2010 – The Year of the Hybrid Search Engine – Part 1

2010 – The Year of the Hybrid Search Engine – Part 1
By Robert Bacal

Several developments over the last year or two suggest that the usefulness and applicability of the general search engines such as Google, or Bing, is decreasing.

First, there’s been a constant battle for the mega search engines to keep spam sites, or sites with otherwise zero value out of the search engine results. Judge for yourself how successful they’ve been. Often it depends on the search terms entered. Many people feel frustrated at how long it takes to find just the right thing, one is looking for.

This battle, no matter how successful, tends to result in unintentional damage to some sites and unintentional gains for other sites. For example, large megasites like Wikipedia, often come up as the first listing for whatever one searches about. Do you always want that? Probably not. Do you really want to be sent to sites that charge $99 to read a simple 10 page journal article? Probably not, but the large corporations tend to show up first for many searches.

The flip side is that many really excellent content sites don’t show up, thus causing the searcher to miss out on a lot of valuable, and usually free content.

Many people are getting frustrated at the difficulty in finding what they need quickly.

The second major factor has to do with Google, long at the pinnacle of the search engine heap, instituting personalized search, without, it seems, allowing opting out. Personalized search means that the results you see will be affected by what you have searched for before, and even, where you have visited before.

This means that two people using exactly the same keywords, will end up getting different results. Which isn’t a big problem. It might actually be good.

However, based on initial early comments and discussions, the results are actually much less useful than before. If, for example, you’ve spent a lot of time buying a game console for your child over the last year, visiting review sites, and doing many searches on the topic, you may be in trouble if you want to find something totally unrelated.

You will likely (at least at present, according to reports) end up seeing game console results even if you search for information on cars. Apparently the search engine is not quite able to figure out that you are NO LONGER interested in game consoles, and you are not looking for something else.

This is a problem, by the way, that continues to exist in online giant, Amazon’s, search system. It is stuck in the past.

The net result is search results that become less and less useful for almost everyone. The Hybrid Solution For Search

The hybrid solution for search is actually a step forwards by taking a step backwards. A hybrid search engine is a combination of two things:

* human selected web sites (similar to the old “directories concept”.

* a search engine system that searches only from among human selected websites.

Hybrids, because they require a fair amount of human resources to build, will only work better than general search engines when the topic is relatively narrow (a niche). The tighter the niche, the more the hybrid will out-perform the general search engine, all things being equal.

An Example:

Let us say you are looking for training related to leadership, and you use the search terms “leadership traits”, in Google. For this term, on this date, about 70,000 results come up. Many of the results go to sites that are “gaming” the system by having short text pieces pretending to be articles about leadership traits. Other material that comes up is straight regurgitation of material on other sites. Sometimes you’ll even find the same articles on a number of sites, legally or illegally reproduced.

There’s a lot of junk. The only way you can find out that a particular result is junk (for your purposes) is to click on it, take a look, and then, if it is junk, go back to the search results. This is, indeed tedious.

Now, compare with a hybrid search engine (in fact there is one related to leadership.)

If you use the same search string, you’ll get a lot fewer results, but the results are FOCUSED, because they are taken from sites that tend to specialize in leadership. In the particular engine, you can further reduce the clutter by clicking on one of the tabs to see, let’s say ONLY free articles, or ONLY free to reprint articles. You control it.

In Part 2 of this series, we’ll talk more about the benefits, how’s and why’s hybrid search systems will likely be a better choice than the one size fits all search engines.

Copyright Robert Bacal, 2009. Article may be reproduced provided the terms and conditions of EzineArticles are adhered to.

Robert Bacal is a successful small business owner, and is the author of Perfect Phrases For Managing Your Small Business, published by McGraw-Hill in 2008. His business books have been translated into a number of languages, and sold around the world, and cover customer service, consulting, performance management, and dealing with difficult employees.

Bacal & Associates newest project (building hybrid search engines for leadership, management, training, small business, web design) is available at http://researchprofessional.org

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