More to Search than Relevancy, Accuracy, Precision and Recall?

October 25, 2013

There is a good chance that we may hear someone cry heresy after reading the Moving Fulcrum post: “The Growing Irrelevance of Google Search.” The author presents his case as a focus group of one who happens to no longer utilize Google as his primary search engine any more. Instead, the author finds information using the following sources: Twitter, Stack Overflow, Wikipedia and Yelp.

The author admits that his searches are focused around himself as opposed to Web sites of information. Whether this has always been the case or not, there are certainly many media available now in order to address the needs of every individual using the Internet.

The post states:

Google excels at searching for the long tail of information. That was true a few years ago, when an individual’s opinion could only be expressed on either a blog post or a forum post, which Google could index/rank like nobody’s business.

But in a world with Twitter, and the silos of information that are now sites like Stack Overflow and Wikipedia, Google Search is becoming more and more irrelevant.

While Google is all about relevance, accuracy, precision and recall, we have to ask the question “is that what people want?” For example, the recent New York Times article “It’s Not Just Political Districts. Our News Is Gerrymandered, too” suggests people might not want to search or see much more than their own reflection.

Megan Feil, October 25, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search

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