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Search Engines Are For People. Meet Y!Q.  

:: Thursday, February 03, 2005 ::

When I was in High School, the senior class voted me for two awards. One was for "The Most Radical". The other was for "The Most Freakiest", which even today, I don't know what that means.

I was, as far as I viewed myself, a few things. Very fair minded. And I disliked being plopped into any one group. As far as I cared, people are people and what you do or what you wear isn't who you are.

Fast forward to 2005, and things still aren't feeling right. For example, in a long debate about the troubles at DMOZ, someone made reference to there being a difference in the types of end users who use the Directory product. There were webmasters or searchers. And, then there were customers. What a surprise to learn DMOZ may be making a distinction, and will judge submissions, or worse, feedback, based on which of these types they're dealing with.

Search engines and directories are for all people, know matter their motivation.

However, there are people who vehemently believe that anyone in the search engine optimization or marketing business is there soley to manipulate or trick search engines into delivering something people want. My clever friend, Ammon Johns, once said, "SEO is all about usability and accessibility."

His insights were on the money, and bare repeating in a year of massive changes and competition between search engines and directories. Ammon also said,

"The basis of all SEO is really simple: we design for one more broad type of user-agent than most of the designers ever think of – even the so-called progressive ones. SEOs design for the spiders to get as much out of the site as the human users can."

To accomplish this goal, which is to help search engines provide accurate results for the people who search, takes more than sticking in meta tags or creating connect-the-dot muliple domains.

Innovation, these days, is understanding what people want and building it for them.

This is happening. Peter DaVanzo, unhappy with long waits for submissions to the giant Directory, DMOZ, built his own Directory, called RubberStamped.org. He took enormous heat for doing so, even from his own SEO/SEM industry peers. But, time will tell if his goal of meeting the needs of end-users will prove to be the correct choice. When DMOZ stopped listening to its "customers", whether they paid for the service or not, they risked losing loyal visitors.

We all know that Google is constantly buried in R & D. MSN, surprise-surprise, has gone back to the drawing board and relaunched MSN Search. They didn't do this because they were deaf, dumb and blind, though one wonders. Acting as if there was no problem, or no competition, helped make Google the number one search engine. We're watching the games begin, now that some of these giants have woken up.

Today I tried Yahoo!'s new Y!Q. I loaded it into my Firefox Browser, which Yahoo! smartly chose to not ignore as a browser to make this application functional in. Y!Q is a tool that allows you to run a search on something you may be reading about and, at your whim (which we all have, right?), you can stop and run a quick search to learn more on a phrase contained in the article, or a question you just thought of.

I tested it, by pulling up one of my articles, and then asking Y!Q, "Where are usability services". My own UsabilityEffect services page came up in the number 2 spot.

The software tester in me was suspicious, because I was asking Y!Q from my own IP, while stationed at one of my own pages. I wondered if that influenced the search results somehow.

So I pulled up my friend John Rhodes' WebWord web site and once there, I asked Y!Q, "where are usability services" and again, it sent me to my site. Hum. Very flattering, but I'm not convinced.

For fun, while starting at both my Cre8pc homepage, and John's WebWord sites, I asked Y!Q, Find John S. Rhodes (I added the "S" so as not to get everyone with that name. I wanted the WebWord John.) Y!Q delivered me his About John page from this WebWord site in the number 1 spot. Even if I started from my Blog, which links to his site, instead of taking me to my own link to John's site, Y1Q referred to the proper page - his. It wasn't influenced by where I was when I asked the question.

Though I'd like to see this tested more, to see if where you are or who you are has any influence on the search result, it does stand out to me as example of designing for all people. User centered design, for a mass, broad-range target market such as a search engine, doesn't matter who you are or what you're wearing. It doesn't matter if you're eating at your computer, or have purple and green hair.

What does matter to their developers is what you came looking for. And better yet, and most interesting, why.

Search engine technology is considering your needs, and believe me, from what I'm hearing, this is the tip of the iceberg.

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 2/03/2005 11:16:07 AM

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