I wonder how many of those "power searchers" are bots scraping Google results for their own use?

• Posted by: SEOMash
• November 9, 2007 10:20 AM

What I do wonder is whether Google et al are creating products for ME, or for my mother. This data would argue that they should be for me.

I wholeheartedly agree, and have said as much many times in the past. I have argued over and over on this blog that Google should be making things easier for people (such as power users) who really want to dig into their searches by doing something more than small text boxes and 10 links at a time. They should be exposing all their hidden query operators, featuring them more prominently, making searchers aware when one or two of the more interesting operators might substantively alter the results they are seeing (think of it as spelling correction.. only it is it whole query structure correction, instead.. things like adding quotes or site: operators or automatically suggesting file-type operators, etc).

And when Google returns 437,000 results, they should give us power users an easier way of sorting through all those results, to really understand what the results are about. Sometimes I, as a power user, am not necessarily looking for the one top ranked document, the one homepage of some company or person or journal. Sometimes I am trying to search to find information about the historical contexts surrounding, let's say, the Supreme Court decision "Brown vs. Board of Education". In that case, a much richer method of presenting and letting me modify and dig through the results is necessary. I don't want to just step through each of the 437,000 results, 10 links at a time.

And yet they stubbornly and steadfastly refuse to do things like this, for the power user. Almost 10 years of Google now, and we still only have one text box, 10 links, and nothing else. Oh, except for the fact that some of the links are now YouTube thumbnails (yay.. Universal Search). Oh, and we also now have 13 ads (3 up top, 10 on the right) where none used to be, before.

But still no real support for the power users.

Then again, power users don't click ads. So maybe this is the elephant in the room that no one is talking about.

• Posted by: JG
• November 9, 2007 11:04 AM

Do power searchers click on sponsored links? I do not.

• Posted by: Jeff
• November 9, 2007 11:54 AM

yep i'm a power searcher too =]
15/30 seraches/day at least. we have no tool do create a fully personal search, wasting a lot of time with this pages....

• Posted by: Rodrigo
• November 9, 2007 12:00 PM

I have sufficient Firefox arsenal that prevents me from seeing any ads. I don't click on sponsored links. I search a lot. I'm their worst nightmare.

• Posted by: Jeff
• November 9, 2007 3:28 PM

something tells me they figure this in .. as a stockholder im content with their decision trees. could care less about us "power searchers" if we dont click on revenue while mom does. those same 10 yrs that same 10 results has sergey and larry lookin pretty smart. There are many other search engines for guys like you that are seeking "smarter" more semantic or enriched search experience.. they presented at your conference.. and many many more.. why do you still use the commercial machine? i bet because its still the most reliable
case closed product ever invented since xanax!

• Posted by: zwe
• November 9, 2007 5:27 PM

I think Mahalo is going for the smaller market of people who search 1-5 times a day, so I think it's ok if Google wants to cater to us power searchers. Ultimately it'd be nice to have the best of both worlds - powerful search plus trustable (i.e. human influenced without alterior motives) and usable answers.

• Posted by: Liz
• November 9, 2007 5:42 PM

1) Why can't "power searchers" just use the Advanced Search feature -- ???
2) I too rarely click on the sponsored links, but I think it would be a bit foolhardy to block them entirely (like Jeff mentioned he does) because the fact of the matter is, sometimes the sponsored links -- perhaps not all that often, but sometimes nonetheless -- ofter the EXACT thing I was looking for... i.e. once in a while they are actually much more relevant than the organic results. And IMHO THAT'S why Google is a $200B company.

• Posted by: Andrew
• November 11, 2007 8:33 AM

The original premise of the paid listings was to introduce an element of 'credibility' to the results, I thought? (I've read the book John but it was a few years ago) Back in the day spam was everywhere and introducing a monetary element would improve the results.

I would have thought that Google would WANT the power searchers to stay and would offer better tools to us 20-a-dayers (inc myself). By allowing us to get 'into' the results more, we will use the service more. If they allow us play with the results more then we might actually click on the ads more?

BTW, I don't think it's power users who don't click on PPC, I did a straw poll at a talk recently and NO ONE in a room of 30 people admitted to clicking on ads (well not knowingly).

• Posted by: Adido Web Design
• November 11, 2007 12:23 PM

I am developing a combination link exchange/directory where I use the crumb trail resulting from menu selections as a search query. in may not be all that popular but it does expose users to the idea of "power search" and expanding queries to minimize and fine tune the results.

From this idea of creating a query from previous selections I am thinking that some sort of mark up language for search queries is in order. For example with a markup language I could send each item of a query with a different priority. I probably could easily use it to combine search terms in groups. If nested together, only a small number of search engine query tags could provide numerous possible ranking and relations among the search terms, which then be used in search queries to produce better search results (and/or sponsored link displays).

• Posted by: BungeeBones.com
• November 12, 2007 10:31 AM

I search alot, mostly on Google. I rarely click the ads.

• Posted by: Sean David Baylis
• November 18, 2007 7:43 AM

This is a TEST Comment
Salman Khan
Salman Khan
http://www.google.com/

• Posted by: Salman Khan
• November 23, 2007 8:53 AM