This week I gave a talk at Ignite Melbourne (Slides are below), the topic of which is how to beat google at relevancy. My opinion is that with a small team of dedicated and passionate people it is possible to build a search capability that can rival Google.

Let me first say I’m not talking about web search, at the moment Google has that market pretty much sewn up and it will take a new level of technology (possible the semantic web) to better them, however I firmly believe that if you focus on a market segment or consumer niche you can build a more relevant search experience (Step 1).

Once you have defined your niche, understand why users are searching your site, what is their goal. Users don’t search because they have a spare 10 minutes over lunch, they have a problem they need to find a solution to, search is a mechanism by which they can select a supplier to solve their problem (Step 2).

Next consider the context of the searchers query. What do you know about the searcher, the intent of the search, the device they are searching from, their location, the language they use, even the time of day they are searching, all of this information can be used to deliver an individualised search as opposed to a generic search for the masses (Step 3).

Once you understand the context of your user, think about their end goal and identify what information would allow them to compare and contrast between the results you return (Step 4).

Finally build you search algorithm so that it can dynamically take the context of the user, their intent and the content that can support the compare and contrats process and deliver results based on all of this information (Step 5).

So my 5 step process to beat google is:

1) Pick your niche

2) Understand your users goal

3) Consider all of the context you know about your user query

4) Identify the information that allows a user to compare results

5) Build an algorithm that considers all of the points noted above.

Even if you don’t want to beat Google, using the process I’ve noted you can improve on the user experience that you deliver to your users and this can never be a bad thing.