The FUD of Searching in the Dark

In Think Like a Search Engineer, Eric Enge explains why FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) improves the quality of search engines. He writes, "fundamentally, the value of [a search engine's] algorithm for ranking content is based on observations about natural Webmaster behavior on the Web -- natural behavior in a world without search engines." Webmasters, however, know that search engines do exist. "So the next-best thing is to make it difficult for the Webmaster to understand the nature of the algorithms used. Doing this ... provides a certain amount of randomness, the foundation of all probabilistic models."

In other words, keeping webmasters ignorant improves the quality of a search engine. Unfortunately, search engineers also keep researchers using their search engine in the dark. Webmaster FUD may be a good thing but researcher FUD makes it difficult to evaluate search engines and that's not a good thing.  [JH]