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How Well Do Search Engines Know Us?
Every search engine is making efforts to understand human search patterns when identifying the best results. Their algorithms are effectively duplicating human behaviour when sifting through millions of websites, by identifying the same things that a person would value and weighing them up against each other. There are, however, only so many things a robot can recognise in the same way a person can, so where do they fall short?
A big part of the success of search engines has actually been down to the reverse - with people learning the best ways to use search engines rather than search engines better understanding people. But their algorithms have come a long way since they started and are successfully recognising lots of things that users value.
Search engines are very good at recognising the relevance of a search term to a page. They can identify how much content is related to the term and how much of the site is also relevant.
What they cannot do is interpret the quality of the content. This is a severe handicap because this is essentially the most important factor in the value of a page. If the content is brilliant, a robot is helpless to recognise it and this is never going to change because, of course, it is entirely subjective. The best a search engine can do is monitor other people's reaction to the page via incoming links.
Judging a page by other peoples' responses to it is a brilliant means of determining it's value, but this user-controlled feedback is always going to be open to manipulation so it is a precarious business trying to remain objective. In a competitive market where sites are constantly trying to win one over on their opposition, this ranking factor is fraught with illegitimate linking tactics.
How can a mathematical equation decide what is a natural link and what is an arranged link? Is this as hopeless a task as expecting a machine to understand quality content? A search engine can identify some platforms which commonly feature links without a personal endorsement as such, like a directory, but recognising the value of this link above a private recommendation is incredibly difficult. More complicated algorithms will address this matter to an extent and place more value on links from 'authority' sites but fully understanding which sites offer genuine opinions of the recipient page has got to be beyond the capacity of a search engine.
The significance of temporary relevance is another area where great strides have been made by some engines over recent years. This is the ability to read which pages are relevant for just a limited period of time. Dedicated news sections are common for this need but many sites do not register pages as news content, however they are similarly relevant when fresh content is added.
So pages with fresh content will invariably receive a boost for certain keywords, but how do you balance this against trusted pages which rank for the same keywords but feature old, untouched content of equal relevance? How does a search engine decide wether because the page discusses current material it is more relevant or if old content is actually just as relevant?
The best it can do is to monitor the traffic to the page and see how successful it is, determining the relevance of the page by it's popularity. Certain keywords can be associated with temporary buzz topics based on the number of searches but then awarding pages greater priority is based entirely on clickthrough and back click analysis in which case the initial position could be entirely decisive and limits the competition for those terms.
Search engines do an incredible job of returning what you need, especially if you have an understanding how best to use them, but their accuracy within the top 20 pages or more is always going to be susceptible to fluctuation because every person is different and there are big holes present in algorithms where human judgement is vastly superior.
We cannot expect a perfect search engine on the horizon any time soon, but perhaps the best we can expect is a superior platform for browsing through the top 50 results, meaning that the results page positions are not determining the flow of traffic but instead the page overview will control where people click.
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