I’ve been hearing the phrase ‘chasing the long tail’ bandied about. It sounded sleek and dangerous to me, like something that should be happening on safari in Africa. But then Eric Enge at Search Engine Watch wrote a whole piece about the long tail that included this:

At Google’s Universal Search announcement, Udi Manber put up a slide that stated that 20% to 25% of the search queries Google sees every day are search queries it has never seen before. Let that sink in for a moment. To me, that number was startlingly large.

I found that comment so interesting that it made me want to understand the ‘long tail’ concept. Naturally, I Googled it, and found that the phrase has its origins in a book by Wired editor-in-chief Chris Andersen. Essentially, it means that the direction of our economy is AWAY from a few products with millions of consumers each and TOWARDS millions of products with a few consumers each:

Now, the reason I found Eric’s factoid so interesting is that VortexDNA, like so many others, is in the predictive search arena, aiming to improve the relevance of search results with MyWebDNA. One area in which MyWebDNA really excels, though, is in its ability to increase relevance precisely for searches that haven’t been done before, by basing the matches on the core purpose and values of the user rather than the user’s search history.

If 20 to 25% of Google search queries are new ones, MyWebDNA could be extraordinarily useful. I’d be keen to know what you think.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 11:01 am and is filed under Relevance, Search, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.