The above image is something that I noticed when perusing my Netflix account the other day, and it got me thinking about relevancy and search results. Netflix felt that I should rent Wallace and Gromit from them based on my prior rental history. I can understand how Monty Python and the Holy Grail may be relevant, given that it’s another English comedy, with animations in part. Dr. Strangelove… well it’s a dark comedy starring an Englishman (Peter Sellars), but apart from that… As for 1954’s Seven Samurai, the harrowing Japanese tale of seven samurai trying to save a group of farmers from a group of bandits… that has absolutely nothing to do with an English claymation children’s show.

So how did Netflix come up with the recommendation? Well, they did it based on the ratings that other people have entered into their system. Which means that people who like those movies, typically also like Wallace and Gromit. So while at first glance the relevancy seems to be completely askew, it is actually correct. As more and more people add their ratings into the Netflix system, they are more and more able to predict and recommend movies that someone should like.

Ok, so how is this relevant to Search Marketing? Search engines live and die by the relevancy of their results. If Google were to suddenly become less relevant than other engines, people would, most likely, eventually drift away to the more relevant sites. After all, if you frequently can’t find what you’re looking for on one site, but you can on another, you’ll eventually stop looking on the first. This is Google’s big fear, and why the continue to work on and improve the relevancy of their search results, by such methods as Universal Search.

What about incorporating user feedback into search results a la Netflix? Well, Google does indeed do that already in a few ways. Firstly, when calculating positioning for paid ads (PPC), they factor the click through rate (CTR) into their quality score algorithm, a site with a higher CTR may find themselves above a site that’s paying more, as it’s obviously more relevant. On the organic side they do track the clicks and factor them into their ranking algorithms, after all if a site in the 3rd position receives more clicks than a site in the first 2 positions, then the chances are that the site in 3rd is more relevant and therefore should rank higher.

There is also the concept of Google personalized search, where searches that you perform, and sites that you click on can alter the the rankings on search results pages, just for you. It could be that as more people use personalized search, and Google is able to parse and aggregate that data, that they could do a very similar job to Netflix. i.e. Since you searched for ‘russian news’ and clicked on bbc.co.uk, you searched on ‘Paris Hilton’ and clicked on cnn.com, etc that your results for your search for ‘Disneyland’ should be ordered in a similar fashion to the personalized searches of other people who have previously done the same search…

Filed under: SEO on Monday, August 20th, 2007 by Simon Heseltine |
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