How the Search Engines Interpret Searchers' Queries

It is a common sight to watch searchers crib, grumble, and howl, whenever they type a search query in a search engine and are shown results that they were not looking for. But have you ever, as a searcher, wondered that may be your request was not formed in the right way? Or may be the context was lacking in your query? It is very important to realize that we as searchers also have a responsibility to provide well formed, relevant, and contextual queries to the search engine, instead of blaming the poor search engine everytime we don't get what we need.

It is negligence, carelessness, and sloppiness on our parts most of the times that we are not able to explain our needs in a proper way to the search engines. If we spend some time brainstorming what exactly we want to find out about, it would save both us and the search engines a lot of valuable time finding out what we want. That is precisely the reason why search engines provide us with search refinement tools to supply them with additional or more specific information or query related terms.

But search engines do not rest while we keep entering all sorts of query terms in their search box. They are constantly observing our behavior and trying to improve their search results by studying our hit and trial kind of searching activities. They take the help of artificial intelligence guys to understand and make sense of our search terms. Though discarded in 1980s for some reasons, AI is back again in vogue and your search can learn a lot from it. Search engines make use of similar systems as 20Q.net which makes you think of an object and then answer some questions. The system will then guess what object you are thinking of on the basis of your answers and interaction with the system. The system identifies the object you were thinking of correctly most of the times. Search engines also work in a similar fashion taking clues from the search terms offered by you and finding out possible matches for your search queries.

The idea behind this blog is that it takes quite an effort on the part of the search engines to provide you exactly the same information that you are looking for. The search engines are an ever evolving entity and they work hard to give you good results, even if means millions of irrelevant and mismatched searches and queries.

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