SEO, eCommerce, & Blogging

Google should allow users to customize each search by weighing the results according to whatever factor is most important to the user. That is, Google should give users the power to sort search results by what is important to them.
Here are some examples:

1) Recent Pages. Say you want to find a photo of Britney Spears bald the morning after she shaved her head. A regular search would merely display old pages with “Britney Spears” and “bald” on the same page (the terms appeared in different sections of the page). If Google provided “user customized search,” users could rate “recent” as more important than “most inbound links.” That way the most recent pages would show up at the top of the search rather than the most popular old links.

2) Proximity of Terms. Similarly, if someone wanted to search for a time when “Robert Scoble” criticized “Digg,” a user could select the “proximity” of the terms to each other rather than viewing more popular sites that happen to have those terms in it.

3) Old Information. As another example, say you want to determine what websites said about Paris Hilton before the Simple Life, sex tape, and other media attention. There is no way to do that in Google now. However, it would be possible if users could search for “Paris Hilton” and list only the oldest pages first. This would be possible if Google allowed users to only consider “Age of Page” sorted by reverse chronological order.

4) Locality. As a final example, a student in Argentina shouldn’t have to see “George W. Bush” as the first link when searching for “president.” The Argentina president should be first. But this local search should not be mandatory. For example, a student in Argentina searching for “ubuntu” doesn’t want the search limited to Argentina websites. Similarly, a student looking for a “book store” in their area would like to limit the search to just their locality. Giving users the power to control whether a search includes global, national, regional, or local sites would be very valuable.

In other words, there are times when Google users don’t want search results ranked by default Google criteria. Users want the power to sort search results by what is important to them.

Here is a niche that some alternative search engine could use to carve out from Google’s massive market share. If this were done in a simple and intuitive way, users might leave Google for the same reasons we all came to Google: a better way to search and get the information that users want.

UPDATE: After writing this I realized Matt Cutts and others have discussed personalized or customized search, but none have presented it with the user options presented here.

Filed under: All Posts, Criticism, New Idea