By Jennifer English. Jennifer recently joined Searchme’s Search Quality team and works on analyzing search results for specific characteristics and relevancy.

I have been working for almost 12 years in the field of web taxonomy and search quality, and I was drawn to Searchme because of the visual interface and the category structure that allows users to narrow down their search results. However, Searchme’s great interface and category structure would be fairly useless if the results we returned were not good enough to keep users on the Searchme page to take advantage of them. That’s where search quality comes in.

Since my job is analyzing search results, I have to be impartial. In my personal life, I admit to being a bit of a snob in terms of art, music, movies, books, and other aspects of culture. On the job, though, I set aside my likes and dislikes. The quality of search results for gossip on a hot pop star or actor becomes just as important as for research on an academic subject.

Several years ago, I organized and led a project to satisfy search results for the most popular search terms on a large web directory. Inevitably, some of my team members complained about having to look into results for the ten millionth iteration of Leonardo DiCaprio searches. “Shouldn’t we be working on something more important?” was the periodic complaint.

In responding, I liked to draw a parallel to asking a question at a public library reference desk. A good librarian will treat all questions as equally important and try to find the best answers for everybody. I believe that search engines should act in the same way.

Analyzing search results all day can be challenging at times, but it is highly satisfying to look at a set of results that I’ve just evaluated and imagine how nice it will be for the user to find the relevant information, whether it be for symptoms of a health condition, lyrics to a favorite song, or background for a research paper.

And, as an added bonus, this work allows me to converse easily on a variety of topics, with everyone from teenagers to grandparents!