Click through rates (#CTR) and search basics 101

Photo by Eric Ziegler

I recently completed reading and taking rough notes from David Amerland's Google Semantic Search. The books is well worth the exercise of reading. I recommend that you read through the book while expanding your thinking by trying to determine how it might apply beyond what David discusses. While I indicated that I am done reading the book, I still have 30+ rough notes to convert to intelligent blog posts. So sit back and relax over the next several weeks as I review and share my thoughts generated by David's book.

Today's thoughts are pretty simple and to the point. As I read David's book, I realize that I am relearning many concepts that I once knew while learning many new concepts. This post is about click through rates (#CTR) and the impacts that they have on search results. I am relearning CTR and also learned some new thoughts and concepts. What I knew was that CTRs include the number of people that clicks a link to go to a site. What I learned beyond what I knew was that CTR also how long the person stays on the page or site.

And the great thing about this is that semantic search finds value in analyzing the length of time someone visits a site or a piece of content. Semantic search infers that the quality of content is higher when a person reads the sites pages and content for longer periods of time. Basically, the longer people stay, the higher the likelihood the content is quality and the more trustworthy the content should be treated.

And the beauty of this is, that this basic principal applies to semantic search in the enterprise. And such a simple concept can have a very large impact on search results in the enterprise allowing people to find the content that is most valuable and most trust worthy.

Love it - search basics 101.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search.