In a fit of procrastination at work I’ve been cleaning up my drafts folder when amongst all the random oddities I found I had saved this link – Are SEOs Better Searchers?, Discuss. For the life of me I couldn’t remember why I had thought such a thread worth saving until I found this comment:
Are SEOs better searchers? YES.
And librarians, too! Another YES.
Librarians and SEOs rock the Casbah when it comes to finding and sorting information.
Yes, yes we do. Its official, when it comes to search – we rock 
Why? Because we understand IR.
We understand how a document or object is stored, how it is indexed and how it is best retrieved. Quite often we are the ones responsible for the indexing and storing of the object in the first place. We were the ones responsible for the markup, the metadata, the taxonomy and other such goodies. We can also be the ones who determine the retrieval and ranking of the item. We know how to set the precision and recall, the relevance and fall-out. We understand when an overall ‘browsing’ approach is required or when a specialised domain specific search is desired. We continually observe and analyse user behaviours and different cognitive approaches. We are aware of semantic and linguistic relationships that can influence and affect what we are looking for. We can assess when a probabilistic model for ranking and retrieval may be more effective than a vector space and vice versa. Most importantly though is the fact that we can find what the patron is really looking for. We take all this knowledge and help people access the information they are after.
All this and we know how to keep the unruly in line with a well delivered ‘SHUSH!’
“Janie Jones, The Clash”
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