We Can’t Judge Relevance

Yesterday, I argued that Microsoft’s search engine update, which included highly touted relevance improvements, did not and will not ultimately improve their fortunes.
To state things a bit more strongly: I think that relevance cannot be a selling point for a search engine, and not just because Live’s update was just catching them up to the level of many other popular search engines. In fact, I think that it’s hard for any of us to truly evaluate “relevance” in results.

Now THAT is Personalization

For anyone who’s read my blog posts for a while or who saw me speak in San Jose earlier this year you’ll know that I’m particularly interested in personalization and specifically, Google’s patents on the subject.

It’s because of this that the launch of 23andme yesterday was particularly interesting though I have to say, I haven’t seen anything in any of the patents on how this ties together.

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