Search Results - A matter of Perception.

Interesting to note that there is really not much distinguishing the major search engines in terms of the actual search results returned. This article "
Google And MSN Tie, But Google Still Wins" gives details of a survey which indicates that although the users are generally satisfied with the results of the respective search engines, perception play a very large role in the search engine that they use. Google with it's towering brand equity in the search market has gained the most from this perception while MSN, though technically equivalent, I believe has been impacted negatively due to this. But it looks as if Ask Jeeves and MSN have made tremendous improvements and increase in their user base over the past year. This is also partly due to the growing market for search.

Information Overload

I have been hearing and reading a lot about this term "Information overload" recently. Just today, there was a post on Greg Linden's blog about it.There is no doubt that is a problem that is increasing in magnitude every single day, even as I write this post adding to the problem.

Most of the suggestions to solve this problem have been mainly related to better understanding the intent of the user, using the user's history and clickstream to further present the most relevant results. Google has recently started this and Findory has been doing this for quite some time. Although these work well in certain cases, I personally do not think this is the holy grail.

We here at i411 believe that there is only so much you can do to infer a user's intent. We prefer to give the user options and engage him in a dialog and give the user options so they can guide themselves to the right set of results. This approach works very well , especially when there is some structure in the data which you can take advantage of to guide the user. This is a trickier problem to solve for the web but not many people have attempted it. Vivisimo with their Clusty have attempted a solution with not much success and Google and MSN have also been researching with clustering technology but have not been able to bring it to the mainstream yet.

Some other potential combinations of solutions to this problem would also include

• New visualization techniques that would enable us to get a good sense of all the information presented to us quickly and intuitively.
• Authoritative source of information - The web has made each one of us a journalist and there is no pecking order among the sources of information. Maybe we need authoritative sources of information which take precedence.

An interesting quote to end the post -

"We are drowning in information but are starving for knowledge"

41% of Google Search Results Page are Ads

Someone did a pretty interesting analysis on Google's results page. We did not realize but this say's that Google is showing a lot more ads on their results page. They are now not much different from most of the other sites except they have managed to keep the interface clean.