Monday, March 14, 2005

Searching Google : Position of the words in a query are important

In a Andy Beal post today I was surprise by his conclusion on how search engines would benefit from personalization. Shure it's true on the dream world, but it will take long before we saw that.

Even with a Desktop Search who gonna clusterize my hard drive to see what my point of interest and take it in account when I make a SE queries, it probably been wrong because I done a web site on berries a while ago and thoses words associates with berries in my hard drive would wrongly influence results on the fruits and not on the RIM Blackberry.

His query was using the wrong search engine. On Yahoo the position of the words on your query rarely get attention. This is bad and the terms you use have more than one meaning. On Yahoo the results on "cookies blackberry" and "blackberry cookies" are the same on the first page of two. On Google the first word of a query will have more weight and give a different set of results. For his query Google find the answer in second position, and if he was looking for food and not cookies files he should only inverse the term to find his "blackberry cookies" recipe in first position !
Not a soap and bathing page like Yahoo give on first place for those two queries ;-)

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