SiteLines - Ideas About Web Searching

Coming Soon - the Death of Search Engines?

Is search weariness finally settling in? Are mass market consumers ready to look beyond search engines to other ways of web searching? In "Coming Soon: The Death of Search Engines", I ponder the issues and look for some solutions.

Recommended Resource: Bplans.com

Spotted on the TVC Alert, Bplans.com is a commercial portal site for entrepreneurs seeking information related to all aspects of business planning. The site contains good content-rich articles on starting or buying a business, writing business and marketing plans, along with sample plans, business calculators, plus the expected ads and links to experts who would like to help you.

Canadians use search engines more than Americans

According to a report by eMarketer covered in the Search Engine Journal, Canadians use search engines more than Americans.

It found that Canadians performed 575 million searches in the month of April 2004,versus 3.6 billion searches conducted by people in the US during the previous month. However, taking into account differences in population, the report claims that the average Canadian performed more searches per month than the average person in the US.

This data comparison assumes that Canadians and Americans have equal web access and are equal users of the web. But is that true? I was suspicious so I went searching.

It's difficult to find comparable facts and figures for different countries. However, according to figures produced by Clickz and aggregated from several sources, Canada's online population of 20.45 million users represents about 63% of the total population, and is virtually identical to the 185.90 million US users, which represent about 64% of the US's total population.

Of course, errors might still exist -- geomapping of IP addresses isn't always reliable, and it's conceivable that some searchers in both countries conducted searches in search tools that were not included in the count. In the final analysis, while the differences between countries are still reasonably significant, what do they tell us about the differences between our nations' information seeking habits?

Yahoo Results Are Looking More Like Google's

For the last several weeks, Thumbshots.com has offered a free online tool that compares results from the same search conducted in Yahoo and Google. Until recently, the results in the two search engines were different enough to suggest that searching in both might be one way to bring up a greater variety of results.

But the Search Engine Journal weblog reports that results in the first twenty hits (the ones that most searchers look at) are looking more alike now. This is a development worth following, as search relevance will be an important competitive advantage as these two major players duke it out for dominance over the coming months.

Use of Google by Judges to Substantiate Information

In the May 13 TVC Alert, Genie Tyburski came across a fascinating article on how US judges have used Google to substantiate information used in trials. Some of the examples betray a rather startling lack of understanding about Google's limitations, and leaves the reader wondering just how Google got to be such a trusted source among those (like judges) who ought to know better.

Google Has It's Own Blog

Google has finally started up its own weblog on all things Google. Although only a few days old, the initial postings (come work in our Zurich office, and more pseudo-apologies on the JewWatch.com controversy) make me think that this will be more of a public relations feed than anything else.

Just Because It's Indexed Doesn't Mean You'll Find It

Since sometime in 2002, Google has indexed a significant portion of the PubMed database. None of the other search engines I tested (Teoma, Yahoo, Gigablast) had any PubMed content.

Even though it's indexed in Google, PubMed's content may never be found.

Google's PageRank algorithm, which sorts search results based principally on how many pages link to the matching page, helps to ensure that PubMed database citations will remain at the
bottom of search results. In other words, it doesn't matter if those PubMed citations are
indexed, because they will never be found by a searcher looking for topical information
using a typical keyword approach.

In this example, I searched the keywords asthma children in Google. The result is a large results list. The sites in the first pages of results aren't particularly bad: Google weights certain domains, like cdc.gov, and medlineplus.gov more heavily and as a result the search results aren't completely overwhelmed by .com medical sites.

But where are the results from PubMed? A search of the first ten pages of the asthma children search above reveals no PubMed citations. Why? Because these individual PubMed citations are hardly ever linked by other web pages, and as a result they receive a low PageRank in Google. The net effect? The low-ranked PubMed results sink to the bottom of Google's search results list for practically any medical topic.

Beyond the negative effect of PageRank, Google's simple keyword-string-matching approach isn't nearly as sophisticated as PubMed's own search options. This isn't unusual. Many specialized, searchable databases on the web have unique search options which simply aren't available through one-box search engine interfaces.

For example, I conducted a search of the keywords asthma children in Google, limiting
results to the Pubmed domain ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (example). There were approximatly 13500 results.

But the same keyword search in PubMed delivers over 22000 results. Why? The difference between the Google results and the PubMed results can likely be attributed to the sophisticated search methodology inherent in the PubMed search, which matches keyword against the MeSH Translation Table in order to create a more inclusive and accurate search strategy. Google's search methodology is rather more ordinary, searching the keyword input directly and matching the occurance of the keywords in the PubMed record. In our asthma children example, Google would retrieve children but not child while PubMed's sophisticated preprogrammed interpretive search logic would retrieve both.

Sure, it's theoretically nice that search engines are indexing formerly "invisible" web content, but without corresponding tweaking of the PageRank algorithm, that content will never be found.

Analyst Thoughts on Yahoo in the wake of the Google filing

Safa Rashtchy, Internet analyst at Piper Jaffray, thinks that Yahoo will be a solid competitor with Google as a revenue generator. In this week's issue of the Silk Road Weekly, he summarizes his key questions for the coming months:

1. competition with Google
2. capturing local search (this means capturing locally-targeted paid ads, like pizza in toronto
3. international expansion
4. growth strategy in branded advertising
5. Yahoo's recent ad campaign

He concludes, "We believe Yahoo is likely to present a compelling case in its competition with Google, leveraging its wider global reach and diversity of services. As such, we expect the stock to react well ..."

It's always important to remember that although a stock may be poised to "do well," searchers shouldn't necessarily assume that the stock will necessarily improve as a search tool.

Given all the buzz about the forthcoming Google IPO, it's ever more important to separate the buzz about a search engine property as an investment from its actual value as a useful search tool. One has rather little to do with the other.

Recommended Resource: NutritionSource

NutritionSource, from the Harvard School of Public Health, is designed to "provide timely information on diet and nutrition for clinicians, allied health professionals, and the public." The site is well designed and presented, with PDF options for printing on every page. Many recommendations are supported with references to major studies.