You are correct, I am used the word spam, incorrectly. I should say results that are not relevant to what I was looking for. For this search I was looking for a simple how to, but was giving a product to download. While MSN knew what I was looking for. As for the clear temp files vs clear cache, well most non IT folks would attempt the first search phase, just my 2 cents. I would agree that the clear cache is the better of the two, but it did not cross my mind during the time and I am a IT analyst! Props to MSN, for guessing what I was looking for.
I wasn't saying that the top 10 results necessarily had spam sites. But when you have 1,000,000 results, a lot of those are probably not relevant to your search. Whereas if you return 1,000 results and make sure those results ARE relevant, its more to the users advantage. This was the point I was bringing up. Is it better to have a huge amount of results, even though a lot of results beyond page 2 aren't very relevant, OR have less results and more relevancy.
Absolutely true. And that is exactly my point. I have felt for a very long time that in an effort to provide the most relevant results SEs have invested largely in algorithms (as well they should) but have ignored the front end, search tools. Too often, SEs are trying to read someone's intent from only 2 or 3 words. I believe that even a minor improvement on the SE-to-human interface would bring huge improvements in the relevancy. But so far, few have had the interest in tackling this issue. As lame as Ask Jeeves might be, I do respect them for at least taking a wack at it with natural language query technology. /*tom*/
It's strange, but during Phase 1 of Jagger my site kept going up and up -- and now that Jagger is (seemingly) complete, my site has come down a bit. I've still gained about 40% of my usual traffic, but I was headed toward 60%, maybe more, before the second and third wave of Jagger. Then again, a boost is better than none. Thanks Google!