Web Search Update
Web Search–Yahoo
Source: San Jose Mercury News
+ Plaxo,Yahoo make deal on search
From the article, “Today Plaxo integrates Yahoo’s search engine directly into the Outlook e-mail program. Under the deal with Yahoo, Plaxo will get paid for channeling people to Yahoo’s search engine. The search box will be placed beside a Plaxo icon that sits atop Outlook. Plaxo will eventually make Web searching possible from individual e-mails, according to Masonis. Ultimately, he wants Plaxo to search individual words within the e-mails. You would click on the word and Plaxo would do a Web search through Yahoo.” Thanks to Searchblog for the tip. J.B. also comments on the deal.
See Also: Direct to Plaxo
–
Web Search
Source: SearchDay
Search Engine User Attitudes
D.S. and C.S. with a thorough overview of some recently released numbers from iProspect. Here are a few points that caught my eye.
+ “What do people do when they can’t find the information they’re looking for? 26 percent said they’d give up on a search and try again if they didn’t find a match in the first two pages of results, more than any other choice. This was followed by 23 percent who said they’d review only the first few matches on the first page, then 19 percent who said they’d review only the entire first page of results. 15 percent said they’d give up after reviewing three pages. The remainder said they’d look at more than three pages.”
+ “Nearly half of those surveyed — 49 percent — said they use one or more search toolbars. This is based on the fact that respondents were asked to answer which toolbar they had installed: Google, Yahoo, MSN or None Of The Above. Yahoo was ranked top among those choices, at 22 percent, followed by Google at 20 percent and MSN at 17 percent.”
+ “In other findings, both men (65%) and women (57%) preferred natural results over paid listings, though the 43% of women who said they favored the paid listings suggest that the preference for organic results is not as strong in women as men.”
–
Web Search
Source: News.com
Study questions Google’s long-term dominance
A couple of comments:
+ The study points out that, “Google’s results vary little from those found on other search sites.” However, SearchDay recently noted that, ” A new comparison tool shows that the major search engines have surprisingly little overlap, even for popular search terms. Search engine guru Greg Notess has long studied search engine overlap — the number of pages found by more than one search engine. Greg’s findings have consistently shown that there is very little overlap in the web page databases of the major search engines, meaning you’ll likely get very different results depending on the engine.” The article also says, “Google users searching for the leading cause of death for people between the ages of 25 and 34, found the information they were looking for 55 percent of the time. The company’s rivals fell close behind with between 52 percent and 54 percent success rates, Vividence observed.” So I guess the question is, what did the study participants consider a good result? Were those surveyed satisfied with whatever they found? Did time constraints come into play? What were the search terms? How many search terms were used? Those of us who use specialized info databases (free and fee-based) — along with things called books (no kidding) — realize that the web/web engines are just one of many research tools. However, I think the general public has little or no idea about “other” existing resources that could not only be helpful, but also SAVE them aggravation and effort. We also know that with a little effort, general web search tools like Google and Yahoo can become much more powerful and precise. This will become even more noticeable as these resources grow in size. I guess the most interesting news is that more and more users are realizing that general web search tools (other than Google) are useful.

+ “The company found that Google clearly remains consumers’ favorite, largely because of the search engine’s less-cluttered interface.” I can’t figure out why Yahoo doesn’t spend some effort promoting the search.yahoo.com interface? Heck, you can even customize the tabs! I also think Teoma.com is far from cluttered, and it also gives refinement options not available at Google. Again, creating and purchasing an info resource is one thing, but getting people to use it is something else. Google does it very well (better than just about anyone); others, including traditional vendors and libraries, need to do better.

+ “Watkins said part of the reason why Google lags behind its competitors is the company’s stringent practice of keeping ads well marked, while the other sites sometimes mix solicitations in with regular search results.” Google deserves mega kudos for their work in labeling web results and making everyone else follow. That said, everyone else is better, and it’s hard to find examples of where the other engines mentioned in the article don’t clearly mark ads vs. organic results.

+ I’ll conclude with two comments that I think are relevant. The first from our friend Tara Calishain, who said in a 8/03 AP article, “Google has a lot of smart people who have built a great search engine, but there are a lot of other smart people out there looking for ways to make search engines even better.” The other comment is found in a 5/03 Forbes article, “Even Google’s engineers admit FAST and Teoma deliver results comparable to theirs.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2004 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.