Ok, people have told me that this logic is typically not valid, but here’s my thoughts on the subject:

When you do a google (or other engine) search, and go through the search results clicking on the ones that seem to be the right ones, one-by-one why don’t we remember the last one that we click on as the best answer to the search? If we find a good result that solves our problem, we don’t go on and continue to search for more results … the last url clicked is very likely the page with our answer on it. So, if we record the last result that we click on and after a week or so, we send that last result url as the ‘best’ result for that search term to a server somewhere or just remember it, the next time we search for the same thing, our ‘last’ search result will be the first one on the list. It’s probably the best answer for what we were searching for and also it’ll bring us back to where we left off last time.

This seems like it’s a no-brainer to me, but other people in the search industry have told me that there have been studies that have proven this theory wrong. Can someone tell me why this is a bad idea? Why wouldn’t this work? If there is noise because a user gave up or something (record a ‘dead end’ as the last result), then we just aggregate all of the search results together and the most popular (the most times someone has clicked on a URL as the ‘last’ search result) gets top billing in your next search result. Or both (the world’s most popular last result and my personal last search result)?

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