SEs are constantly tweaking their relevance engines, partly to increase their effectiveness, and partly to confuse the spammers, those Web designers who deliberately distort their page content to trick the SE into giving them a higher relevance ranking for particular keywords than the actual reader content of the page deserves. It is difficult to find much solid research evaluating today's SEs for their effectiveness in relevance ranking. Leighton and Srivastava demonstrate a sensible approach to the problem, but their data, deriving from searches conducted in early 1997, is ancient history in Web time. Until more research can be done, all we have to go on are our individual subjective perceptions and impressions. In the search for relevance, there is no avoiding the fact that human intervention still plays a key role.
People return to the most useful sites.
Analyzing Web use behavior at the statistical levels where millions, even billions of uses can be measured is apparently a powerfully accurate way of predicting which sites will be the most useful and relevant. Web search results still have human touch. December 27, 1999. December 26, 1999. Leighton, H. Vernon and Jaideep Srivastava.