How a Search Engine Might Use a Searcher’s Knowledge, Interests, and Education to Rerank and Validate Search Results
Thursday, June 26th, 2008The amount of pages on the Web that a search engine could try to index is extremely large, and the approaches that search engines attempt to use to index and rank those pages is mostly an automated effort, but that doesn’t mean that the search engines don’t have people take a look at search results, and try to gauge how relevant their automated results might be.
A search engine typically locates web pages that contain the keywords entered by a searcher within a search box. The order that those results appear are based upon a number of algorithms used by search engines which look at various factors, such as: the frequency and number of entered keywords that are within each page and the position of the entered keywords within each page.
An example might be a first page that has a keyword located in the title or near the top of the page ranking higher than a second page that has a keyword in a footer or near the bottom of such second page. That first page might be presented to a searcher before the second page because of the location of the keyword.
While this automated approach might be satisfactory to some searchers, other searchers might find rankings of pages to be inadequate or irrelevant to their needs.
How might a search engine verify page ranking results of a search algorithm with respect to the specific needs or characteristics of specific groups of users?
A recent patent application from Yahoo explores the topic, and it wouldn’t be too much of a surprise of the other major search engines employed some processes of their own to do something similar. In fact, a set of Quality Guidelines (pdf) were uncovered from Google, which provides instructions to people who manually review the pages that appear in search results from Google.