Search Done Right

John Battelle’s Searchblog mentions Zibb.com, launched by Reed Business Information to use “proprietary categorization, entity extraction and taxonomy management software … [which] automatically organizes content from hundreds of Internet sites into a vertical search engine.”

Vertical search by publishers is a worthy attempt to deal with this problem: the success of general web search engines Ask, Google, Live, and Yahoo (AGLY) – or even Clusty – as go-to places for all kinds of information threatens to diminish the brands and mindshare of specialty publishers, turning them into commodity suppliers of AGLY search results.

Certain brands won’t diminish in my own mind, such the ACM (I have a computer science degree), IEEE (my undergrad degree is in EE), National Geographic (unique), New York Times (worldwide coverage), and the Economist (highest-quality articles), because these brands were imprinted on me before the web arose. But, as young professionals turn first to AGLY and see search results from the New York Times mixed in with the Tuscaloosa Times, the NYT will lose prestige and then readership.

So back to Zibb … how are they doing? Anybody can check traffic figures on Alexa.com, so I’ll stick to evaluating the quality of the service.

Key question: why should users visit Zibb rather than AGLY?

Let’s say I’m a potential buyer searching for ‘enterprise search software’. Zibb’s results page has this top search result:

1. Ask Jeeves sells enterprise software unit
Ask Jeeves sells enterprise software unit Thursday 29 May… Ask Jeeves is tol sell its enterprise software division, Jeeves Solutions, to…launched last year, combines search and customer relationship management… http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2003/05/29/194863/Ask+Jeeves+sells+enterp…

which is a 4-year-old item about Ask Jeeves divesting its enterprise unit. The second result seems some kind of spammy site, and the third result is a consulting firm in Greece (nice country, fount of civilization, but not the place I’d turn for search software, plus the page is under construction).

How about UI or navigation aids that differentiate Zibb from AGLY? Two are prominent: alternative queries, and tag clouds.

Zibb shows these alternative queries to my ‘enterprise search software’ query: enterprise software, search engine, enterprise resource, resource planning, search software, supply chain, enterprise search, planning software.

Clicking on one of these alternatives issues a new search, makes my screen disappear, and shows me a new screen with all-new information and context. I have never understood this design approach, since the search engine basically tells me that I’m stupid: you searched for ‘enterprise search software’ but maybe you should search for ‘enterprise software’ instead. I know my topic, I just need help navigating the overload of information on my current screen.

Zibb also shows a tag cloud of clickable industries:

Aerospace, Marine & Defense / Agriculture & Horticulture / Automotive / Chemicals, Plastics & Rubber / Construction / Electronics / Finance & Tax / Food, Beverages & Tobacco / General Business / Healthcare & Medicine / Hospitality / HR & Training / Information Technology / Jewelry / Legal / Manufacturing / Media & Entertainment / Metals, Mining & Extraction / Paper, Packaging & Printing / Publishing & Information Services / Retail / Security / Textiles, Clothing, Fibre & Fabrics / Transportation & Logistics / Utilities & Environment

which when selected narrow the current search results by industry, which the software presumably tags the crawled pages with. After narrowing, no further tag cloud help is offered, although the query alternatives do change.

Overall, my guess is that there is little reason for users to go to Zibb instead of AGLY.

How to compete better? That’s a longer story, but here are two quick remedies:

Address the ranking issue: (1) Break out news sites into separate collections from vendor sites, then federate them after making editorial judgments about whether news sites should precede vendor sites. (2) License general web results from an AGGLY (throw Gigablast into the mix) and federate them with your own crawled results. Commercial web indices tend to give better overall ranking because of pagerank-style factors. Make sure that AGGLY allows blending its results with yours, otherwise no deal.

Help Users Navigate Within Their Current Search Results: clustering, previews, search-within-the-results, are examples, but there are more.

Vertical search can work, but users need good reasons to turn away from AGLY.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 7:32 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.