I had a great conversation with Chris Sherman at Web Search University about search results, which brought up to me an enormous disconnect between SEO and info pro communities. (Gee, what a surprise!)
He and I were comparing Google results for a particular search technique. Of the first 10 results, the second and sixth hits were spot on. Since it was a somewhat amorphous topic, I expected to have to wade through a lot of stuff to find what I was looking for. Two good hits from the first 10 was pretty good for me. Chris labelled those results as a #fail, since 80% of the results weren't useful.
My response: It's a question of precision vs. recall. Search engine marketers consider results with less than 90% relevance to be a failed search, because the precision wasn't high enough. Info pros, on the other hand, are often more concerned about recall; we want to make sure that we find as many useful resources as possible. For a difficult search, 10% or 20% relevance is just fine.
And this comes back to my ongoing theme that we info pros are far more data-tolerant than most people. Wading through page after page of search results is just fine with us, as long as we find something useful. And we often forget that our clients are far less data-tolerant than we are. One of the biggest challenges of info pros is limiting our results to the depth and breadth that our clients need. We want to keep digging deeper, and to send our clients all the fascinating information that we found, forgetting that this may be doing the client a disservice.
For more on distillation and making information more user-friendly, see my talk on adding value at BatesInfo.com/extras