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What would you propose instead? It seems that asking people which they prefer is the only way to do this, even if it does stilt towards the market leader.
by jmtulloss 17y ago
What would you propose instead? It seems that asking people which they prefer is the only way to do this, even if it does stilt towards the market leader.
- eli 17y agoMaybe kick it off with the first search pre-populated from, say, a dictionary word. (Though maybe that's not fair either, if it isn't the type of search you're likely to perform in real life)
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- ricree 17y agoThe best way I can think of would be to have a long term test where a number of users did all of their searching through a site that would randomly show the results of one search engine, and then have the users rate their satisfaction with the results. It wouldn't be quite as good at cross comparing, but it would have a much more realistic selection of searches to draw from, and it would reduce the sort of biases that the gp post was talking about.
- encoderer 17y agoHere's a thought.. build a list of questions. Give them a search box to find the answer, using their own queries, and let them choose which result set was most helpful. "What is" "Who is" "How was" type of questions. Would be much more work, but could be worth it if you're trying to answer this question accurately. Tho personally, I've begun using Bing in addition to Google. I think this is what most people will do. The idea that we only have room in our lives for one search engine seems silly. Doesn't anyone remember what life was like before Google? I'd often use multiple engines for a given query -- and each engine had links to 'Try this search on ____' at the bottom of each result page. Google has been so far better than the competition that such behavior has died off. But I think it's going to make a comeback now. I guess we'll see.