Sensis relevancy
About 18 months ago, Sensis launched its new multi-content search engine to much fanfare. According to the ZDNet article Telstra launches search heavyweight, the Sensis management had high expectations that their new search engine would be the one others would eventually be compared to, because apparently:
"It is not about technology and it's not about volume or providing thousands of irrelevant results. After all, who wants 10,000 irrelevant results when you can receive 20 or so highly relevant results that meet your precise needs? What we have done with sensis.com.au is create a new benchmark for internet search against which future search engines will need to be compared"
While Sensis have fixed the initial problems they had with their crawler doing exactly the opposite of what they claimed, they still have a long way to go before their search engine is actually considered good enough to use on a regular basis.
For a start, their search results page looks to be way out of date. Searching for "Lutrov Communications" produces these results:
One entry pointing to our website. Much better then before. But wait. What's the "we don't just build..." doing there? They're showing the first few words of our old tagline:
"we don't just build websites, we solve business communication problems"
But that was up until June 2005, when we had it changed as part of our general website redesign.
And that's some 8 months ago.
While Edward "The Chief" Mandla makes some excellent points about just how much more Sensis will have to do, if they're to be taken seriously, there's an urgent and immediate problem with their technology.
Surely relevancy requires current content in a search results page?
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About the author
I'm Ivan Lutrov and I'm the owner of Lutrov Interactive. I have 25 years of experience producing interactive work and I create cost effective business websites that are simple, engaging and easy to use. I practice what I preach and I say what I really think, even if it's sometimes not what you want to hear. Subscribe to the Lutrov Interactive feed via RSS and follow me on Twitter.