[finders] Evaluating Search

[finders at findability.org]

September 27, 2005: Evaluating Search

Google will no longer tell us how many billions of web pages they've
indexed, though they do claim to be "more than 3 times larger than any other
search engine." John Battelle tells the story over on Searchblog.

Of course, index size is a flawed metric. Most users never get past the
first 10 results, and neither Google nor Yahoo! lets you explore beyond the
first 1,000 hits. And if you're crazy enough to dig deep into the result
sets of Google and Yahoo!, you'll find that both pad their indexes with
spam. For a search index, quality counts, and sometimes less is more.

It will be interesting to see how the search wars play out in the coming
months. As the playing field becomes level with respect to speed and size,
it seems clear that brand, relevance, and user experience design will be the
keys to competitive advantage. What do you think?

PERMALINK + COMMENTS
http://www.findability.org/archives/000051.php

LINKS MENTIONED

Searchblog
http://battellemedia.com/archives/001889.php

Google Blog
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/we-wanted-something-special-for-our.h
tml

User Experience Design
http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000029.php