Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

If a consumer is searching for a movie actress, the results that will please most people will go to the actresses who are referenced most frequently and most recently. A famous actress of the 1950s might have 50 million references to her in the archives, but few are particularly recent. Why doesn’t Google—or any other search engine—rank actresses by how well they can act or singers by how well they can sing? Should politicians be ranked by intelligence, honesty or the number of votes received?

These are judgments that software doesn’t do very well. That’s partially because humans don’t do them very well, either, because they are so entrenched in emotion and personal preference. (For the record, the only personal preferences that should matter are mine, but my wife disagrees. Go figure.)

When you do a search for a word on Google, Bing, Yahoo or any other major engine, how often does it correctly figure out what you really want to know? If it guesses correctly 70 percent of the time, that is amazingly impressive. But it also means it’s wrong almost one out of three times.

How much of an impact on your search engine referral business would it have if Google concluded that those very happy customers you had—the ones who used a lot of exclamation points for your superb customer service—were actually yelling in an angry manner? Will the underlying software understand sarcasm or humor?

Let’s assume a customer wrote: “Wal-Mart had these laptops on a clearance sale. They were fully loaded, with an MSRP of $2,000, and I picked up three for $250 each. I love a great ripoff!” Would the software recognize that Wal-Mart was being complimented on having great prices? Or would it zero in on “ripoff” with an exclamation point and conclude that the customer was angry?

I have tremendous respect and admiration for some of the extremely talented folk at Google. Heck, the number of truly great minds on Google’s payroll (and, for what it’s worth, Amazon’s) is staggeringly high. That’s how the company gets all the way up to 70 percent and maybe even 75 percent in successful search results. But the more Google, or any other search engine, leaves the numeric realm and gets deeper into the subjective realm, the more its accuracy is going to have to drop.

Also, will Google’s software factor in the realities of consumer comments? For instance, consumers expect a perfect experience, in the sense of “deliver to me what you promised, at the price you promised and in the timeframe you promised.” If you do that perfectly, the consumer will be happy, but not necessarily overjoyed. Competent professional performance will not prompt many consumers to bother posting a comment. But screw up and consumers are highly motivated to post.

Presumably, Google’s software—which, if nothing else, can count well—would spot this trend. But how would it deal with it? The larger the chain, the more negative comments. Will the software determine a percentage for each retailer, as in “of all the comments you received, 17 percent were negative”? Or will it compare retailers with each other? Will the software consider differences such as a company-owned chain versus a franchised one, where owner groups could perform quite differently?

I’m all in favor of punishing retailers that abuse their customers. It’s just the idea of software making that determination that makes me nervous. Right, Hal?