancy of results not only depends on the searcher,
but also on what the searcher happens to be looking for at that specific point
in time. That is, a single person may type in a query one day to look for one
thing and may type in that same query the next to look for something else
slightly different. In order to determine true relevance, you need context –
more context than most people type into the search field.
Plus, there are lots of times that I perform a search on a
term and I’m really not sure what I want to find. Maybe I’m just hoping to see
something interesting or quirky on that topic, or maybe I want something a bit
more informational. It’s kind of like an “I don’t know what I’m looking for,
but I’ll recognize it when I see it” situation. This type of query is almost
impossible with today’s search engines.
Getting back to the whole quality vs. quantity issue, I
certainly agree that quality should be a key factor in search results. But,
with the growing amount of information available on the Internet, we need to
have more choices available for us to see at one time if we want to find what
we’re looking for faster and more efficiently. We’re more than capable of
handling more information at a time when it comes to making choices. That’s why
we have cable subscriptions that offer hundreds of channels, visit bookstores
to choose from thousands of books, and scan Twitter feeds at a lightning-fast
pace.
I suppose making this type of change would make search
engines more like curation tools. But, hey, wait a minute. Isn’t that the
point?
Image Credit: PhotoSpin/Design Pics
No comments:
Post a Comment