The Search For Relevance And It’s True Meaning

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 20 of November , 2007 at 4:48 pm

Jordan McCollum made a brilliant post earlier today at Marketing Pilgrim regarding the topic of relevance. Just a few things stand out about her blog post that I’d like to respond to.

I think that relevance cannot be a selling point for a search engine, and not just because Live’s update was just catching them up to the level of many other popular search engines. In fact, I think that it’s hard for any of us to truly evaluate “relevance” in results.

Before getting into the meet of relevance, I’d like to just say that Jordan is right. It is difficult to evaluate relevance for several reasons, which she so aptly points out. In a nutshell:

• It’s a subjective term; what’s relevant for one searcher may not be for another
• Certain terms can be interpreted in several ways, many of which could be unrelevant relative to each other
• Sometimes a certain search term may not be sensible to the search engine
• Sometimes a certain search term may be nonsensical in any sense
• Due to some improvements like Google Universal and Ask 3D, some search results may be entirely irrelevant
• Personalization hasn’t really helped, and may never help, because we all have varied enough interests that narrowing down search interests could be an impossible task

First and probably foremost, search engines try (as much any computer can “try”) to understand user intent, but they aren’t all that great at it.

This truth is a source of discomfort for some people, but it’s always been the case. Google rose to prominence primarily because the search engine was better at returning relevant results than all the others. But in 1999 there were much fewer web pages to search out for the best results and quite a bit fewer searchers entering search queries. The algorithms had a lot less work to do. The possibilities have expanded far beyond anyone’s imagination and have proliferated way out of control.

But even personalized systems aren’t perfect. Yesterday, perhaps I was looking for flatware; today, I might be researching New York Indian tribes. Tomorrow, religious collective movements. This is part of the reason why there is a limit to how personalized Google has made its personalized results.

And I’d add this caveat: The more searches any one searcher performs, the more difficult it will be for Google to discern search patterns. A journalist, for instance, who queries on a lot of different topics may never get truly personalized results. A search today for turkey with regard to information on recipes that involve the bird and one tomorrow on the demographics of the country Turkey will undoubtedly send mixed signals to Google regarding personal intent.

A site could be totally on-point for my query, but if it requires me to register, forces music upon me, features a horrific amount of ads or is simply completely illegible, I won’t be able to consider it “relevant.” (And I will run far, far away.)

And some of us will run farther than others.

But there is a place for nonsense in the real world—and a place for Braeburns on a SERP, even if that wasn’t what you were looking for. It might be exactly what someone else wanted.

Quite frankly, this is where most searchers need to be educated. We can blame the search engines all day long for not returning relevant results, but sometimes it is the searcher’s fault. If you want information on Braeburns then you need to query Braeburns, not apples. If you want more generic information on apples and don’t care about specific types or brands of apple then “apples” as a search query is fine. Just because the search engine didn’t return the type of results you weren’t looking for doesn’t mean the results are irrelevant. It may mean your query was irrelevant.

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Category: SEO

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