[Search-l] NPOV for Search?

[John McCormac]

Jimmy Wales wrote:
  > Relevance and neutrality are not opposed goals at all.  The problem with
> the Google results in this case is that they fail to cover the wide 
> range of what the user might be looking for.  That is to say, their lack 
> of neutrality gives rise to a lack of relevance.

The social aspect of search is that it may provide some guidelines as to what the user is searching 
for. The obvious example is that if I was searching for something Waterford related, I would most 
probably not be looking for something from Waterford Michigan or anywhere other than Waterford 
Ireland. Now if that was part of my profile, it could be used to narrow the results. But that might 
be going a bit too far with social search - taking the user into the search.

The only mechanism that works in an repeatable fashion is the use of words in the query. Trying to 
move beyond that is difficult because you are in the position of having to try to guess what the 
user wants. With search engines, you can only please all of the people some of the time. Google has 
a greater coverage of "some" than others like Microsoft or Yahoo.

> "Relevance" is not a concept that can stand alone.  Relevant to whom, 
> and for what?  Once we scratch the surface, we understand that relevance 
> asks for balance, for neutrality, for quality.

"Relevance" for the moment, is that which satisfies most users for that particular query. Basically 
a search engine has to provide what the operators hope is the most likely set of results that are 
relevant to the user's query. Social search offers an element of refinement but the hard work has to 
be done on the backend. This might be putting the cart before the horse at this stage but the 
quality of the search engine's URL set has to be clean and usable. Once the data set is clean(ish) 
the relevance is easier to achieve. The neutrality aspect is what concerns me most because every 
successful search engine is far from neutral. Perhaps it is just a philosophical argument rather 
than a technological one and I'm thinking as a search engine techie.

Regards...jmcc
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