When we need a quick piece of information, a trip to the internet usually will get the job done. Many people use Google. Google prides itself on prioritizing the return of search results to optimize relevance.

Google recognizes that people are only willing to look at the first few tens of results and are not going to work through millions, thousands, or even hundreds of hits. Because of this, as the collection size grows, search engines need tools that have very high precision (number of relevant documents returned, say in the top tens of results). Indeed, search engines want the notion of "relevant" to only include the very best documents since there may be tens of thousands of slightly relevant documents.

Briefly, Google, in part, assigns "rank" on its search engine results much as Science Citation Index (SCI) assigned the "value" of a scientific paper based on the number of papers who cite to it. Google assumes you will find a given webpage more valuable if others have created links to it.

--> If a human reads a web page and finds it relevant, that human might put a link to it on his or her own site.

--> The higher the number of pages that link to a given web page, the more relevant it is.

An important point to recognize is that Google doesn't just contemplate the content of a searched website, they consider "how many" other sites link to the searched website. In theory, there could be a website out there that has EXACTLY what we want, but it does not show up in the first tens of hits because NO ONE links to it.

When we're looking for a quick piece of information, we can readily tell how effective the search has been, and we can modify the search if necessary.

But, turn this around, for a moment. Suppose someone is looking for you. What are they going to find?

To give an example, I searched myself on Google, and the first few tens of results are definitely not the ones I would have picked to let people learn about "Lawrence B. Ebert."

My first two hits were my blogger user profile (blogspot is affiliated with Google). I have more than 1500 entries on my blog (IPBiz) but the third Google hit was to a particular entry (IPBiz: India to produce Tamiflu?). I have no idea why Google selected that one particular blog entry. The next three hits concerned blog entries about Mark Lemley's law review article on "Rational Ignorance at the Patent Office," two from Patently-O and one from IPBiz. I have no idea why Google was intrigued by these. The next hit was an entry on wikipedia (wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_B._Ebert), which entry certainly providing more information on "Lawrence B. Ebert" than any of the preceding hits. The next entry was to a brief comment I wrote on themuseumofhoaxes about The Long Fall of Jan Hendrik Schon. How this hit got a high priority is a mystery. The next entry was a short bio on ipfrontline, and the final first Google page entry was to an article I wrote that appeared the Kent Journal of Intellectual Property (jip.kentlaw.edu). This was the second article I wrote for JIP; I have no idea why the first wasn't mentioned.

Topping the second Google page was a repeated cite to the blog entry about Tamiflu (IPBiz: India to produce Tamiflu?). The next two hits were to entries at www.knowledgeproblem.com.

I could go on. The issue is that Google was giving high priority in the search results to rather episodic, isolated entries on various websites. Significant articles I had written (such as one cited by the US Supreme Court and another cited by the Colorado Supreme Court were not among the first tens of hits) and would never be found by any "third party" looking for information on Lawrence B. Ebert.

Many people have spent a lot of money trying to figure out how Google arrives at weighting factors in presenting results of searches. Trying to trick Google has not been particularly effective. Trying to change Google has not been particularly effective. If the search results aren't going to be effective in getting people to "know" you, more pro-active, direct approaches to your potential customers and contacts are definitely in order.