Web Poll Results: What is the Most Important Component of a Search Engine?

Our last web poll had asked readers to vote on what they considered to be the most important component of a Search Engine - an indication of the areas a small search startup should focus on to help capture market share away from the major search engines.

27 readers voted (thank you!). The poll results are shown below.

These results are interesting because I had expected a higher percentage of votes for the Results Visualization choice, followed by the Algorithm choice, but the votes did not match my expectations. Part of the reason could be that readers of this blog are predisposed to have a stronger interest in the algorithms and strategies used by various search engines than in their UI paradigms.

As for the size of the Content Index, that's a metric that is slowly declining in importance. There was a time when the major search engines would fall all over themselves in trying to top each other in terms of the amount of data indexed; but as the content on the web explodes and grows progressively richer, it simply does not matter as much, and that is reflected by the votes.

As expected, the Query Spec choice got completely ignored. The search engine input spec could be so much richer than a minimal number of words or a single phrase. However, I fear that we're condemned to using keyword-ese for specifying our needs to the Search Engine for the long-term future, which is a pity; like the QWERTY keyboard, it may stick with us well after its usefulness has waned.

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Comments

[Endre Jofoldi]

Regarding to algorithm I am 100 percent sure, that the most people could not differentiate between the results of Yahoo and Google if they should do it blindfolded. Actually there is a french study what points out that the difference in users' satisfaction with results of Yahoo and Goodle is minimal, but the market share difference is huge. http://aixtal.blogspot.com/2007/11/search-google-yahoo-comparison.html

It is like in any other markets: more and more about the brands.

[BECKYFrazier24]

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