Recently in Google Category

Stephen Arnold, author of the report Beyond Search, as well as two books on Google, has put together a free service that aggregates the headlines from Google's own blogs. The service is called Overflight. "Overflight is an RSS aggregation service. The service that is now publicly available aggregates the headlines from Google's 74 Web logs. We group the most recent headlines using the same categories that Google favors."

What a great idea. Thanks Steve!

Intent, hidden within a search click, lies at the intersection of Search and Business, as in "let's do some business". That search click has extra-ordinary value because of the intent to buy -- that's why we're searching, right?

Perhaps, or maybe we're just browsing, or surfing, and we're not in the mood for advertisements. It could be more militant than that; perhaps we're still trying to research our choices and would see a sales pitch as tainting the honesty of the information. At least that's what the founders of Google originally believed.

Although the model of the web was a set of stateless pages, and a Google search box certainly fits that appearance, people's intent is not stateless. It ebbs and flows, from entertaining looking around, to researching choices and comparing possibilities, through sourcing a chosen product (now we're talking about a qualified buyer), to selecting fulfillment options, and possibly all the way to figuring out how to return a product that we're dissatisfied with. That last one is probably not the best time to present an ad claiming how wonderful that product is.

This is a "long running transaction," a series of steps that fit together and flow towards (and past) a purchasing decision, but with back-currents and eddies. And it really is a transaction in the database sense where a failure during one step can cause the entire sequence to be discarded as if it never happened. Though if you believe Sergey and Larry, it will be worse than never happening, you may lose trust in your guide through that transaction.

Has the intent changed? Depends on what that means. On one hand, what has changed across those steps is the mode of the intent. If the intent was to purchase a product, then the research, comparison, purchase, and fulfillment were clearly pieces of that intent, though they call for different approaches: organic search for the research, product focused responses for the purchase, perhaps service-oriented for the fulfillment, and some combination for the comparison.

But what about that "I need to return this product because I hate it" step? The intent has clearly changed, but it is more necessary than ever to connect this new intent to the previous steps. If not, perhaps the search engine will continue to suggest that product to a disgruntled customer with very counter-productive results.

So, what is the unifying concept? Is it intent, organized by modes? Not if what is being unified is a complete user's story about their purchasing experience.

Relevance has always been the main goal of search for most of us searchers, although sometimes completeness can be even more important, e.g., when we want to determine relevance ourselves and volume is not an issue. Relevance is relative, and there is no way to write code that can anticipate relevance in a general way. (Of course quality is relative too!) Fortunately, search can be extremely useful even without the mind reading option - in fact, mind-reading wouldn't be enough to anticipate relevance enough anyway.

Much of the discussion about search quality these days revolves around the front-end of relevance, i.e., determining, as much as possible, searchers' intent. And we do have increasing amounts of information (such as surfing behavior) that allows us to make better guesses about intentions.

We can also make information richer so that search engines can make more accurate determinations about relevance. For example XML site maps provide context in the form of structural information; providing additional metadata to search engines provides even more context.

Despite the imprecise, and constantly changing meaning and use of language, we have been able to asymptotically improve our ability to determine both intent and relevance, and incrementally improve search quality.

I say "we", but I am neither a developer nor an expert on search technology. We are fortunate to have someone who is arguably the most influential expert and developer today speaking about search quality in two weeks at our San Francisco conference. Udi Manber, VP Engineering, Search Quality, Google is going to open the conference with a presentation on Search Quality and Continuous Innovation. While Udi won't be giving away any secrets, his presentation will provide valuable and fascinating insight into the way Google thinks about improving search quality. For a taste of Udi's clear and straightforward style, and what he'll be talking about read his recent blog post: Introduction to Google Search Quality

Google has added Sun's StarOffice to its free Google Pack. This has been expected and is of course targeting Microsoft's Office suite. Richard MacManus reported it Sunday, and Dan Farber says most of what I would say about it.

Looks like some really interesting stuff will be coming out of Google that will profoundly change both enterprise and consumer search experiences and markets. Lynda Moulton's post over on our Enterprise Search Blog is a good place to start on what, as of last week, has emerged - thanks to Steve Arnold - about Google's nearer-than-you-might-think plans.