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]

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