Part 3 in the 4-part series, “My Search Sucks,” discussing why search, well, sucks.

There are three key principles that explain why site search just doesn’t perform like we expect it to. Over the next few weeks, I’ll dive deeper into each issue surrounding traditional search and offer my insights and experiences to help you understand why your search sucks, and how you can improve it.

Reason #2:  Actions speak louder than words.

Okay, so we’ve figured out that the critical information is not in the document.  Where is it?  Well, it’s in the users’ heads of course.  Let’s look at an example.  If we look at a work by Shakespeare—or any great work of literature—the meaning cannot be identified simply by looking at the words within it.  It’s synthesized in the reader’s mind, and different readers may derive different meanings based on their own unique makeup and experiences.  The same applies to any document.  We must look beyond the words within the document to truly understand the value.  The key question to ask is this: when and why is this document valuable to users?  Only the users themselves know the answer.

Now that’s all well and good, but how do we extract that knowledge from the users?  We could ask them directly, but while that might seem like a good strategy, it’s actually not.  Asking users to explicitly rank, rate, or tag documents is doomed to failure.  The core problem is one of participation.  Think back to how many times you’ve provided feedback on the web.  Most of us never have; others may have on occasion, but almost certainly not on every page visit or search result.  This participation problem leads to a few key challenges:

A. Low coverage. A small subset of the population rates content, and when they do, the ratings only tend to  cover the most popular content.  Where does that leave the majority of our content?—the long tail.  Unranked and therefore undiscovered.  And with search, it’s not just about knowing that a document has value; it’s about whether it’s valuable for that specific search topic and that user.

Let’s take a deeper look at this.  Let’s say we have a bunch of ratings on a particular camera.  Sounds great, right?  Well, not really.  People like or dislike a camera for a variety of reasons.  Someone looking for a “lightweight camera” might think it stinks, while someone looking for a “cheap camera” might love it.  You can’t ignore the context of what a person is looking for, and getting explicit coverage across every topic of interest is even harder than just getting an overall rating.

And, when you factor in staleness of content — be it the article or the rating — then even the ratings you do have become less meaningful.  Add to that the mountains of content that are being created every day, and the problem really gets out of hand.  There’s just no way to keep up with it if we’re relying on people to go out of their way to explicitly rank, rate, and tag content.

B. Biased. In general, the people who do participate in explicitly rating something online represent a very small subset of the population.  That means that, even for those documents and topics that do have coverage, there’s no guarantee that the knowledge imparted by users even represents the majority opinion.  In fact, it almost always represents fringe opinions that are either extremely positive or negative because those are the people motivated to be heard.

To read more about the bias inherent in explicit methods of capturing community wisdom, check out my “7 Deadly Biases” whitepaper.

C. Inaccurate/Incomplete. Even when an individual decides to provide some form of explicit feedback, it often is not fully representative of even their own experience.  Let’s go back to the insight/incite example from my previous post.  Let’s say that a user decided to tag the Incite product page that was so useful.  What tag do you think they would use?  Probably “incite” or “incite phone,” right?  They would almost certainly not tag it with “insight” once they realized their mistake; but this is actually the tag that would be of most value to the community!  It might surprise you to know that social scientists are generally distrustful of people’s own accounts of their feelings and behavior!  Meta-cognition and emotional self-awareness are far more complex, and less intuitive, than people think.

So, if asking people to tell us what documents are valuable and why they’re of value doesn’t work, then what is the right way?  The key is to observe what people do, not what they say.  It’s both more accurate and more comprehensive.  The wisdom we are looking to tap is present in every single search–whether the searchers were successful or not.  By watching what people do, we can understand which documents are valuable and when.

But we need to be careful here too, because watching which search results users click on is not enough.  Clicks are a very weak indicator: just because people clicked on a result does not mean it’s valuable.  Perhaps the title was intriguing, confusing, or even misleading.  It is critical to follow the user all the way from query to success or ultimate failure—even if several steps later—and not get distracted by what they click on.  At Baynote, we track 24 different behavioral heuristics to ensure that we accurately capture where users are engaging given a particular context and intent.  And it’s not just about search; it’s about the entire online experience.  More on this in the next post.

Next week: Part 4 in the 4-part series, My Search Sucks! where we’ll explore how search does not exist in a vacuum.