Relevancy & Trust Are "Holy Grails" Of Online Search

Recently, I have put forth three communications regarding my suggestion to help motivate the search engines to take up Danny Sullivan's challenge to publicly and formally try to come up with ways of measuring relevancy on web search, local search and other vertical search.

My suggestion goes something like this:  "Even though Yahoo and Google do well on the 'Search Engine Relevancy Challenge' by Rusty Brick, I'm curious about what the search marketing community and the search engines would think of many search marketing people on many different forums being given the challenge (broken down by category/topic) of trying to come up with ways of measuring relevancy. Danny Sullivan's recent article has a great challenge for search engines, but why not start out challenging many people who work with keywords and relevancy every day? After that, then the search engines could 'Establish a research center, a consortium or something and a methodology that all will agree upon.' as Danny suggests. Getting all forum participants to agree on results would not need to happen, and it would surly get media attention on the more lofty goals of search engines."

Barry Schwartz (AKA Rusty Brick) posted this on relevancy back on 1/5/05.  His "Search Engine Relevancy Challenge" currently shows these results.  While Yahoo is leading today, things can always change.  But, I'm sure even Rusty Brick would like to see the search engines take up Danny's challenge as then the research center that would initially set up and keep improving the standards for measuring relevancy would be heavily funded by all the participating search engines.

My suggestion is based not upon the 100% accuracy and usability of the the ways to measure relevancy that the many search marketers would come up with (although they are very experienced professionals in working with relevancy), but upon the public relations "kick start" of something being done by the search engines.  The search engines would benefit from the positive PR produced by the traditional media's attention being focused on the lofty goal of relevancy versus click fraud, advertising disclosure issues, etc.. 

Jennifer Laycock has a recent article on "Reputation Management, Are You Doing It?".  She was not addressing search engine reputation management, but in these days of heightened competition, the search engines should be doing everything they can to show that there is "common ground" and a "unified front" that all the search engines can agree upon (like the quest for the holy grail of relevancy and trust in online search). 

Why the need for the "kick start"?  After many years of Dale Carnegie, Xerox, AT&T, etc. formal sales training coupled with plain old common sense, I feel the search engines ignored Danny's challenge in his 12/5/02 article because there were not enough positive motivating factors to go with it.  But, there were and are, more negative motivating reasons for the search engines to to not go with it, as they see it.  Danny said this himself in a post on his Search Engine Watch Forum topic of "Coke vs. Pepsi Challenge for Search Engines" on 4/14/05.  But, he added:  "Still, OK, I'll stay optimistic. These guys all want to attract people, and just rolling out new features and not offering up proof of relevancy that others can see is really lacking."

My opinion is that all the optimism in the world will not get the search engines to accept his relevancy challenge, but maybe this will.  Yoda, in the most recent Star Wars movie, says "A path to the dark side, the fear of loss is".  Right now, the search engines fear the loss of reputation and usership by taking the challenge.  They need to be educated to the opportunity of the benefits of accepting the challenge.  The truth is that they can't afford not to take the challenge.  Letting the fear of loss rule, over remembering who brought you to the "Google Dance" (the online search users) is a path to the dark side for the search engines, in my opinion.

If it is made easy for the search engines to "buy-accept" the fact (possibly by doing my suggestion, or some other proactive approach) that their perceived negative is a positive PR golden opportunity for the online search industry, then they may all accept.  After all, if these "measures of relevancy" show a continual "open to the public" competition for an ever changing top two or three positions in each web search or vertical search category, then the search user benefits by more relevancy, the search marketer benefits through happier clients, and the search engines benefit by focusing positive attention on this lofty "holy grail" goal.  The pharmaceutical companies benefit similarly, in my opinion, by focusing their PR on expensive research that develops many new drugs, and effective drugs that are aleady developed.

I'll post on the "Holy Grail of Trust" the next time out.