Best bets: a worst practice?
Categorised under: Search tools
Kas Thomas has raised some questions about the value of best bests in a search engine. To quote:
Not everyone thinks the “best bets” mechanism is a good idea. The problem is that, fundamentally, it’s a hack. It’s arguably the worst kind of hack in that it involves serious amounts of human intervention. Someone has to create the best-bet database. (Typically there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of best-bet links.) Then the database has to be updated and kept fresh as user needs change and documents are added to or dropped from the system.
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 