I just checked my TripIt account and so far I have been traveling for 25% of 2009. That means, having just started June, that I have been gone from Boulder for more than a solid month. (Well, not a solid month, more like a total of a month worth of days, but I bet you get it.)
Which also means I get a lot of time to read. Lately, I have been reading a book called The Know-It-All by AJ Jacobs. In the book, which is non-fiction, AJ reads the entire encyclopedia to become the smartest person in his family.
In many ways, I view Google, Yahoo!, and MSN (I mean BING!) similarly. They are out there attempting to catalog the worlds information so that when asked a question, they can provide you with THE one right answer.
Often, they do. But as time as passed and the information store has grown, context has been lost. When you do the search for “seal” what is returned? The animal? The singer?
Google hedges its bets by displaying images of both, but guesses the singer in the results…
There was a recent article in DM News that search queries of three words or less were down 3%, 5% and 1% respectively, but that searches of four to eight words had grown from 3% to 20%.
In short, searchers have learned that to get relevant results, you have to use more than three words.
My friend Kevin Lee of Did-It was quoted as saying:
“Longer queries are a sign of the searchers becoming more educated and savvy and essentially being trained by the fact that results for shorter queries tend to return less relevant results than longer searches.” (emphasis mine)
Frankly, while not surprising, that boggles my mind. Searchers have learned that the major search engines are inherently inefficient and ineffective at applying context to a search query. How is this progress?
That major search engines are relying on the searcher to provide the context via additional keywords in the query. How does that create a better search experience?
Which, of course, brings us to Lijit.
Across our network approximately 75% of the searches are three words or less. Why is that?
Because we allow the publisher to provide the context. Their readers, by going to a trusted source first, already believe that the results that are returned will be contextual to the query. Therefore, they don’t need to use multiple word queries to return relevant results.
How do we know that this is the case?
1) On average, we get a higher click through rate on organic results than people using Google Custom Search.
2) On average, we get a higher click through rate on ads than the industry standard for text ads.
So what is better for publishers?
The “one right answer” approach that the major search engines take, or the “every publisher has a right answer” approach that we take?
I suppose that is up to the searcher.
But, I can guarantee it will take less keywords in the query to find the answer on a Lijit publisher.
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Toolemera