Jun
28

Search Engines have a way to go to improve

Nick Burcher has done a good job comparing different search engines results f or the phrase "Michael Jackson Died". 

The one that comes up best is Hakia (pity you didn't put that at the top of your list, Nick give it some more publicity).

Hakia bills itself as a 'semantic search' engine that understands more about what the user is looking for. The Hakia results served up for 'Michael Jackson Died' are definitely more relevant than the other search engines referenced above. Hakia note the existence of Michael Jackson the writer, but seperate this off into a top section with the label 'would you consider this answer?' Impressive.

I also like his skill at tracking down the source of some of the confusion – Wikipedia who, since 2007, has had the exact phrase in an article referencing the 'other' Michael Jackson.  

Indeed Wikirank shows that visits to the profile of Michael Jackson the writer increased by 31,995% on June 25th. This 'other Michael Jackson' Wikipedia profile was visited 83,134 times on 25th June – even though it has nothing to do with the King Of Pop. 

However, the real answer to the search string could be provided by "real-time" search.  The Online Marketing blog summarises this in the context of the Iran + Electrion search string.  This is a small holy grail that has been on the cards for a while. Take a read of OneRiot's nice summary (although it is a rather a strong sales pitch for his work).

But the 'rumours' of the internet activity spikes causing Google news to think it was under attack by malware are more entertaining…. and Alan Patrick has a good graph summarising the reasons for the 'attack' – this really made me smile!

Michael Jackson graph 

And of course this has clear implications for your own company / brand / name.  Check yourself out on all the search engines Nick lists for obvious search phrases and see which one 'finds' you.  If not, back to the SEO drawing board to refine the natural search phrases.

Thanks for a great insight, Nick and starting my researches into this great topic. 

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  • Thank you for the kind words! I think there are actually two distinctly different problems here.

    1) Semantic Search - Search Engines being able to interpret what a user is actually looking for and then serving the relevant results (clearly seen with the 'wrong Michael Jackson')

    2)Real Time information - the challenge of being able to serve instant results, but not results that include spam or unreliable info. Neither Jeff Goldblum nor Britney Spears died, though real time info suggested that they did, because in a world where you have to be first these stories were spreading faster than anyone could verify them.

    I agree with the points about monitoring the internet and needing to know what people are saying about you brand - and responding where necessary, however getting (and acting on) the wrong information is worse than doing nothing at all. Real time is a challenge for any information filter - especially around seperating out truth.
  • Glad you like the MJ analysis :)

    The problem the "traditional" search engines have is that they spider the web to build in-house indexes to search (faster results), count the links to the webpages they index, and keep long memories - so a post from 1997 with lots of links will count higher than one from yesterday with no links.

    Realtime search on the other hand will see the rapid rise of yesterday's story. But the longer the lens back, the more long term the Realtime engine's view as well - for example "top trending" story of the day is different to that of the week, month, etc.

    The downside of realtime search is that it is massively resource intensive so unless very focussed takes a long time.
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