…I’d need a larger mailbox to hold the 1.9 billion results delivered when I ask for ‘my mail’;
…I’d need a dumpster to hold the junk mail from advertisers;
…I’d need a ‘Return to Sender’ stamp to process all of the misrouted mail; and,
…I’d always miss some of my mail because sender and receiver used different keywords.
The U.S. Postal Service isn’t perfect, but they’re darn close when compared to Google search. Each day, when my mail arrives, I find 90+% addressed to me, with the remainder addressed to ‘occupant’. Very rarely do I receive a piece of misrouted mail – the percentage is astonishingly low given the handwriting I see.
What makes ‘search’ and ‘mail delivery’ so different? Simply this – Tagging and Taxonomy!
Each piece of postal mail is ‘tagged’ with a delivery address, using a structured taxonomy of zip codes and street addresses, to precisely describe its destination. There is no guesswork in selecting the mail for my mailbox – relevance approaches 100%. (Note: I don’t like junk mail either, and rarely find the content relevant, but this isn’t the fault of the postal service – their job is to make delivery to the specified address regardless of content.)
So, if Google could precisely tag all of the content they index, using a precise and structured taxonomy, then the quality of search results delivered by Google might approach that of the Postal Service mail delivery.
Google search results could approach the quality of Postal Service mail delivery if:
- A precise taxonomy was broadly adopted for all content;
- All content publishers assigned appropriate tags;
- Google ‘returned to sender’ all content without appropriate tags;
- Google’s search algorithms we’re optimized to leverage assigned tags; and,
- The process was resistant to tag spamming.
I’m not so Pollyanish that I believe this scenario is possible. But there are options that can get us close … especially in the realm of job search.
Stay tuned …
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