hakia Blog » Blog Archive » Introducing Quality Search versus...

Every Web search starts with two queries. One is X. The other one is “who knows X the best?” Because finding X is not enough if the author of that page does not know X himself/herself. This will immediately resonate with you if you ever searched for medical, legal, or financial information for a serious case.

This was called the “credibility” criteria in the old world-order which has progressively vanished in the new age of Internet search engines. You enter X, and get the same “popular” perspective without distinction of credibility. You may recognize some of the sources, but are you an expert yourself about these things?

Ironically, there is a science for this. It is the science of libraries and librarians. That’s their job. They know what is credible, trustworthy, and commercially-unbiased. But how is it possible that none of the search engines today provide you a full-perspective of credibility for the given query? It is because they made their choice earlier while building their algorithms. They chose the popular view. Their result pages are doomed to have a mixed view including junk content that slips in because it is somewhat popular.

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