Faster Doesn’t Always Equal Smarter – Kay Kelison

Google rolled out a new search enhancement that shows results when you type, called Google Instant. While it’s true that this feature is innovative, one should question whether innovation equates to more relevant search results. In truth, there is no correlation between speed either quality or relevance of results. So, when you get the 10 blue links does the fact you got them faster mean the search and results were smarter? After all, Aesop warned us of the folly of relying purely on speed. Last year Bing’s search engine was tweaked to produce Real Live Search, which loaded full results pages as users typed. Stefan Weitz, Bing’s director, is featured in USA Today were he talks about how Bing is trying to do search smarter, and that faster doesn’t always equal smarter. He continues to explain that it’s a good thing to produce search results quickly, but that doesn’t always mean it is going to be the type of results that users are looking for thus not really saving them any time. Combining with Yahoo is helping them not only gain access to more information, but with the increase of information Bing can bring users more relevant results faster. “When you think about state-of-the-art searching, it should be less about searching and more about finding” says Weitz.

Posted via email from Kay Kelison's Digital-Log