If it's shown in position one, it should be expected to get more clicks than position ten. If something gets more than expected, move it up.
Your point is spot on. Old pages tend to have more association to seen queries, which does not play in favor for new pages.
That said, however, there are a couple of things to consider: 1) seen queries is not the only way to create queries, we are pretty good creating synthetic queries based on the content, descriptions, etc. This queries are more noisy that the seen queries of course, but good enough. And 2)novelty, freshness and popularity are very important features on the ranking. Feel free to try out any new topic you might think of on https://beta.cliqz.com, you will see that is not only "stale" content.
It is still a little fuzzy to me. What is a "synthetic query"? Is this basically generating queries that would match the content (i.e. essentially reversing the process)?
Novelty, freshness are interesting but can lead back to the noise problem mentioned in the blog. If many pages are created that may match the query (e.g. "best new movies") many young pages will match this. Popularity would be useful but difficult to establish and then there's the clickbait and other gaming problems.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15423936
Two years and three domains with the typo? It's malice.
That, or any kind of exploration/optimization algorithm, to be honest.
You are on point. Recency is a challenging problem in multiple ways for search engines. Not just limited to discovering new content, but also how does one index it? How does one balance out when you have for the same query "very new", "new", "slightly old" and "really old" results during ranking. This involves both news as well as new webpages surfacing on the web.
On top of this, we have to remember that this is a fully autonomous real time system which requires solving some of the most difficult engineering challenges at scale and at the same time being mindful of the latency and quality constraints.
At the end of the day, it's all about the final user experience that we ship. We are very much mindful of the same. We will be publishing more details about Cliqz search, on our blog https://0x65.dev/ in the coming days, so stay tuned.
>Queries performed by people, if associated to a web page, serve as even cleaner summaries than anchor text. This is because all the logic put in place by the search engine, who resolved the query with a list of web pages, and all human understanding and experience that led one to select the best page from the offered result list end up embedded in the association <query, url>.
This would seem to present a "rich get richer" problem where the oldest links that have the largest click-through tend to float to the top making it difficult for a new result that may be "better" to appear high in the search results. Anyone know how search engines tackle this problem?