But do you get the point, at least, that there is so much more Google could be doing around helping us find information, than giving a single, unmalleable ranked list, topped and sidled with advertisements? Relevance feedback is only the most obvious and glaring of possible improvements, simply because it has been studied for decades and known to work. And yet it is not offered. Its absense is conspicuous.

How can one but conclude that the reason for its absense is the Google’s focus on advertising? Advertisements, while possibly relevant (though I can’t imagine who actually advertises their GPS review site when I’m searching for reviews.. seems mostly to be people just trying to sell GPS devices, sans real, objective reviews), take up page real estate that otherwise could have been dedicated to ways for improving the search experience.

Truth is, even Consumer Reports sold out, long ago. Not to advertisers, but to the unions / federations related to the testing labs.

one place to start …

The suggestion was to make “Sponsored Links” more bold, and to have it be a link to a full explanation of that term like Yahoo does:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-03.html

[gio, January 14, 2007 01:32 AM]

gio, did you *mean* the double negative (or are you repeating the negative for emphasis)?

at any rate, the sponsored results engine is faster, cleaner, and presumably the links there are relevant since people want to pony up the PPC rate to show up there (of course they could do so and try to get you to play the lottery, but that’s just how Google works; I guess that http://software.net/ and/or http://download.com/ would be less willing to dilute their results, since that would tend to drive away users…. then again I can’t figure out why people still use Google — does anyone else have an idea?)

nmw

Here Rui’s definition:

Relevance feedback is a powerful technique used in traditional text-based Information Retrieval systems. It is the process of automatically adjusting an existing query using the information fed back by the user about the relevance of previously retrieved objects such that the adjusted query is a better approximation to the user’s information need. In the relevance feedback based approach the retrieval process is interactive between the computer and human. Under the assumption that high-level concepts can be captured by low-level features the relevance feedback technique tries to establish the link between high-level concepts and low-level features from the user’s feedback. Furthermore, the burden of specifying the weights is removed from the user. The user only needs to mark which [web pages] he or she thinks are relevant to the query. The weights embedded in the query object are dynamically updated to model the high level concepts and perception subjectivity.

We could go into this in further detail if you’d like but the key difference between relevance feedback and the “search within these results” that Google is currently offering comes down to the automated nature of relevance feedback. With Google’s current “search inside these results”, the user has to manually come up with additional query terms that may (or may not) re-sort the list into a more relevant order. With relevance feedback, the user need only mark a few documents as relevant and/or non-relevant, and the system automatically and dynamically takes care of the query reweighting. That is the main difference.

Google has said over and over that users are lazy, that user’s do not want to do a lot of work when searching. Relevance feedback is perfect for that! Rather than forcing the user to think really hard and come up with a new set of query terms, relevance feedback allows the user simply to say “I like this link” and “I don’t like that link”. That’s it.

If there ever was a search tool that was custom built for the Google philosophy, relevance feedback is it. And yet they don’t offer it. I want them to offer it. I need them to offer it. I would use it all the time. But if they won’t offer it, I wish they would at least come out publicly and say why. Publish a paper showing that it doesn’t work on web-sized collections or something.

The longer they go without offering it, and the more they focus on calendars, the more I look elsewhere for other engines to help me find information I need. So, Google, any chance of offering it?

Oh who am I kidding.. ain’t noone reading this thread anymore..

And I took your suggestion and did a Google search. I found two interesting things at the bottom of the results page. The first was a little blue box in the center with the words:

“Get organized for the new year with Google Desktop”

The phrase “Google Desktop” is hyperlinked. So, is this another Google tip? (This time without the tip icon?) Or is it a paid advertisement, because it is in a blue box? I don’t know. I can’t tell. But it certainly is further blurring of the lines. Wonder what Blake Ross would have to say about that?

Oh, but you probably didn’t mean that, did you? You probably mean the link where it says “search within the results”, right? In other words, where you can type in another query.

I’m sorry, but that is not “relevance feedback”. It is a nice feature, but it is not “relevance feedback”.

If you really want me to explain it further, I will. But I feel like I’ve already done enough explaining, above. If you want to know more, go to Google Scholar and look up relevance feedback, yourself.

You apparently haven’t looked at the bottom of the results pages lately, or perhaps you should explain what you mean by “relevance feedback”.