Internet Marketing Course BLOG

By Chris Sherman
Associate Editor
SearchEngineWatch

Dave’s Comments (Internet Marketing Course Blog): A comparison of of first page search results for 4 of the most popular search engines – Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask Jeeves. It’s really quite amazing how much the results vary between any 2 search engines, and particularly, among all 4 of the engines. A must read!

“A new study suggests that the overlap between search engine results is less than it was even a few months ago, and that the voices of each engine are growing even more unique.

It’s easy to think of search engines as black boxes that all deliver more or less the same results. But that’s not an accurate view, according to a study released today by Dogpile and researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Penn State University.

The study looked at search results from more than 12,500 random queries on Ask Jeeves, Google, MSN search and Yahoo, and found that the overlap in first page results for these four engines was a scant 1.1% on average for a given query, suggesting that each of the four major search engines has a unique voice that’s not duplicated by the other services.”

Read more about the survey, including links to comprehensive survey results:
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3524411

Technorati Tags: Business, Internet, Marketing

Source: Yahoo! Next Web Site
June 9, 2005

Dave’s Comments (Internet Marketing Course Blog): Sort the first 100 Yahoo! search results for your search term to reflect whether you’re ready to buy now (commercial) or you want to learn more about your search term (research/information-oriented). It’s really a neat new feature! Here’s what Yahoo! has to say about it.

“What is Mindset? A new twist on search that uses machine learning technology to give you a choice: View Yahoo! Search results sorted according to whether they are more commercial or more informational (i.e., from academic, non-commercial, or research-oriented sources).

Sometimes you want to buy stuff and sometimes you just want to do research. In a typical search page, results point to commercial pages that are mixed together with non-commercial pages, so it’s harder to find the type of information you’re looking for. Mindset is our attempt to help solve that problem.

Through the use of machine learning for text classification, we try to classify each web page in the top 100 search results for a query. Then we sort those results according to the preference you set. Mindset uses an intuitive slider in the interface, so you can set the bias for commercial vs. non-commercial results. Often, we come across a web page that hasn’t been classified yet. In those cases, Mindset tries to classify that web page in the background, so it’ll be classified along with the rest of the results next time you do the same query.”

To try it out, go to: Yahoo! Mindset