The topic of improving the quality of search engine results is known to generate many debates. It’s essential to keep the content of online work accurate and useful, while allowing it to be easily searchable by end users. After all – there’ s little point in creating online content, if no-one is likely to find and view it. In a continual quest to improve search engine results, Google implement processes to identify and distribute key words and phrases. But how good a job are they actually doing?

It’s true that the perceived quality of a Google search can differ from user to user. After all, the information being retrieved will apply more, or be more ‘relevant’ to some users, than it will be to others. It’s also true that a search query can cover a wide range of subjects. So, how can Google really indentify the correct results for each and every user query? Certainly, it seems like an impossible task in principle. (more…)