Review my PHP website

ITstudent1213

Note to mods: I posted this on Development forum too, but the Web Design forum may provide me with valuable feedback also.

Hey guys, I am hoping some of you would be willing to provide feedback (a very short survey) on my meta search engine, where the results from Google, Bing and Yahoo are aggregated and displayed in one list.

If a document appears in more than one engine it receives a more favourable rank. This meta search engine has been made for a university assignment and is for educational purposes.

Based on a test of 50 queries from the Trec 2012 Web Track, this engine performs approximately 12% better (in terms of document relevance) than the highest performing individual engine (Google).

If you are willing to do this, could you leave a comment and I will PM you the link to the website? There is a page on the site where you can leave feedback via a form..I would appreciate if you could do this, which will aid me greatly in the generation of my written report.

Thanks.

ITstudent1213

Its very quiet in here. :pac:

SweetCaliber

PM me a link

PaulPinnacle

ITstudent1213 wrote: »

Its very quiet in here. :pac:

It's the subject matter more than the location I'd guess.

It's an interesting concept, but it's flawed on a few levels.

Judging by your comment, your viewing the results of your page purely on a "relevance" score? This is an issue as with the vast majority of searches you can't know the user intent. This is the very reason that a variety of results are shown on a SERP and not simply the 'highest relevance'. The search engines that you're fighting with for relevance are going out of their way to ensure user experience is maximised, which requires a variety of subject matter in the results. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting they get it right all the time, but they do try and achieve this.

In this industry, brand is vital. The biggest issue Bing face in trying to tackle Google isn't their local search (which still sucks horribly) or any other technical issue, it's the brand. When doing blind tests, users favoured Google results over Bing by 53% to 47%. When headers were included on the search pages, that jumped to around 66% to 33% in favour of Google. The alarming part being that it didn't matter which of the two sets of results you placed the Google banner on... it still took a significant lead in preferred results. People simply trust Google, at least when it comes to serving up search results.

Happy to have a look at it and give any feedback I might have. Feel free to fire on the address.

ITstudent1213

PaulPinnacle wrote: »

Happy to have a look at it and give any feedback I might have. Feel free to fire on the address.

Sent, thanks!

Anybody else? Last chance today!