Yahoo Queries The Obscure

Such frustration serves no one, not the searcher, and definitely not the search engine as it fails to place relevant advertising alongside the search results a person hopes to see. It’s a situation, as Resource Shelf indicated from Yahoo Research, that has room for improvement.

The fine minds at Yahoo Research, who most recently enjoyed their supercomputer debut at Carnegie Mellon, tackled the problem of obscure queries. Their research yielded a way to improve upon the one-off searches that engines sometimes see:

To address the problem, the Yahoo! team proposed a methodology for using search results, as well as information available on the Web, as a source of external knowledge. To this end, they sent rare queries to a search engine and assumed that a majority of the highest-ranking search results were relevant to the query. Categorizing these results allowed the team to classify the original query with high accuracy

The results definitively confirmed that using the Web as a repository of world knowledge contributes valuable information about the query, and aids in its correct classification. “We discovered the best source of information to understand what these rare queries are about is to look at the search results,” Broder explains. “If you look at each returned page as a vote on what the query is about, you find that the majority tends to be correct even though many individual pages are wrong.”

A couple of positive results should happen as research continues. Search results should be more in line with what the searcher expects, while advertisers with the most appropriate messages to place with those results may find better responses to their campaigns from qualified customers.

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“Unfortunately its impossible to count the number of blogs in the blogosphere due to the number of spamblogs, splogs, zombies, whatever you want to call them,” writes Cuban.

Cuban settles on the lingo, eventually choosing “splog” as the new Internet word of the day. Personally, I’d have gone with “blam,” but who am I?

After Technorati’s Dave Sifry reported in March that nearly half of all blogs in the blogosphere are stagnant (not updated for six months or more), the proliferation of splogs (blams) is a reasonable surety due to free and easy setups.

This presents quite a challenge for blog search engines as well as they will have to scramble to develop algorithms especially efficient at filtering out bogus content.

Of course, bringing up the issue gives Cuban a chance to slam Google’s hosting service Blogger.com while praising IceRocket’s splog filtering capabilities.

“Blogger is by far the worst offender. Google seems to be working hard to adjust their relevancy indexes to exclude splog from having influence on search rankings, but they don’t seem to be doing anything more than removing reported splogs,” said Cuban.

But he does make a valid point that it will become increasingly difficult for search algorithms to differentiate between legitimate blogs and splogs, which is bad news for the innocents who may be overlooked while being indexed.

Cuban suggests using an email system to verify when legitimate posts have been added similar to those used for comment spam (which Salsa Dave and I shall call “scam.” Dibs!).