Google Relevance

[Ellio]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance: Relevance is term used to describe how pertinent, connected, or applicable some information is to a given matter.

Having given relevance a little thought recently I thought I would test Google on a term that in an ideal world should return only relevant results: "Airlines"

I was pleasantly surprsied as the first 50 yes 50 results were major airline homepages on both default & Big Daddy.

Continental Airlines - Airline Tickets, Vacations Packages, Travel ...
Continental Airline Ticket Reservation, Find all current Continental flight
information online, check flight status or book an online airline ticket ...
www.continental.com/ - 50k - Cached - Similar pages

Monarch Airlines > Cheap Flights
Monarch Airlines offer cheap flights to a wide range of popular European holiday
destinations such as London, Majorca and Barcelona.
www.flymonarch.com/ - 50k - Cached - Similar pages

American Airlines
Find the right airline tickets to fit your needs and your budget online at AA.com.
AA.com, where you can book airline reservations online and get our ...
www.aa.com/ - 77k - Cached - Similar pages

United Airlines - Domestic and international airline tickets, all ...
United Airlines online reservations and airline ticket purchase, electronic
tickets, flight search, fares and availability, seats flights destinations ...
www.united.com/ - 64k - Cached - Similar pages

Virgin Atlantic Airlines
Includes online booking, frequent flyer information and special offers.
www.virgin-atlantic.com/ - 55k - Cached - Similar pages

Delta Air Lines - Find airline tickets and manage your travel
Flight reservations, itineraries and flight schedules.
www.delta.com/ - 24k - Cached - Similar pages

Northwest Airlines NWA.com -- Airline Tickets, Airfare & Travel ...
Buy airline tickets, check airfare, and airline flights on NWA.com. Guaranteed
lowest airfares. Check plane ticket prices/availability, airfare promotions, ...
www.nwa.com/ - 36k - Cached - Similar pages

Southwest Airlines
The official Southwest Airlines website with Ticketless Travel reservations,
Southwest Airlines schedules and fares, and general information about Southwest ...
www.southwest.com/ - 20k - Cached - Similar pages

Lufthansa
Includes downloadable timetables, photo gallery and online reservations.
www.lufthansa.com/ - Similar pages

Singapore Airlines
Includes information on routes, schedules, inflight dining and online reservations.
www.singaporeair.com/ - 12k - Cached - Similar pages

etc to about 54....

I was expecting to see a raft of cheap airline ticket sites. MSN results are knowhere near as relevant and Yahoo while better than MSN is not as relevant as Google either.

It does seem that with some major phrases Google is getting it right. What do you think?

[whipnet]

Good observation.

*

[freehits]

since all changes have favored larger longer established websites, seems that particulr search makes sense that they are ranking well. Not really a market with too many local players of any real size, or budget/longevity to flood those big players out.

search for http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=miami+hotel

"miami hotel" a search where the most relevent results would be the business sites of hotels in miami, and you' get hit with subdomains on mega-directories, and subpages or marriot.com and similar.

If you go in looking for the biggest names youll find them on top, it the biggest names in an even playing field that you may not find, when anything regional is involved.

all of the meg-sites have subdomained themselves into every region and washed out the first pages.

[pemburung]

This also works for rental cars and cruise lines, but doesn't work for a bunch of other similar terms - "home improvement stores" eg only returns Lowes in the top ten; a couple of others appear in the next ten. But no nice ordered list like airlines or cars. Every one of the top 20 listings for "hammer manufacturer" are third parties. As these are fundamentally the same search, just different letters, it makes me wonder if there is something other than a naked stupid algorithm affecting the results. I'm sure there have been lots of consumer complaints that what are obviously relevant results -the airlines, cruise lines and car rental companies, two of what must be hugely searched for entities - were not ranking highly, but so many spam to semi-spam to ordinary selling sites were.

[Ellio]

Further research has shown that even terms like "Car Insurance" and "Insurance Companies" now return an ordered list of relevant major companies with almost nil spam.

[kgun]

It does seem that with some major phrases Google is getting it right. What do you think?

May be a too natural and simple search KW with very high usage.

Dangerous to generalize from the simple to the general.

Nice observation after all.

[Ellio]

Kgun,

Thanks and I did only state "Some Major Phrases" I appreciate there are very many more where they don't.

I was simply struck by just how relevant and ordered some of these new major term results are.

[pemburung]

Given the extra ones you mention, Ellio, and my own observations I think even more that this is not the result of an SE working in the dark, but a separate and human-ordered result. How's that for sticking a neck out. Cut away.

[jackson992]

Originally Posted by Ellio

I was expecting to see a raft of cheap airline ticket sites.

And those are less relevant how?

[Ellio]

The keyword was "Airlines" not "Cheap Flights" thats why.

Search for Airlines and you want to find Airlines - simple

[jackson992]

not much difference IMO

The searcher could be looking for airline tickets after all:)

[Ellio]

Originally Posted by jackson992

not much difference IMO

The searcher could be looking for airline tickets after all

I disagree,

Searcher would probably type Airline tickets or flight tickets maybe but not Airlines.

Surely it must be a good thing if a search for "Airlines" returns a long list of Airlines homepages.

True relevance in my opinion.

[pemburung]

This topic to me is very significant. I've just checked "insurance" and "hotel". Same thing; not quite as perfect, but pretty darn close. I checked on a couple of the international sites, and same thing, although any URL ending in the country's id came out on top, as would be expected.

Can you imagine searching on "hotel" a month ago and not receiving any "cheap hotels?" Changing the search to "hotels" adds hotels.com, travelocity, expedia, but keeps the brand name list and still no "cheap hotels" sites.

According to other threads, and G, the only change recently is BD, and that is just "infrastructure."

