Also, Google partially uses this in their algorithm as well — if a search for “ottawa baseball” has people consistently clicking on the third link result, it gets higher rankings.

There might be a way to refine this, in that Google doesn’t necessarily know that you “found what you were looking for” when clicking on the third link, so you would have to track the entire query, possibly with a browser toolbar that you can click a thumbs up/down for to communicate back with the search engine.

As regards the P2P aspect, I’m going to put some thoughts together (since I can’t read what you wrote) and put a post on my blog.

Mmm…plain links only:
http://www.bmannconsulting.com/node.php?id=342

One more note I should add: I know that the problem of indexing the “deep web” was being tackled by the Gnutella guys working with Infrasearch – which eventually got bought by Sun and integrated into the JXTA Search team. Just thought I’d mention it.

That said, they may be doing that kind of tracking with the Google Toolbar – or they could do it fairly easily. Of course, if would require more back end horsepower to track user activities if they did.

Today, I wanted to find information about entry and exit technique for kayaking on rocky coastlines. Googling for this information was very difficult, and required a great deal of “-class -course -tour” type terms. The likelihood of anyone else searching for this information, however, is very small, especially within a short time period.

Like any other branch of computer science, the shortcomings of search engines are in the special cases; the finding of information that is rarely accessed. Google rarely fails me, but when it does, I’m looking for something off the beaten path.

The problem is that the feedback signal to Google is extremely attenuated. When someone, such as yourself, finally finds a piece of information by picking through Google’s results and refining their search, that knowledge (“this is what I was looking for when I said ‘entry exit technique kayak’) is lost. Google throws away that knowledge, even though it could be tracked and incorporated into its database of knowledge.

Ryan’s observation implies additional required functionality: a method for allowing users to refine and sort through search results in a simple fashion, and augmenting the meta-data with the refinements. Basically this would say “hey, when someone searches for ‘exit entry technique kayak’ exclude pages that match the subsearch ‘class course tour’.

This idea reminds me of another proposal. Currently you can add a set of meta-tags to your web pages to guide search engines on what your page is about (a set of keywords and descriptions). This is failure-prone, as people have an incentive to lie in their keywords and descriptions. However, what if you could include a meta-tag giving a list of key words for which your site was not a match? This would allow you to tell a search engine “yeah, my page is about kayaking, but I don’t cover exit and entry techniques. Sorry!”

As for meta-tags…they have not been used by search engines for years now, precisely because of the “gaming” of them.

Link tracking: I was actually thinking of the “sponsored links” that appear on the right hand side. You’re right on the “main” links. Yes, they do do some of that tracking with the Google toolbar if you accepted the “we will track you” option on install.