In an amazingly honest answer Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of the Online Audience Group for Microsoft Bing said that Bing focused on what is known as HEAD search instead of what is called LONG TAIL search.
The argument between “Head” and “Long Tail” searches has been going on for a very long time. It basically comes down to the idea of a “Head” search looking at the top returns of a search, say the top 20% and assumes that anything in that list is adequate for a relevant return of a search. The “Long Tail” search on the other had looks at the other 80% and measure this information for relevant and given other factors might push these smaller results higher in the search return.
In the “Head” search only large and common websites will show up. You have to be big to start with before you will show up in the top 20%. The “Long Tail” search give the little website and other look at give them a chance to raise higher in the rankings.
This means that when people use Bing it will return only popular website as a return of any query but will not index longer searches or provide good results for these many word searches. Google on the other hand has always used the “Long Tail” search which explains why people tend to find what they want.
At the NYC event Mehdi said the Bing/Microsoft believes that tide is turning back around to the “Head Search” of popular queries.
Considering that Bing only has captured about 8% of the search engine market and most of that has come not from Google’s audience but from Yahoo’s audience. I can not help but feel that Mehdi is wrong. I think that the “Long Tail” search is a very viable method and will continue to return good search results.
The bottom line to me is that people don’t can how as Search Engine works. All they care about is what results that they back. If BING is only going to keep sending me to the top 20% website no matter what I ask it then what’s the point?
What do you guys think?
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