I'm trying to understand how a mere infrastructure change, aimed at speeding things up, allowing more indexing ability, and deciding which URL to use (according to Cutts) can so radically alter G's listings.

Added to how many jagger submerged pages/sites have reappeared over the last couple of weeks, and in my experience how many terms are being found and ranked, once again, on pages that disappeared for these terms under jagger, something major has happened.

I agree with Ellio, G's SERPs relevance has suddenly taken a major upswing.

[Ellio]

something major has happened.

I believe it to be Big Daddy changing the way that Google indexes sites. Its seems to have found a way of finding the best page (normally homepage) for the most relevant sites and listing them in good order.

Especially for major terms.

No real idea how though, but credit where credit is due.

[kgun]

Pemburung wrote:

I'm trying to understand how a mere infrastructure change, aimed at speeding things up, allowing more indexing ability, and deciding which URL to use (according to Cutts) can so radically alter G's listings.

Some keywords:

1. Removing bottle necks.
2. Increasing hardware capacity and efficiency.
3. Improved datastructures (combined with compressing?).
4. Shuffeling less important sites offline (caching) or to an older less efficient datacenter.
5. Paralellism and distributed objects. Various instances of the object implemented / instanciated on different computers.
6. Improved algorithmes.
7. Adaptive algorithmes, that is combine computer alogorithmes with human intervention. Increased human resources.
8. Outsourcing kernel activity (what is that?) to BD.

In my personal view, an infrastrucuture change can make a little road into a super high way.

[DrTandem1]

Originally Posted by kgun

It does seem that with some major phrases Google is getting it right. What do you think?

May be a too natural and simple search KW with very high usage.

Dangerous to generalize from the simple to the general.

I agree. Since most airline companies end their name with "airlines," I think this is too simplistic a sample. I can think of several generic single-word terms that will bring up sites that are irrelevant.

[pemburung]

Actually, quite a few, including Lufthansa, Emirates, ATA, Iberia (in Spanish!) don't have the world airline; Ritz Carlton, Hyatt, Wynns, Grand all get into the Hotels list without the word hotel. Adams Mark also get's in, and I'm betting that's not a heavily optimized site compared to many booking sites. Hertz gets #1 without mentioning car or rental.

I agree that some other generic words do not have the same results. Car, automobile or car company don't work as well, only 6 out of 20 top sites are a car manufacturer. On a random basis, one might expect car company to as accurately bring up, well, car companies, as rental car brings up rental car companies or cruise line brings up cruise lines. Or airlines. Car companies, car, automobile companies etc have the usual style of results, with no order to them.

What does it all mean? I don't know, but it just doesn't seem like normal G results.

[incrediblehelp]

Yes but who types in "airlines", "insurance", "hotels"? The act of searching is becoming more improved by end users everyday as they understand the more descriptive the query is the better or more relevant results you should get.

The use of geo-based and long-tail type keywords will be come more and more popular as search grows on end users.

[pemburung]

Incrediblehelp, that made me think. So, knowing that "airlines' gets you a pretty much straight down list of the major US airlines on page 1, I followed your advice and got more specific. I tried "major US airlines." I got none of them on page one. "main US airlines?" Same thing. US airlines? Two different entries for US Air, no others. So the most accurate search was the one with the least descriptive search term.

[incrediblehelp]

That tells me the scope of the engines relevancy checks are limited to only the most popular keywords. To bad they dont dig deeper like the rest of us and they would see how much more work they really have to make the results better.

[kgun]

Relevancy.

Not good.

That is why rating resources like

Moodys: http://www.moodys.com/cust/default.asp ratings,

Standard & Poor's: http://www.standardandpoors.com/

Weiss Ratings: http://www.weissratings.com/

Bankrate: http://www.bankrate.com/brm/default.asp

are much more inportant if you search top rated and solid financial institutions.

But it is bad that a SE gives so bad hits on specific KW's.

Conclusion:
SEO specialists are still lightyears ahead of the SE's (in manipulating the SERP's).

[Ellio]

Originally Posted by kgun

Relevancy.

Not good.

That is why rating resources like

Moodys: http://www.moodys.com/cust/default.asp ratings,

Standard & Poor's: http://www.standardandpoors.com/

Weiss Ratings: http://www.weissratings.com/

Bankrate: http://www.bankrate.com/brm/default.asp

are much more inportant if you search top rated and solid financial institutions.

But my point is that on a few major keywords the relevancy IS very good returning only solid top rated companies in the top few pages.

[kgun]

Yes, but consistency and stability of the results. That is why I know

1. When I shall use a SE.
2. When I shall use other resources like those mentioned above.

The ratings above may be combined with SE checks in order to do your own due dilligence and dig deeper.

So the resources are complementary.

<digression>
Remember Enron, that was reccomended by large US financial institutions 14 days before it was bankrupt. Good SE queries may have informed you about potential problems.

And I have used this simple IT tool when I am unsure of a website. I have it in my links folder, that is centrally placed in my web browser.
</digression>

[Ellio]

Kgun,

I agree with your sensible approach to financial institutions, however my findings related to non financial services and companies in the main.

Terms like:

Airlines
Car Rentals
Rental Cars
Car Hire
Hotels
Car Insurance
etc

All return what appear to be very relevant results.

[kgun]

My little red and blue flag for the day

Originally Posted by Ellio

Kgun,

I agree with your sensible approach to financial institutions, however my findings related to non financial services and companies in the main.

Terms like:

Airlines
Car Rentals
Rental Cars
Car Hire
Hotels
Car Insurance
etc

All return what appear to be very relevant results.

OOPS: Did you spell the name correct? There is a niche for wrongly spelled words.