Search sucks - where's the context?
More so than ever I think that, unlike the '90s, the Internet now has too much information. That the information and answers people are seeking are becoming lost in all the noise (what some call the signal to noise ratio). Even the rise of blogs, which is tremendously empowering to individuals, helps to increase the deluge of information where potentially every person on the Internet can have a 'voice' which runs the risk of turning the Internet into an overwhelming babble of conversations. Where's the context?
Even Google I find is becoming less useful every year as it is simply returning way too many links and the number of times I find what I am looking for on the first page of search results seems to be getting lower all the time.
I think the problem is that people seem to feel that the answer they are looking will be found in one place. Today's world is much more complex than the '90s and the answer you are looking for will likely be compiled from several sources. There is no right or wrong answer, just shades of gray.
This is why I think that areas of study like social network analysis will become more important over time as content like articles and web pages are simply potential 'doorways' to the actual authors. If I like what I read then I tend to trust the authors. This sense of trust acts as a filter online.
I'm waiting for the day when Google returns search results that also includes the author's name and some sort of 'person ranking' like the way it does today with its page ranking algorithm. There must be some way to improve the notion of tracking web page links to include people links to add context. Even using something like the author's email address as a unique indentifier could help.
Google today uses the aggregate of clicks to return search results. I would be willing to give up some of my privacy to log into Google so that the search results factor in who I am and what I have clicked on or stored previously.
If this notion of trust works for eBay where people can do physical goods transactions why can't it work for the Internet for knowledge transactions?
posted by Ben Watson at 10:13 PM
1 Comments:
Yes context is the key to search and trust is an important form of context. To be fair, Google does context as well as anyone, and its use of links to determine context is brilant. It is also worth looking at what Amazon does with context and the social network it has developed around book reviews.
Trust is not the only way of extending context. In the future we will be able to use typed links and/or techniques such as latent semantic analysis to build context. Nestling context maps inside various ontologies is the long-term solution, although this works best in closed systems at this time.
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