Nilhan Jayasinghe » research

Is search in travel becoming more navigation and less discovery?

nilhan — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 10:16:01 +0000

Heather from HitWise released a very interesting graph, showing a six percent increase in travel brand searches. She suggests that loyalty is growing among travel searches as a result search is increasingly being used as a navigational tool.

Brands have now established themselves in the space, especially comparison brands like Expedia and Lastminute.com – partly helped by search engines also having evolved to favour big brands. The inevitability of both link based and user driven algorithms leading to the rich get richer.

I think there’s something else equally as significant at play – Travel choice is something that is hugely influenced by the conversations in the network (TripAdvisor anyone?) – So, we may be seeing the influence of social media on the research and discovery phase in travel, which would naturally increase the navigational use of search.

Google patent for extracting text in images

nilhan — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 16:11:09 +0000

I love reading about new patent applications but rarely comment on the direct impact on search. As everyone knows, there’re lots of reasons to protect intellectual property, and most rarely get used.
But the one just granted to Google for extracting text from images looks like the real deal. The number of uses are almost unlimited from search applications to helping out blind people read regular books, to finding their way around the high street and shops. So I’m happy to help stir up the subject if it’s going to help make it out to the real world anytime soon.
If anyone’s after a detailed explanation you could do worse that head over to SEO by the sea. If Bill’s not talking about it, it probably isn’t true.

Personalised search, privacy and user personas

nilhan — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 16:05:58 +0000

One of the main issues around personalised search is privacy. Most people feel a little bit uncomfortable with the idea of a search engine attempting to deliver results based tracking us as individuals. Like when someone constantly finishes your sentence, because they think they know you so well (annoying? I know! I do it all the time).

Bill Slawski aka SEO By the SEA, may have uncovered a couple of Google patents that may provide an ingenious workaround.

The proposed method is to create group profiles based on individual search history combined with group behaviour. Creating user types or personas like traditional demographic categorisation can provide personalised results without getting personal.
Another interesting concept is to allow your profile to be stored on your computer, which would make people more comfortable with the whole idea.

May be one day it may be possible to have a profile standard which would allow a searcher to own their data and plug it into the search engine index of their choice.

Brand matters when it comes to search engines

nilhan — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 07:53:35 +0000

A research study at Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) – placed identical search results taken from Google into four different results templates – Google, MSN Live and Yahoo! as well as an in-house search engine.
When these pages were shown to the experimental subjects and asked which pages results were more relevant – the majority thought that Yahoo! and Google performed better than MSN and the internal engine.