New Delhi Times - Gaurav Bhatnagar reporting from New Delhi, India

Thats an excellent point about search quality and incentives. Apart from that interesting analogy with Microsoft, Google's focus on everything under the sun, but search nowadays, validates what you are saying.

Search quality though, is not just about the raw quality. Its also about whats in the user's head. I remember reading a study that showed that people judged from different engines about the same in a blind test, but judged Google as better when they knew it was Google. Cannot remember where I read it though.

I am not sure what exactly you meant to write about . were you cribbing over Google quality or you simply hate google earning money from their ads . I do not subscribe to your view about google having no motivation to improve their search results since it actually wants its users to click on their ads . Let me tel you that on the contrary google has more interest to improve its results since more visitors means more users ..more CTR ( click thro rate ) and more people clicking on their ads .
I am not sure if you are well acquantined with the SE industry . I fail to understand what you mean by this
"So when a user was specifically looking to buy something online (which is when they are most likely to click on google ads), they would anyway get the best results in the middle of the page and never need to click on an ad"

I dont know how you came to the conclusion that ppl that buy online click on ads . they wud click on Froogle ( e commerce search of google ) more than they click on ads . Also organic search results are clearly separated from the ads which is called " Sponsored results " Any average english knowing visitor can differentiate the two . I would request you to desist from making observations on something which you are not aware on , rather than make misleading generalisations on Search Engines
And I also fail to understand you Microsoft -Fixation in everything you write . I understand you had worked from them , but I am sure you could do well by giving more divergent examples

I do agree with Gaurav that you need competition to keep Google going. However, I wouldn't compare Google's current "inertia" with respect to search algorithm with Microsoft's over confidence with IE. I think Google is definitely spending their resources on the improvement of "search technology" unlike Microsoft which publicly told that they are stopping work on IE.

Excellent point, Google claims to have the largest index and the largest share of the market. Tough competition would keep them working hard. Of 2005, I did see a slew of new developments from Google, but still nothing as promising as their existing search business. Perhaps they feel they can take a breather and consolidate?

However, I don't see the same conflict you highlight. A lot of my marketing friends (those with MBA's I guess) talk about footfalls (and similarly page-views). At first I was a little surprised - my question was the same as yours, what is more important? The usual answer is - sure, it's important to convert the customer, but if I can get more people through the door, my conversion is also going to grow proportionally.

That I believe is conventional thinking. Marketing folks will at the same time work very hard to optimize the transaction and make it only a small part of the experience.

I think currently no search engine offers good alternatives to searches like "visit india" or "vacation australia". Its unreasonable to expect them to return good results for such queries and hence the fall back and the searcher tendency to click on the ads which are of more value to them.

But alternatives such as social search, tag based search, open bookmarks etc. are promising and might be a good complement to algorithmic search.

Great post though!

I think currently no search engine offers good alternatives to searches like "visit india" or "vacation australia". Its unreasonable to expect them to return good results for such queries and hence the fall back and the searcher tendency to click on the ads which are of more value to them.

But alternatives such as social search, tag based search, open bookmarks etc. are promising and might be a good complement to algorithmic search.

Great post though!

If you perform a number of searches related to something you looked for in the past, Google might try to provide better results as those appear in its index, if it believes that you are still interested in that topic and weren’t satisfied with the answers that you received.
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