Brian Smith kicks off a series over at Search Engine Watch looking at how Ask, Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft are providing bonus, focused, “added-value” search results.
First up: Ask’s Smart Answers. Basically, Ask uses a handful of trigger words and specific terms to provide hand-crafted Added-Value results in addition to the organic, “normal” results we are used to.
For instance a query at Ask for president of tunisia returns with the following listed at the top of the page:
The Chief of State of Tunisia is President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and the Head of State is Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi
World Factbook | Encyclopedia | BBC Profile | US Government Travel Info|
Maps
Smart.
Rather than rely on the underlying search algorithm to simply find the right URLs and display a summary of each, Ask is using human engineering to provide likely answers to the implied questions.
According to Ask.com’s Director of Online Information Resources Gary Price,
“We look at how people are searching—the keywords, the click through pattern—to figure out good Smart Answers. People out on the road suggest them all the time. Smart Answers is run by the product team. They make the necessary content deals to get things up. Plus an editorial team gets involved when necessary for special events like hurricanes or the San Francisco earthquake anniversary. There’s an entire team of engineers who decide when a Smart Answer will be triggered and how it will be triggered—what shows up and how it shows up.”
This blurs the line between “search” and “editorial” content, but then About.com has been doing that for years. The architectural innovation–for me–is that while Ask continues to serve the long tail of search organically, they are investing human resources to handcrafting results to the most common and most obvious added value search queries. This doesn’t necessarily scale well, but it does cherry pick the high value opportunities, and as long as the profit margins on the click-through for these bonus sections is enough to pay for the team of engineers, it should work.
Because the Smart Answers are sometimes defined by trigger words independent of the subject terms, such as “map” or “definition” or “market cap”, Ask is providing vertical specialization seamlessly integrated with organic results. Of course, Google has been doing this for a while, with “define:” and “recipe”, so I’m looking forward to Brian’s run down on the rest of the Search Engines’ approaches to this type of added-value results.
This whole phenomenon demonstrates how far we still have to go before we seamlessly transform user intent into simple, complete answers.
I recommend reading the full article.
