Robin Good Responds
January 18th, 2005Robin Good responds to my post on why I think RSS Feeds for search engine results are useless.
A few assumptions were made on Good’s part for which I am completely to blame:
1) I monitor more than just the news. I have numerous customized searches in PubSub, Feedster, etc.
2) I reported on something that clearly needed a reference. When I said, “Who uses more than 2 keywords anyway, right?”, I should have prefaced that with the latest statistics on web search. Gary mentioned in November that the average query length in search engines is 2.8. These statistics are comparable with everything else that I had seen. Thus, my comment. My point was that the average searcher does not run extensive queries on the major engines. Thus, the reason for NOT getting any new stuff via RSS. That said, I haven’t seen any search engine query statistics for those that use RSS.
3) I am an SEO consultant for a large non-profit company, where I check their brand name in the 13 major engines. I only check the brand name. They have other people who check keywords and phrases. Thus, my comment, “I monitor numerous queries in over 16 engines for my consulting work and there are rarely any new results that appear in the top 10″ is true, because I only use 2 keywords. That is still the average though. As an aside, I am more interested in the ads that people buy up for their brand name, which will not come up in any search engine results RSS feed.
Robin also mentioned that if you use enough keywords you will get current content out of the general search engines. I still disagree with his theories. Even his search for “RSS web-based search” in Google brings back information that I had seen elsewhere (more likely in a customized PubSub feed). My point is that no matter how specialized the search, the odds of me finding new content on a search engine is much lower than from the news or the blogosphere. This is based on my use of search engines, news searches, and the blogosphere for the past 3 years and not on any research (although that would be a fine library science research project)
So, while I understand his point of being all-inclusive, I’m not about to add more feeds to my aggregator because of the slim chance that I will see something new based on a well-formatted search in G! or Y!. I’ll probably see it anyway. Keeping current means not having to see any repetitive content and the general engines will more than likely repeat what I already know.