White paper on why quality of search results matters

Blog sponsor Deep Web Technologies asked me to produce a white paper on why the quality of search results matters so I wrote a four-pager — Quality, Not Quantity: The danger of overlooking quality of search results. I wrote the paper to be easy to read while packing a good amount of information.

The white paper is available from Deep Web Technologies’ web-site as a PDF document. The paper is divided into short sections, some with pithy titles:

• Why quality of results matters
• What does “quality of results” mean anyway?
• Too many results, not enough time
• It’s not a popularity contest: the dirty little secret of the search engine industry
• The need for speed and the price you pay
• The myopic focus on features
• What really matters
• How Federated Search fits the bill
• Not all federated search engines are created equal

The motivation for writing the paper is that all too often vendors tout features and customers get caught up in judging federated search by those features while overlooking the tremendous importance of search results. There’s a huge difference in the quality of search results between federated search engines. The white paper explains the factors responsible for the differences .

If you want to read more about the subject, here are a few blog articles related to quality of search results:

• Not all Federated Search Engines are Created Equal
• What determines quality of search results?
• On credibility of search results
• Science portals: It’s about diversity and hope

Tags: federated search