Google Not Best for All Searches - Asking the Right Search Engine
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Patrick Schaber was recently inspired to check out the major search engines for information on Tony Bennett, a performer who’s been delighting audiences even longer than the Beach Boys. He felt let down by the results of a search in Google. Sure, Tony Bennett’s official site was at the top, “but with all the talk of Universal Search I was expecting a very rich media-type experience with music, video, news and more.”
As it turned out, he could indeed get what he thought of as the Universal Search experience – but he had to go to Yahoo for it. “From the nice results box featuring Tony Bennett, I’m able to listen to music clips right there, watch video clips (right on the SERP!), get a link to the official Tony Bennett site or click on links to check out albums, photos and more.” He then checked MSN Live and Ask. MSN seemed to respond in the same way that Google did, while Ask’s approach was closer to Yahoo’s – if anything, it was even more complete, thanks to Ask’s separate panes.
It occurred to me, though, that this was a people search. What happens if you ask a people search engine the same question? I’ve reviewed Spock previously; it’s a people search engine with a social element. When I used it to search for Tony Bennett, the singer was actually the third result returned. While the entry itself contained a lot of links and a certain amount of information, I couldn’t listen to music clips or watch video clips from it; Tony Bennett’s own web site wasn’t even the first one listed! It’s a sad bit of irony that Yahoo and Ask, which function as general search engines, did better than a vertical search engine at this task.
But that simply indicates that there is room for improvement. Remember what I said earlier about the different kinds of questions that could lurk behind the simple use of keywords in a search box? Yahoo’s and Ask’s approaches answer as many of those questions as possible right on the very first page. That’s why their results are more relevant than Google’s. In fact, a user might not even have to click through to any of the results to get the answer they want, depending on the question. As Schaber observed, “I’m not sure I’ll need to know anything more about Tony Bennett after the Ask.com experience.”
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