tedster - 10:30 pm on Jul 10, 2012 (gmt 0)

Google's business absolutely DEPENDS on their ability to measure user satisfaction. And so does our business depend on our ability to know the same about our own sites and businesses. In fact, being a public company, this is almost a legal mandate.

With just a bit of consideration I can come up with a lot of approaches to measuring user satisfaction for the SERPs - especially with the immense search volume Google enjoys. A few years ago, when I was watching Google's job advertising for PhD types, it seemed that over half of the openings were for degrees in statistics.

It's not smart for us to underestimate how savvy Google can be on the topic of user satisfaction, or how well they can measure user data. They can and do make that measure - and so does Bing. Duane Forrester at Bing has been discussing this rather transparently in interviews and at conferences for more than a year. What Bing does, you can bet Google does. Heck, before Yahoo Search went to Bing, Yahoo was doing it.