RL|redline

next search engine

Maybe the search engine war is not over as all. I (as many) was convinced that Google already won the war for "how to get quickly what you need on the web"; well it seems that at least from the quality of the search service I was wrong. Jean Véronis made some interesting research about the relevance of the results provided by several engine. The research reported in John Battel's Blog generated an interesting debate between Jean and Jakob Nielsen about how to measure the real relevance search engine result because users don't necessarily click the first hit so relevance should be calculated using the average relevance rather that single hit relevance. What's interesting here is that if you count 10 hits Yahoo is slightly better than Google. If this data are correct this means that search technologies are getting better also away from the "pagerank home", but the main point is that if get you quick on the right page is becoming easier the core business for search engines will be the interaction between real world and online data... and Google knows it very well.

posted by Luca @ 3/09/2006 03:03:00 PM