Search in a hurry...

A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.

‘The Brook Kerith’ by George Moore

I had the choice yesterday to test the Search Engine results relevance in order to look for information about something that I have/had idea.

The term was chondromalacia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runner's_knee) and defines a kind of knee problem.

I checked first with google.com and google.es (Condromalacia), and I found that even looking for the term in Spanish, the results, (from my point of view) were more relevant in google.com.

• For the term in Spanish appear 40.200 results (40.300 in google.com).
  


• For the term in English appear 277.000 results.
  

I test the same terms for Yahoo:

• Spanish: 13600 and 13000 in Yahoo.es.
  


• English:242.000
  

In both cases I have to refine the search in order to find the information in my logical order (description, symptoms, treatment etc).

I decided to make the same test with 2 or three Web 2.0 Search Engines.

• In http://clusty.com the results are around 60.000, but in the 5 results of every area I reach the relevant pages that I found using google and yahoo.
  

• In http://www.wink.com the results were 273.000 (very close to Yahoo) and I didn´t found many differences with the results from yahoo or google. I know that I could provide my opinion about the relevance, but I am acting like a normal user and I am in a hurry.
  

• In http://www.lexxe.com Only appear 100 results and are organized in clusters like http://clusty.com, and I could not find differences in the relevance of the results.
  

At the end the best option remains for me remains in Google, clustering the search with the “more” parameters like “more:alternative_medicine”.

I believe that we are at the first stages of the SE development, the new search engines introduce algorithms that value the users opinions (Social Networks) or develops new ways to analyze the content relevance, but I think that for the regular user that look for information about something without previous knowledge, the new SE technologies don´t provide more relevance results that Yahoo, Google or Ask.com.

I think that any development trend for the SE algorithms are fine, because at the end are going to be the end users who approve or refuse the new development. But for my point of view it should very good to have algorithms that start to integrate in the SE response, the results translated, from different languages and IA algorithms that analyze the value relevance of the content

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