Change channels in search
Even before Google, Altavista used the search channels ‘Web’, ‘Images’ and ‘News’ to let users devide search results. Google adapted this approach and I cannot understand why this remains.
I believe about 80% of all searches is done on the Web-channel and the search results become worse and worse. My main focus of search privatly is in Dutch and we cheeseheads seem to be into the secondhand markets….a lot. So what happens: anything you search for results in the first 10 pages in Google are ads from these market places (marktplaats, tweedehands, etc). Very frustrating if you are looking for productinfo from the original supplier.
My suggestion is to alter the channels into something like: general web, discussions, markets. This could be worked out in more detail but you get my drift. We incorporated this in the public Qweery search engine 3 years ago and got a lot of positive feedback on it. Not to tap ourselves on the back, the public engine won’t be here to see 2009, but I think this will be a true addtion to the mainstream search engines like Google of LiveSearch.
Now to think about how to determine which page goes where.
The way we did this at Qweery was: markets were identified by domain, so we kept a large list of domains which we believe are marketsplaces. A lot of work, but does work well.
Secondly the discussions or better: fora and blogs. Wel, this can be done much easier: just look at the url and if it contains forum or blog then put it in the channel Discussions. Maybe not very clean, but it seems to work.
I can image sites to abuse these kind of rules, so some other great thinkers should work this out in more detail, I guess.
What do you think?
Cheers,
Maarten Rooseboom
Tags: channels, public, search engine