Please try the test here and vote because this is fascinating. It’s simple: perform a search and pick which is the best result, as in, which result best corresponds with what you are looking for. The script gives you the top result from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (not in that order), but – crucially – does not show which is which. Currently, after 1400 votes, 34% have voted for the first, 53% for the second, and 29% for the third.

Of course this is an inexact science. Two different people could perform the same search and prefer different results. Further, it is not quite fair, in that the search engines could have personalization algorithms that will not operate when you go via a third-party script. I also hope nobody is cheating here, since unfortunately the test is insecure, in that you can work out which search engine is which and vote accordingly.

It is still interesting because it removes branding from the search results. This counts against Google, which has the best brand for search. After all, the brand has become a verb, “to Google”. Some people probably think Google invented web search.

Although number two is significantly ahead, the figures are already closer than actual market share would suggest. That implies that factors other than pure results are of critical performance in the search wars – though I suppose you could argue that if one search engine gives you the best result 53% of the time, you will end up using it 100% of the time.

Has anyone done a more secure test, maybe showing the first page of results rather than just the top hit?

The BBC reports that Google will ban essay adverts. I knew this was a problem but hadn’t appreciated how severe it is:

Banning the ads strikes me as sensible, but won’t students simply perform a search instead? Google could also block the searches, but that’s censorship and has difficulties of its own.

The internet has made both paid and unpaid plagiarism too easy; but there has always been a fine line between plagiarism and research (a song by Tom Lehrer comes to mind). Perhaps it is time to change the way students are assessed.

Ephraim Schwartz’s article on search fatigue starts with a poke at Microsoft (I did the same a couple of months ago), but goes on to look at the more interesting question of how search results can be improved. Schwartz quotes a librarian called Jeffrey Beall who gives a typical librarian’s answer:

The root cause of search fatigue is a lack of rich metadata and a system that can exploit the metadata.

It’s true up to a point, but I’ll back algorithms over metadata any day. A problem with metadata is that it is never complete and never up-to-date. Another problem is that it has a subjective element: someone somewhere (perhaps the author, perhaps someone else) decided what metadata to apply to a particular piece of content. In consequence, if you rely on the metadata you end up missing important results.

In the early days of the internet, web directories were more important than they are today. Yahoo started out as a directory: sites were listed hierarchically and you drilled down to find what you wanted. Yahoo still has a directory; so does Google; another notable example is dmoz. Directories apply metadata to the web; in fact, they are metadata (data about data).

I used to use directories, until I discovered AltaVista, which as wikipedia says was “the first searchable, full-text database of a large part of the World Wide Web.” AltaVista gave me many more results; many of them were irrelevant, but I could narrow the search by adding or excluding words. I found it quicker and more useful than trawling through directories. I would rather make my own decisions about what is relevant.

The world agreed with me, though it was Google and not AltaVista which reaped the reward. Google searches everything, more or less, but ranks the results using algorithms based on who knows what – incoming links, the past search habits of the user, and a zillion other factors. This has changed the world.

Even so, we can’t shake off the idea that better metadata could further improve search, and therefore improve our whole web experience. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could distinguish synonymns like pipe (plumbing), pipe (smoking) and pipe (programming)? What about microformats, which identify rich data types like contact details? What about tagging – even this post is tagged? Or all the semantic web stuff which has suddenly excited Robert Scoble:

Basically Web pages will no longer be just pages, or posts. They’ll all be split up into little objects, stored in a database (a massive, scalable one at that) and then your words can be displayed in different ways. Imagine a really awesome search engine that could bring back much much more granular stuff than Google can today.

Maybe, but I’m a sceptic. I don’t believe we can ever be sufficiently organized, as a global community, to follow the rules that would make it work. Sure, there is and will be partial success. Metadata has its place, it will always be there. But in the end I don’t think the clock will turn back; I think plain old full-text search combined with smart ranking algorithms will always be more important, to the frustration of librarians everywhere.

Microsoft is giving enterprises incentives to use Live Search instead of Google or Yahoo, according to a ComputerWorld report; John Battelle has more details.

Buying search share is nothing new; the Mozilla Foundation apparently gets a ton of money from Google for making it the default in FireFox. This is just another skirmish in the search/toolbar/gadget wars; the stakes are high, because search is the user interface of the web.

I doubt the strategy will have much impact, unless Microsoft fixes what really matters: the quality of its search engine.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of search today. I was reminded of this during a recent presentation on software usability. Speaker Larry Constantine made an example of a feature in Word: how to insert a caption for an image.

Problems like this are easier than they were in the pre-Google era, for the simple reason that users are now able to search for the answer. Try it: Google for “word insert caption” (without the quotes) and up come dozens of postings on the subject. Quicker and better than online help.

Since the ability to search efficiently is now a key productivity factor, it follows that businesses should think twice before allowing themselves to be bribed into enforcing search preferences. Better to evaluate the search engines, and maybe give some training in how to use them.

Internet Explorer is the dominant browser, Windows the dominant desktop, yet Microsoft’s share of internet search is apparently declining. Here’s why. I’m researching Yahoo Pipes; I forget the exact url for the Pipes home page so I type the search into the IE7 search box, where Microsoft’s “Live search” is the default.

The page I want is not on the first page of results. The ads are irrelevant. Some of the search results are at least relevant, but they are not what I would call top tier results.Even the O’Reilly link is a page for all articles tagged Yahoo, not one of the actual Pipes articles.

So I switch to Google search. The page I want is top of the search results. The other entries are more relevant. Even the ad is moderately relevant (at least it is about software Pipes not metal tubes).

This is of course anecdotal. It was also a tough test, considering Yahoo Pipes is new. Perhaps there are hundreds of other searches where Live Search gets better results. All I can say is that I rarely discover them, whereas I frequently find Google’s results much better. This just struck me as a good example.

Microsoft will never improve its share of search unless it can deliver at least equally good results.

See also my IT Week comment.

Technorati tags: search, microsoft, google

Ran into this puzzler today:

I could not persuade Google Maps that it knew where Mansfield is. I mean Mansfield in Nottinghamshire; but even when I typed in “Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, UK”, Google Maps professed ignorance – although I could easily scroll to the actual location on the map itself by the strategy of searching for another place first. No doubt there are other Mansfields in the world – but why not a disambiguation menu?

Eventuall I tried Mansfield, UK and it worked. Except that the position is miles out:

I guess Google Maps just doesn’t like Mansfield. Microsoft’s local.live.com had no problems.

I’m sure a postcode would have worked; but these are not always conveniently at hand.