Staying on message

The need for relevancy and context is a recurring theme and is an issue which will do nothing but grow in importance.

For while our planet is shrinking as a consequence of the global village, the web is growing exponentially year on year. Google alone indexes over eight billion web pages and more are being published online every second of the day. Making it navigable is a challenge that can only get bigger and more complex to overcome.

Raw data results are no longer enough. Content may be king, but context is the queen. Search engines will increasingly have to refine the results that they present to gain supremacy in the context stakes. The logical progression, perhaps, is that with web pages already outnumbering humans on the planet by two to one and this rate of growth showing no signs of abating, we could end up with less choice, not more, if search engines decide only to list paying customers in an effort to generate meaningful and contextual results.

While that scenario may be a little way off, or not even a certainty, keeping our web sites focussed and on message can do nothing but improve our web site rankings. This is emphasized by the popularity of meta-search engines like info.com which do not index sites but rather aggregate the results from a selection of search engines and directories. The trick is not to present million upon million of results but rather sift and filter them into a single set of results that tightly lock onto the keyword term entered.

Info.com, launched late last year, portrays itself not as a search provider but more of an information provider. This semantic debate is largely academic; what info.com does, and does well (more of which later), is interrogate 14 search engines including Google and Yahoo! then strip out all the guff to present the user with a highly-relevant stripped down set of results.

Although info.com is US-oriented, its bias toward consumers and focus on relevancy is a strong example of a new trend in online searching. For crucially not only does info.com aggregate search results from other search engines it also aggregates their advertisers’ paid listings as well.

Quoted on webpronews, Stephen Carr, CEO of info.com said: “There are significant differences between the top results displayed by popular search engines. Despite general satisfaction among search engine users, most would be surprised to know that they are not getting the most relevant web results from a single search engine. Info.com allows users to search the web, look for their preferred news, compare products and shop while knowing that they are getting the right information the first time.”

Quite a claim. But rising to this challenge, yours truly put info.com to the test with a search term that had drawn a time-consuming blank on both Google and Yahoo!

The search term was “motorcycle insurance groups”, the two-wheeled equivalent of car insurance groups. Not particularly obscure or esoteric one would have thought. Evidently not, judging by the number of sites trawled through to no avail thanks to Google and Yahoo! Light emerged, as if by magic, at info.com which hit the bullseye with result no.3. Enough said…