Re: AltaVista Testing Paid Search Results

From: David Yancey <dyancey_at_intergen.co.uk>
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 14:03:13 -0500 (CDT)

To echo and amplify some of Eric Ward's points:

1 Users should simply demand that all engines be up front
about whether a listing is paid or generated through a
search bot or the equivalent. Believe me, if thousands and
thousands of webbies hammer at the big engines on this, they
will feel pressured to be more open.

2 Eric, who probably knows as much as anyone about focused
keywords, counsels us to think *carefully* about the
specific keywords that will truly and usefully describe the
site. I'd expand his advice with this suggestion: before
some materialist like me has the chance to build a
commercial site that claims to report, for example, "the
current placement and positioning cost" for a goto.com, we
who participate in this list along with IADL and I-sales etc
ought to take it upon ourselves NOW to define a consensus
standard metric that will let all webmasters know what they
are up against before they simply get roped into throwing
precious budget at goto.com or Alta Vista or the others
should they adopt the paid listing model.

3 Eric's point that paid listings offer at least one answer
to the burgeoning mass of sites is valid, but must not be
allowed to let the engines off the hook - - the reality is
that the keyword-dependent bot methodology is simply
ineffective, not because the database is so large, but
because keywords are essentially unreliable as predictors of
listing relevance to the searcher's query. That may sound
like heresy to some, but stop and think: if I enter
"travel", then the poor bot has no way to distinguish
between a page that is actually about travel, and a page
that merely mentions the word in some other context. The
more common the keyword, the more susceptible the search to
this "implicit unrelatedness factor". Should the bot be
limited to Meta tags, the relevance reliablity may seem to
improve, but many pages and sites will drop off the list
that should not, especially when the search query involves
relatively infrequently used terms, or specific names, etc.
In short, then, the problem of overly long lists of
"results" that, in fact, are *not*, will only begin to be
resolved when we realize that indexing of keywords alone
will never be a sound and efficient foundation for page and
site searching, whether the database is one million or one
hundred million entries.

4 But the really *immediately* useful suggestion Eric made
is so good I must quote it verbatim, in case any readers
missed the post:

'Have a link just above the search results that says:

"Click here for hits from .edu, .org and
other typically non profit or non commercial sites"

In other words, without making it any more confusing, the
engine could organize the results into classes, rather than
giving the laundry list.'

Hear! Hear! We *all* ought to pressure the engines to adopt
this easy-to-implement suggestion, as a way to let the
not-for-profit sites that all of us rely upon for so much
information and assistance pop to the rightful top of the
results pages. More problematic, perhaps, but just as
important, we ought to insist that the free-hosted homepages
with useful information be similarly accommodated. It isn't
rocket science to give a bot the capability to know it's
currently indexing a site on geocities, for example.

Let's simply demand this kind of attentiveness by the
engines as they evolve. All the sites I and my colleagues
are involved with may be commercial, but it doesn't bother
me a bit to share listings with sites that are not, or to
rank below them in any fair test of relevance. That, fellow
web professionals, is precisely what made the web the
fantastic information tool it is, as well as the fantastic
commercial opportunity it is fast becoming. To try to
simplify the search process by relegating non-commercial or
"unpopular" pages and sites to some kind of information
ghetto or cyberslum would make the web something else,
something we should none of us want to see.

Sorry for the longish post, and thanks to all the others who
take this issue of search tool usability so seriously.

David Yancey, Managing Director, Intergen Associates
Internet Business Planning, Development & Management
"If you want an Internet presence, create a website; if you
want an Internet *business*, create an Internet Business
Plan."
mailto:dyancey_at_intergen.co.uk or see us at
http://www.web-base.com or call our Japan office:
81-42-943-2637


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Received on Mon Apr 19 1999 - 15:21:08 CDT