OneMind

I’ve been spending a lot of my time lately looking into the world of Internet search. My main client is about to crank up a major effort in this area and has asked my team to play a pivotal role in the project. In addition, as someone who spends an average of 6.75 hours per day online (yes, I’m just nerdy enough to have actually calculated that value over a recent one-week period) I figure I probably use search a lot more than the average Net user.

As part of this study, it made sense to me to peer beyond the well-defined edges of search-driven marketing (optimizing a site for search engine results and using search results to trigger the display of keyword-based ads) and look at other arenas. One place I find that search is still very much embryonic is an area I think has tremendous potential if only we can figure out the right technology to enable it to scale is human-assisted search. Because even with recent efforts by Google to make search smarter so that it can bring back the pages that are most likely to be of interest to you based on previous searches you’ve done and rankings you’ve given its results, search is still largely naive because it is virtually entirely context-free. In addition, it requires a little knowledge to phrase queries in such a way that the results, even though not entirely what you might expect, are at least not overwhelmed with the irrelevant.

One answer to this problem that we’ve all just learned to live with is the intervention of a human somewhere in the search process. Someone who can mediate search results so that they return focused and useful information is a valuable information librarian. While there are folks engaged in this business and others who are trying to find ways to automate the processes, one avenue that seems to me to be largely ignored is the use of Social Bookmarking sites such as Delicious and StumbleUpon. Delicious serves up about 3 million page views per day according to the latest stats I could find, which is of course a mere pittance. But I ran some tests on several topics over the past few days and found that Delicious.com often returned more relevant, current and useful sites than Google, Bing or Yahoo.

Even though Delicious isn’t a major search site — and isn’t worth advising my clients to try to increase their presence on — I think it’s quite overlooked. If you try using it yourself you might find that your search experience on the Web increases enough that it’s worth the fact that not every site on the Web is mentioned on it.

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous