Just sitting here thinking about one of those 'odd' things I think about sometimes and SEs like Google and Bing have access to data about we don't, and I think it's interesting, so I thought I would share ... One of the things I've noticed myself doing lately, especially when learning something 'new' is clicking on (and liking) results that aren't specifically a match to the actual query, but are 'related' in some way.
Here's what I mean:
Over the last few days I've been setting up my first 'from scratch' server and I've found a large percentage of searches I've conducted resulted in me clicking on and being happy with results someone who knew all the 'ins and outs' of the terminology would think were 'wrong' or didn't match the query. It's actually really interesting to me how many times I've done it, and how long I've been doing it for and not really noticed or paid any attention to.
I wonder if this is something more people than only me do, and if maybe sometimes when we look at results for our 'area of expertise' and see something 'not exact' we interpret that to mean 'bad result set' when to the 'average user' the results that don't 'exactly match' are as helpful, if not even more helpful, than the 'exact answer' to their query and therefore the result set is 'good' from a different perspective?
