  In previous research it has been shown that link-based web page metrics can
be used to predict experts' assessment of quality. We are interested in a
related question: do expert rankings of real-world entities correlate with
search engine rankings of corresponding web resources? For example, each year
US News & World Report publishes a list of (among others) top 50 graduate
business schools. Does their expert ranking correlate with the search engine
ranking of the URLs of those business schools? To answer this question we
conducted 9 experiments using 8 expert rankings on a range of academic,
athletic, financial and popular culture topics. We compared the expert rankings
with the rankings in Google, Live Search (formerly MSN) and Yahoo (with list
lengths of 10, 25, and 50). In 57 search engine vs. expert comparisons, only 1
strong and 4 moderate correlations were statistically significant. In 42
inter-search engine comparisons, only 2 strong and 4 moderate correlations were
statistically significant. The correlations appeared to decrease with the size
of the lists: the 3 strong correlations were for lists of 10, the 8 moderate
correlations were for lists of 25, and no correlations were found for lists of
50.
