All 1 entries tagged Long Tail Of Search

No other Warwick Blogs use the tag Long Tail Of Search on entries | View entries tagged Long Tail Of Search at Technorati | There are no images tagged Long Tail Of Search on this blog

July 25, 2007

Over 20% of Google's Searches have never been seen by Google before.

Writing about web page http://www.johnston.co.uk/2007_06_01_blog-archive.html

I happened across a couple of ‘long tail of search’ quotes recently that confirm the rule that half of all search terms are unique.

Chris Anderson’s ‘Long Tail’ blog quoted a senior Microsoft executive’s letter confirming this ratio.

Steve Johnston’s blog confirms this ratio for Google and goes on to quote an even more amazing claim.

Udi Manber, VP of Google Engineering said at a recent conference, that there are three reasons why Search is only going to get harder in the future. One of these I already use – “scale and diversity are almost beyond comprehension” – one of which is not particularly relevant to this point, but the third will replace my previous reference: “20 to 25% of the queries we see today, we have never seen before”. I will convert this into ‘1 in 4 of the expressions typed into Google today have never been seen by Google before’. Ponder that for a moment. Google is tapped into our collective consciousness. It’s astonishing.

Truly astonishing indeed! My experience, where no matter the size of the server logs that I processed, 50% of the search terms were unique also confirms that these figures are taken from unprocessed logs. So extraneous characters, ignored by the search engines, have helped reach these easily remembered ratios. The other route causes are synonyms and word ordering, see word order counts.

Most of these ‘very long tail’ search terms can include words from the ‘short head’. My findings that 80% of visitors to a well titled page will have used one or more words from the title yet 50% of the page’s search terms will still be unique! Having looked at all of the long tail terms for a page titled “klaxon horn” (and many others) I can also believe that 20-25% had never been seen by Google before!


Search this blog

Most recent comments

  • I can see what the probable pensioner was aiming for with the green bananas but I always find that i… by Wendy on this entry
  • When I was a child I remember reading the words "The end of the world is nigh" and thinking it said … by Sue on this entry
  • If anyone's in the Bath area I'd recommend "Roman Glass" on the Lower Bristol Road. by Sue on this entry
  • When the old Vectra died and I came to scrap my car I called Paul at Car Removals UK. by Robert McGonigle on this entry
  • Before making major changes to this account the owner took my advice and improved his Page Titles. H… by Robert McGonigle on this entry

Blog archive

Loading…
RSS2.0 Atom

Snap

Google Analytics

Not signed in
Sign in

Powered by BlogBuilder
© MMXXIV