I’m thinking of visiting my family for Thanksgiving this year. Needing to confirm the date, I did what seemed like the sensible thing to do; I went to the search engines. Alas, I may have been better off pulling out a real calendar.
My search engine of choice is Google. I typed ‘when is thanksgiving 2011′ and the first result was from WhenIs.com. About 2012. The second natural result, helpfully, has the right answer.
But, this is a question that has a specific answer; this is not something where I need to see multiple options. There is an answer, and I don’t really care where it comes from, so long as it’s accurate. I don’t need to see ‘about 47,400,000 results’; I only need one result with the correct answer.
Searches elsewhere yield equally terrible results.
Blekko, which claims to ‘slash out’ spam, features a top result about the Southridge Mall’s new anchor, which might launch by Thanksgiving 2011. Blekko’s second result is about Disney moving The Muppets Movie release to Thanksgiving 2011. Both kind of related, but still not answering the question. The third link is to a Catholicism sub-page on About.com, which has a link to the date among 35 other primary, non-sponsored links on the page.
Bing’s ( and by default, Yahoo’s) first result is the same About.com Catholicism sub-page noted above. Buried in a confusing mess of information, the actual date is available on the second result – sgholiday.com.
Ask.com actually gets it right in its ‘Closest Answer’, and even its number 2 organic result from Chacha.com has the right answer – right there in the search results.
The issue here relates to the difference between being a ‘search’ engine and being an ‘answer’ engine. If the query has only one real answer, perhaps it’s time that search engines stopped delivering ‘results’ and started delivering the right answer.
I'm passionate about digital marketing, customer service, personal branding, and education. My posts here will mostly focus on those subjects, though I can't preclude the very real possibility of a rant or two now and then. And I have a very snarky sense of humor, though it's never mean-spirited.
In addition to being a digital marketing consultant, I'm the Program Director for the Internet Marketing degrees at Full Sail University. I love my job(s)!
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Yes, I agree. For the most part I am alright with the results that appear in Google, but there are those searches that are next to worthless. I think what needs to happen is add a feature that once you search for something, you can go through and mark the “results” that were the “right answer”. These would then be associated with your search query and the algorithms could begin to learn from this data and improve results for the next person who searched for that same query. Right now algorithms are essentially internalized, and feedback from users has very little immediate impact.
Jasper – I think you’re right. Google did try the ‘thumbs up’ approach for a while, but it never really gained much traction. The issue there, in my opinion, is that I can’t give something a thumbs up or a thumbs down until after I’ve seen it. If it’s what I want, I’m not that likely to go back to the search results just to give it a thumbs up. (On the other hand, if I don’t find what I want, I have to go back to the SERPs anyway, so I might give it a thumbs down…)
I suspect +1 in the SERPs suffers from the same problem.
I agree with you that user feedback doesn’t have a major impact – at least not yet – but I certainly think that’s changing.