Google’s search engine and the relevance in system-user interface

Abstract

This paper presents a theoretical research that has as its object of analysis Google´s search engine. It starts with a hypothesis, inaugurated by Yus through Cyberpragmatic, explaining that the Relevance Theory is able to give a scientific explanation to human activities all over the Net, considering that according the mentioned theorist, the researches concerning to cognitive procedures of human mind in physicals scenarios necessarily imply a parallelism over virtual environments. Therefore, due to the blurring of the distinction between virtual and real, the relevance, in addition to guiding communication mediated by Internet, also guides any online human activity. Among the human activities on Net, this research focuses the relevance sought by the system for an user as a place of analysis, in view of that the result of Google search engine fits exactly on that area. From an operational point of view, the defended hypothesis refers that tools provided by Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson), associated with the findings of Cyberpragmatic (Yus), have ability to analyze and describe the Google search engine. Moreover, this study assumes that the search engine ‹metarepresents› a goal of an user who uses its search interface, maximizes the relevance of its input (inquiry, search) supplying outputs (search engine results) according to the relevance of each user, increasing the cognitive effects and decreasing the processing effort applied to reach the goal which motivated the search. In support of this assumption, it presents the technological advances concerning Google search engine, with the introduction of its new algorithm - Hummingbird - and Semantic Web, besides the recognition of user behavior on Internet and the personalization of search results in order to attend, in a relevant way, to the needs and intentions of users, in an attempt to contextualize the user experience.