International Law

The Future of Search blog writes about wanting to put humans back in search:

Previously I?ve covered what I dubbed Search 3.0, how search engines have evolved toward blending vertical or specialized results into ?regular? web listings. Today, the step beyond that: Search 4.0, how personal, social and human-edited data can be used to refine search results.

The Search Evolution So Far

Before going ahead, let me summarize what I covered in my past article, in  terms of how search engines have changed over time to create and rank the  results you get when doing a search:

• Search 1.0 (1996): Pages ranked using ?on-the-page? criteria
• Search 2.0 (1998): Pages ranked using ?off-the-page? criteria
• Search 3.0 (2007): Vertical search results blended into regular search    results

The evolution above is not perfect. For one thing, some ?Search 3.0? blending started to happen years before 2007. It?s just that in 2007, I felt all the major search engines made the leap into Search 3.0 in a significant way.

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Search 4.0: The Human Factor

Onward to Search 4.0! As I said in my opening, to me this is the move for search engines to make use of human data as part of their ranking systems. In particular, it means human data generated by you, by those you know or by human editors.

Search engines already make use of some human data. All the major search engines, for example, monitor what we click on within the search results. This helps them determine if a particular listing is drawing more or less clicks than would be expected for the position it holds. For example, if the number two listing for a particular query is getting less clicks than ?normal? for a listing in that spot, perhaps it?s a bad quality listing that should be replaced with another.

Another example: all the major search engines make heavy use of link data ? and that link data is largely human data, humans both ?voting? with their links and ?tagging? pages by the words they use in the links. Google Now Reporting  Anchor Text Phrases and Google Kills Bush?s  Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs provide more about how links  are used in this fashion.

When I talk about putting human data into search results as part of Search 4.0, I mean things that are more aggressive or active than what I?ve covered above. I?ll start off with the most refined Search 4.0 implementation out there, Google?s personalized results.

Google: Search 4.0 Gets Personal

With Google Personalized Search, the web pages you visit, bookmark and things you click on within search results at Google are used to custom-tailor search results for you. The personalization is not as dramatic as with a place like Amazon, where if you purchase a book once, Amazon seems to continually push similar books like that at you forever. Shifts are far more subtle, mainly to help elevate results from sites you

Read more here.