Lee Gomes an analysis (sub required) of the famed search data recently released by AOL.

What popped out at me was this:

How good is the Web with queries not involving naked celebrities? Users seem to think it needs improving, becuase in 47% of all searches, they didn’t click on any of the results presented to them.

AOL uses Google for search.

It’s been about eight years since I was introduced to Google search. Though I use Google and Yahoo interchangably and don’t see too much difference in the results, you would think that after all that time the relevance of a search result would be better then just over fifty fifty. Why is that?

A few possible reasons.

Creating smart search algorithms is incredibly hard. Thousands of the smartest people in the world just can’t get a better result. Maybe.

People are incredibly stupid. They can’t think like a computer (or a computer can’t think like them, see above) or they just don’t know what to ask for. As a person who spent 20 minutes trying to find a place to eat in Fayetteville GA, which is a pretty simple search task, I ain’t buying this one.

Google is semi-incredibly smart. Or at least shrewd. They have quarterly numbers to hit. How do they hit those numbers? Via PPC advertising. How to they get those clicks. It’s a functions of page views.

Google does not have to have the best search results relevance possible. It just needs to be good enough to stop people from switching to alternatives.

Just good enough equals more page views which equals more AdWord displays, which equals more click throughs, which equals more revenue.

Or maybe they just can’t get better search results.