Posted on October 20th, 2007 | by sunny |
Google’s search quality team made an interesting observation in an article in The New York Times recently: “…When search first started, if you searched for something and you found it, it was a miracle! Now, if you do not get exactly what you want in the first three results, something is wrong…” Most of us would agree with this. Unless we are in the research mode, we expect search engines to deliver in the first few results. That means, for a large measure of search queries, you’ve just about 3 slots to impress the user, three legitimate positions to vie for.
But with millions of web pages being indexed every day by leading search engines, and perhaps another few 1000 websites being churned out daily, the situation is slightly difficult to imagine. Small players and the latest entrants could either hope that the long tail would notice them, or settle for spending enormous amounts of money in search engine marketing and optimization. Google’s universal search model tries to accommodate more in the same 1 – 10 search results space, thereby making it further difficult for upcoming websites.
This brings us to the obvious question. Isn’t it about time, we changed the search results design to make it more user friendly and at the same time accommodating more result? That’s a difficult ask considering users are averse to even scrolling down. 20 search results model hasn’t quite taken off.
Maybe in a very small way, but Antya could be a start. The Antya search results design attempts to accommodate more results, at the same time focusing the user’s attention to just one result without the need to scroll down. Ultimately, Antya aims to achieve the utopia of exactly mapping the user intent to ‘one’ result.
The other results in the form of brand logos have been kept to make the user register the brand. Recognizing trusted sources for results could also be easier with brand logos shown instead of the results. With good broadband penetration through out the world, speed shouldn’t be much of a problem. But user perception will definitely be… especially beating the current search mindset – people used to seeing a lot of text – and of course typing a lot of query variants. Also, another challenge could be people perceiving the brand logos for banner ads.
How successful this model is, we all will see. This is just an honest attempt. But if it is, it will be interesting to see how this model could be scaled to the web, we mean the crawled web.
One Response to “Search Results Matter”
By N.S.Narayan on Dec 10, 2007 | Reply
The Uttara Guruvayoor Temple has not been included. This temple which is located in Mayur Vihar Phase-I is an exact replica of the one in Guruvayoor. It is very famous and almost all important and well known people are in the management committee. The temple is well managed and run in the traditiona style. Kindly include it.