My primary job at Live Search is Group Program Manager for Search Relevance – making sure the results we return for your query are the right ones. It’s a fun job with a lot of unique challenges, great people, and uniquely cool technology. It’s fun to be in the race as an underdog. At the same time, I’m the kind of guy who is always asking “why”. The “why” of a search engine is to help people find the information they’re looking for as quickly, easily, and confidently as possible. If you want to do a good job at that, you need to understand the people you’re trying to serve and the context in which they’re using your tool.

We’ve learned a lot over the last few years about how customers behave with search engines. But there is one key insight that really sticks out in my mind that I’ll be talking about at SMX: searches don’t occur in isolation – they are often part of a longer task. That is, searchers come to a search engine with something in mind, do an initial query, click on multiple results, perform multiple follow-up searches, and then frequently come back in the following days or weeks to return to the same topic.

Read more over at the Live Search Blog.

Labels: live search, Search Behavior, SMX West