A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine had some issues with her cleaner and was looking around for other domestic cleaning companies she could use. After doing a few unsuccessful Google searches, she asked me why was it so hard to find what she was looking for?

The fact of the matter is that no search engine is perfect and if they did manage to correctly rank every page that deserved it then a lot of SEO’s (including myself) would be out of work.

The biggest problems faced by search engines is determining a pages relevancy (which is very subjective) whilst deciphering the natural language patterns used in the search query.

To give an example, you could do a search for ‘monkey’ wanting to find-out information about animals from the primate family but someone could be doing exactly the same search wanting to find information about the cult television series from the early 80’s with the same name. Given the search query, both results are equally as relevant, but as you can see, relevancy is quite subjective. If you then throw-in the various idiosynchricies of the English language (or any language for that matter), it makes things even harder for the search engines to decipher exactly what it is that you are searching for.

We too, have to accept some responsibility for poor search results due to not articulating what we are looking for. Sometimes we genuinely won’t know the correct terminology for something or our spelling is so poor that the search engines need to fix our mistakes before returning the results.

If you’re looking for more reasons why you can’t find what you’re looking for, have a read of Hamlet Batista’s article on 7 Reasons Why Search Engines Don’t Return Relevant Results 100% of the Time.

For a more technical look into these types of issues, Bill Slawski covers a lot of search patents on his blog. If you’re interested, have a read of his post - Why Sometimes Best Search Results aren’t Always Top Search Results.

In my next post I’ll talk more about localised search which is one way the search engines are attempting to provide better results based on geographic location.

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