In his latest Alertbox e-mail, usability expert Jakob Nielsen has some unusually great ideas for Steve Ballmer, Microsoft and the $50B they saved from walking out on the Yahoo! deal:
a) Give back to the websites that create the content that search engines currently scrape for free: pay sites for only being indexed in one search engine and refuse the other engines. In particular, allow access to deep link archives of value-added content for users entering from your search engine. Value proportion to users: When you search on engine X, you find stuff that’s otherwise not available.
b) Give back to the users. For example, pay IT departments for redirecting all searches emanating from their company to engine X. Value prop to advertisers: if you want to reach the B2B audience, you need placement on our SERPs because that’s all business users see in 70% of the Fortune 500.
Finally, and most importantly: improve basic search performance. For example by creating human-readable summaries of the search results instead of the horrible 2-line snippets currently used.
One idea is to hire a million people (probably no more than ~$1B/year) to use an instrumented browser that requires them to pass judgment on the usefulness of every search hit they visit. This data could allow sorting the SERP by usefulness instead of popularity and thus vastly improve the quality of searches.
All great ideas, to be sure. If you’re not already subscribing to the Alertbox e-mails, you should be.
