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As reported by Scoble: http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer/01bbb409/i-love-that-bing-means-is-not-google-very
I agree — very clever and quite funny. A recursion that all computer scientists should appreciate, tipping its hat to similarly-constructed acronyms, such as GNU (Gnu’s Not Unix) and Pine (Pine is not Elm).
It’s interesting, too, how the new generation references the older generation, i.e. the final character [...]
I just came across a Wired article today on a new search push from Microsoft, which will supposedly be named Bing. It touches on some of the issues that we were discussing in yesterday’s comment thread, in particular:
People thought online e-mail was just fine and more or less converged on the same specific set of features — until Google came along and gave people gigs of disk space, organized e-mails by conversations and let people send big attachments. Soon Yahoo and Microsoft were forced to follow. So too with search. Google appears to have created the staple recipe, but there is a clear hunger for something more. Unfortunately people may not know what that something extra is until they see it — and that’s something not even Google has been able to figure out. So what do we know about what web searchers want? Weitz gave Wired.com a look at some of what Microsoft found when it when “back to the data” — namely Live.com search results — in a bid to make a qualitative leap in search performance. The data shows rampant clicking by many on the back button, while others get desperate enough to look to the second page of results. And when that doesn’t work, the users try again, coming up with slightly different terms. That’s about half of the searches. Only a quarter of searches return a good result — meaning an answer to a question (think a stock price), a satisfying search engine result or a happy ad click.
While this is a good start, it’s still not clear to me that the interpretations of the measurements are correct. Just because someone doesn’t click something, does that mean the search was a failure? Just because someone did click something, does it mean that the search was a success? It is not to difficult to come up with reasonable and abundant, counterexamples. And it’s still not clear how to differentiate task failure from process failure.
On a slightly different note, I found the following excerpt from the article particularly interesting: Continue reading…
I have a question that has been bothering me, kicking around in my head, for at least half a decade now. And I can’t seem to come to any solid conclusion on it. I suppose it can’t hurt to throw it out here onto the web, and see if one of my 3 readers [...]
This was a particularly busy week, and I did not get a chance to post many thoughts. Instead, I’ll do a quick roundup of articles that I enjoyed reading this past week+.
First, a tongue-in-cheek post from Nick Carr entitled For Whom the Google Tolls:
It’s amazing that, before Google came along, any of us was able to survive beyond childhood. At the company’s Zeitgeist conference in London yesterday, cofounder Larry Page warned that privacy-protecting restrictions on Google’s ability to store personal data were hindering the company from tracking the spread of diseases and hence increasing the risk of mankind’s extinction. The less data Google is allowed to store, said Page, the “more likely we all are to die.”
Continue reading…
Google finally acquiesces, and starts exposing more advanced, user-controllable search result refactorization options. See here, here, and here:
But as people get more sophisticated at search they are coming to us to solve more complex problems. To stay on top of this, we have spent a lot of time looking at how we can better understand the wide range of information that’s on the web and quickly connect people to just the nuggets they need at that moment. We want to help our users find more useful information, and do more useful things with it. Our first announcement today is a new set of features that we call Search Options, which are a collection of tools that let you slice and dice your results and generate different views to find what you need faster and easier. Search Options helps solve a problem that can be vexing: what query should I ask? Let’s say you are looking for forum discussions about a specific product, but are most interested in ones that have taken place more recently. That’s not an easy query to formulate, but with Search Options you can search for the product’s name, apply the option to filter out anything but forum sites, and then apply an option to only see results from the past week.
I’m pleased to see that it is finally happening. For years I’ve clamored about how frustrating it is that Google not only hasn’t given users these sorts of options, but has actively campaigned against such functionality: They have often said that exposing advanced tools is “too complex” for users and that it would clutter the famously clean Google interface. Perhaps the long-held belief that simplicity trumps all other considerations is finally being let go, with the understanding that functionality is sometimes more important than bare and minimal interfaces. This is a good thing.
Willingness to expose these tools helps topple the myth that is often perpetuated, about how HCIR interfaces offer the user too much choice and therefore do more harm than good Continue reading…
Two pieces of recent news have my head spinning. Both are instances of technology companies acting in exactly the opposite manner from their ideals (and public statements). The first is Microsoft announcement of an open-source version of BigTable:
Instead of creating a proprietary copy of these pieces of infrastructure, Powerset decided instead to turn to Hadoop, [...]
Google is an information retrieval company that prides itself on the purity of its results. It does not allow the integrity of its ranked list ordering to be tampered with by sponsored results. It also has claimed for years that it does not engage in hand-coding (aka hand-crafting or hard-coding) of results. Everything that it returns in the non-sponsored, organic list is purely algorithmic, or at least only indirectly influenced by the hand of humans (e.g. relevance assessors and quality raters). The order in which a result is ranked will not be — as far as I’ve always understood Google’s position — hand-picked.
So I was much surprised recently to learn about a new initiative from Google that allows you to create a Google profile for yourself, which Google places into the 10th slot in the organic results when someone searches for your name! From the official Google blog:
To give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name, we’ve begun to show Google profile results at the bottom of U.S. name-query search pages…Don’t have a Google profile? Just search for [me] and follow the instructions at the top of the page to create one. In just a few minutes, you can create a public profile that represents you and that appears when people search for your name on Google.
How is this not hard-coding of results? Continue reading…
In a recent response article, Danny Sullivan takes Forbes CEO Spanfeller to task on the whole Google vs. The Newspapers issue. There are a lot of things I agree with Danny about, and an equal number of things that I disagree with. But I feel compelled to propagate one nugget from Spanfeller:
Spanfeller: Search is not really all that great at the moment, a comment repeated time and again by much more astute folks then me. This is especially true when looking for high-quality professionally created content. This is not to say that user-generated content or ecommerce options or product specs should not be returned in search results, simply that there is clearly a better way to showcase the different paths an end user might be pursuing. The idea that everyone is forced into trying to “game” the system so that they get their “fair” (or sometimes not so fair) share is testament to how terribly wrong this entire process has become.
This excites me because I see in this statement an acknowledgment and realization that Exploratory Search and HCIR (“showcasing”) is necessary. Sullivan, however, completely misses the point: Continue reading…
Apropos to my post yesterday, Technology Review has a short comparison of Wolfram Alpha and Google. Here are a few samples:
Here’s what I entered, and what I found.
SEARCH TERM: Microsoft Apple
WOLFRAM ALPHA: I got side-by-side tables and graphics on the stock prices and data on the two companies, plus a chart plotting the price of both stocks over time.
GOOGLE: The top hits were mostly news stories, from major and minor publications, containing both words.
And.. Continue reading…
It is good practice to rotate the mattress on your bed, to prevent lopsided wear-and-tear from shortening its useful life. The same thing applies to car tires; they need rotating. Smart travelers know to rotate the airlines from which they purchase tickets, as the accumulation over time of per-ticket better prices often outweighs the rewards or miles than comes from a single airline’s loyalty perks. Even the internet itself works by allowing packets of information to dynamically rotate across different routes, based on traffic congestion, rather than tying up a full end-to-end circuit.
So why wouldn’t you rotate your search engine usage? Continue reading…
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