Science for SEO

In the preliminary survey they were asked how confident they were that they would find all the information.  Most were 80% confident.  They did however struggle, or not find it quite as easy as they had thought.  Internet professionals were no exception to the rule.

What is hard about those queries?  That's a question I'll be asking you.

It is hard, although some people have managed quite easily to find the answers.  Some gave off-topic answers that were as close as they could get, some just couldn't find the information.

I'm still collecting data, if you think you can handle the challenge, give it a shot and see how you go.

You're given 8 query contexts or questions, and then you're asked to find out the answer using Google.

You keep your queries from the first till the last one you used to find the right information - it's not about how few queries you found the information in, it's simply about finding the information.

This is part of an experiment not on Google but rather on users, so it's an HCI experiment.  The KIA project (knowledge interaction agent) is all about natural language generation and understanding.  We can't do any of that if we don't know how users search for things or what language they use for example.  The first part of the experiment happened in 2006/7 and was based on an irritating chatbot system that helped us understand how accepting users were of susch things.  You can read my research on that here, it's a Springer paper from HCI International.

The winner of the book is chosen by a group of researchers at the university.  The reason for that person winning will be revealed in the experiment analysis afterwards.