Search For Better Search – What Do Web Searchers Want?

We polled you and confirmed that search is still an unsolved problem. A number of innovative companies are attacking this problem from different angles. In our “search for better search” campaign, we have results on top tech blog writers’ thoughts about the search landscape and their propositions. We also organized a poll to ask blog readers what they think. As of May 2nd,the results are as follows:

Poll question: What do you think a search engine should do? (504 votes)

As we push the search technology envelope to innovate, it is great to see the poll’s confirmation that we are responding to the demand! We attack the relevancy problem by delivering more meaningful results, powered by the QDEX and SemanticRank, which is summed up in the top two choices. We are working to bring a fresh perspective on other improvements as well, such as providing a clean and strong user interface. Did you check out our uninterrupted, highlighted sentence presentation, as opposed to broken keywords, that let’s you evaluate your answers directly from the search page, even without visiting the source of information? Michael Arrington’s “give me more control” argument is in the 3rd rank with a significant 10% vote – it’s hard for me to understand this because all search engines already give you a lot of control with the advanced search settings. It is interesting. Personalization is surprisingly unpopular with a total vote of 3%.

And now let’s flashback to a similar Read/WriteWeb poll as an independent source to confirm our findings:

Poll question: What ’search 2.0′ concepts you think stand the best chance of beating Google. (625 votes)

Even though ReadWriteWeb results are more evenly distributed, the rankings are almost the same. Both polls share the same top finding: users want more relevancy.

Web searchers want their search engine to become more intelligent; they want to get exact results to answer their questions. Interestingly, personalization is not that important for them, perhaps because keywords that require personalization are not that many and you can easily solve that problem with adding one more relevant keyword to your query – for instance if you’re looking for java, the programming language and not java, the island, you can look it up with 2 keywords java and programming and you’re done in keywordese!

Another striking outcome is that ReadWriteWeb readers want to see effects of power of masses in their results. Just like del.icio.us does with tag based bookmarks integrated with their search functionality.

Last but not least, the user interface of course…Even if you have the best technology, you can do nothing with a boring and slow interface. On the same token, you can do nothing with the best UI, if your technology does not deliver. At hakia, we try to offer you both, a simple interface and higher search relevancy, to reduce your search time.

Yes these are my findings. Let us know what you think…Thanks to everyone who participated in our campaign, blogged about us and spread the word. Expect to see more in the following months!

        

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 3:45 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.