You don't keep searching after you found what you were looking for, right? | Hacker News Reader

You don't keep searching after you found what you were looking for, right?

badcheese.com

14 pointsscumola13 comments

Google has been doing this for years.

How is it interesting to add pre-existing Google functionality into a Firefox plugin that just duplicates what's already happening?

Sounds like a perfect example of "often 6 months in the lab can save you 10 minutes in the library".

Yep, they've been doing this for a while. I still remember when they changed the result URL's to be redirects instead of direct links because they wanted to track exactly this behavior.

It is a great idea, but uhm.. ya, a bit late to the party. :)

I like this idea. However, my browsing habits would mess this up. When I run a search, I'll often open the first two or three results that look good. I do this before looking at any of them. Still, even knowing that a result "looked good" might be enough to improve results.

I do the same thing, which is why I have my doubts: I'll do a search and ctrl-click (or equivalent to open in a new tab) the top 4-5 that look promising. Last clicked in no way means it is the best result, especially considering that the last one I clicked will be further down in the search results and (theoretically) be the least applicable.

clicks-as-votes isn't new. There are many reasons for the last click though.

   1. found what you want
   2. got bored
   3. tried a new search term
   4. browser crashed
   5. continued your searching session through the site (ie going forward not back)
   6. tab based browsing

It's true that you wouldn't keep searching after you found what you want, but that does not necessarily imply that if you stop searching you have found what you were looking for.

Alternative search engines have tried and died.

And to add:

7. Switched to Bing and/or Yahoo to compare results.

That's exactly how Google tracks your habits to personalize your search results. And recently they announced they're going to do it for everyone, not just logged in users.

When I search I scan through the search page and pickup interesting links and get them opened in tabs. Then I read opened tabs and if they don't have stuff I need, I refine my search query. I think my search style would feed lots of false positives to the research the writer is doing, if I participate :).

Sounds interesting. I guess the more users you get the better search results your search will return.

I'm generally in favor of people doing little mashups over the Google interface. I'll bet there's a lot of potentially interesting work in that area -- though I'd hate to try to make money off it.

This will bias results towards those that are already on the first few pages. New pages that are actually more relevant for a query(but haven't had time to get clicks) wouldn't stand a chance.

You could make it a fraction -- last-clicks/views

At a conference, Norvig once mentioned that you not clicking on the number 1 link says a lot more than you clicking on the number 4 link. Just saying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com