“Best bets” functionality for search systems
Categorised under: Search tools, Usability & user-centered design
Karen Loasby has written about search engine best bets, highlighting some of the debate that surrounds this functionality. To quote:
Best Bets are essentially editorial picks that appear at the top of the search results. They are a manual intervention for use when the search engine isn’t developing the best results for the users. Some sites use them to fix just a couple of problematic queries but others have built up extensive databases of thousands of best bets.
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 