Can
Google Search the Stray Dogs?
Don’t
get me wrong. But when I try to search anything on our search engines I
get lost in the search results. Mainly I use Google or Yahoo! site for
searching. Could not muster courage to dabble with others, as I have
burned my fingers with these popular ones. Here’s the sad story of
search engines, scripted by
Rakesh Raman.
Here it
goes. For any query, the volume of hyperlinks thrown back on my computer
monitor runs into miles across multiple web pages. Some times I feel I
need another search engine to search relevant information from the
search results.
Don’t
know the precise definition of a search engine but I suppose it should
be: “a web-based software utility that searches everything for you
except what you want.”
Let’s
take a real-life example. I live in New Delhi. And I’m really fed up
with the gangs of stray dogs in this Indian capital. I was just curious
to know how many stray dogs are in the city. So I searched “number of
stray dogs in new delhi” on Google.
I’m
damn sure this exact data won’t be available on the web, because these
dogs keep visiting their relatives outside the city or their relatives
would pour in from other places. And I can’t expect our municipal
corporation to keep this data and then regularly update it on the web.
So ideally I shouldn’t have seen any result back.
But
Google will show its efficiency even in such hopeless conditions. You
know how many results it showed! Hold your breath! It took just 0.41
seconds to cull out 275,000 records and displayed them on countless web
pages. I – and you also – wonder if this dog data is not available then
what Google is trying to produce.
I
suppose for every search query, it follows the meaning of its name. As
you know – and Google says – its name comes from "Googol," a
mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Now when you search
anything on it, it tries to produce results that are equivalent to “1
followed by 100 zeros” in number.
And
while showing these utterly useless results, Google perhaps knows that
most users will be dissatisfied with its output. So it subtly asks at
the bottom of the page: “Dissatisfied? Help us improve”.
Other
search service providers are equally notorious, but ironically all of
them are attracting billions of searches on their sites. Take U.S.
market, for example. Research firm comScore reveals Americans conducted
13.1 billion core searches in February 2009. While Google Sites led the
U.S. core search market with 63.3% of the searches conducted, it was
followed by Yahoo! Sites (20.6%), Microsoft Sites (8.2%), Ask Network
(4.1%), and AOL (3.9%). In terms of numbers, Google Sites handled 8.3
billion core searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.7 billion, and
Microsoft Sites with 1.1 billion.
The
number of searches is high perhaps because users come to search sites
again and again with the hope to find some useful information. But
problem persists. Their output may be confusing but, believe me, all the
search engines are earning plenty of money from the advertisers and
thriving on this confusion.
That’s
not all. In the process, they’ve created an unruly ecosystem in which
some others – called search engine optimization (SEO) companies – are
adding fuel to the fire by selling something that has hardly any value.
When the search engine technology itself is too crude, how can you
optimize its output?
There’s
a fundamental flaw in the so-called optimization services. We know each
potential keyword normally exists on millions of web pages. And a search
engine shows, say, 10 results per web page. If hundreds or thousands of
companies want these “optimizers” to bring their references at the top,
it’s structurally not possible. Their links are bound to flow to
subsequent pages no matter how much they pay for the service. And study
of consumer behaviour tells that you can’t expect a user to go beyond
three web pages while searching a piece of information. There are other
optimization-related issues as well, which are beyond the scope of this
write-up.
At this
stage, users can keep using this raw search facility so long as it’s
free. But companies or advertisers must think twice before paying even a
single penny to any search service vendor.
And
don’t expect any meaningful development on the search scene in near
future. The confusion will keep mounting at a rate faster than the
growth of stray dogs’ population in my city. So, the sad story
continues…
Rakesh Raman
is the managing
editor of My Techbox Online.
Bookmark this on Delicious
Seed
Newsvine
Your
Comments:
