Saturday, November 25, 2006

The Big G and Semantic search: Commercial success vs QoS

As years passed, it grew and the world took notice: the PhD. project by Larry page and Sergey Bin that eventually became the fastest growing project ,so fast that the Goliath at play,Microsoft ,had to take notice even though its market capitalisation was much much more than Google's.

Not very long ago i read an article on Google effort on semantic search and the effort it is putting in.But in practice I dont find anything...really.In fact I am feeling that the percentage relavance of the search terms to the the search results is sometimes alarmingly low.

Example:
Do a search for Microsoft and lo! the third result is about Internet Explorer 5.5 and the change in its URL.

And something more annoying (for me atleast).A search for India would give the first result as http://indiaimage.nic.in with the Wikipedia entry coming in second and the link we all hope should come first- the National Portal of India-http://india.gov.in coming in a very distant 7th.

And Google needs to get rich ,may be, but that does not mean Google ads give extraordinarily STUPID results.The search for 'the most searched word on The Net' (I could easily mention it if not for the fear of Mighty G listing my page in 'blog search' results for The Word) would get you a Google Ad for Children's furniture.That was a month ago...now that its a month let me check it out for you and ......Ahem! The results:
1.Girls Speak Out( Nothing explicit about this)
2.Hypersexuality -supposedly a research.
3.Something banned on EBay (Google does a good job here.Call the police please.Help the country ;-) ,and yourself)
4.Racing , Action and Cricket gaming titles.
5.Web Photo Album software.

Well,if Google calls this 'effort' and 'semantic search' ,then I guess it would get a little unhappy for those celebrating GOOG hitting $400 on NASDAQ.

As Google gets bigger and expectations grow for compulsive Googlers like me(One line explanations later,even for that QoS),it needs to work harder and smarter.

GoogleBot better watch out as Excavator is workin real hard to get close and might succeed.

Note:This article is essentially over except for the tech-uninitiated.Bah!I meant if you have understood each and everyword, please continue by clicking here.

The Explanations :
QoS- Quality of Service.
compulsive Googler-A person who has to use Google even for Google-bashing.
GoogleBot-Google's search engine(prefer calling it Google's spidey)
Excavator-Microsoft's spidey ;-)

As I have already said, all study made using Google.So commenters might help me providing an alternative.