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Via Greg Linden, I came across the following experimental result from Google as to the importance of quickly returning results to users. The gist of the experiment is summed up in the abstract:
Experiments demonstrate that increasing web search latency 100 to 400 ms reduces the daily number of searches per user by 0.2% to 0.6%. Furthermore, users do fewer searches the longer they are exposed. For longer delays, the loss of searches persists for a time even after latency returns to previous levels.
Google therefore concludes that speed matters, that it is of utmost importance to return results as fast as possible, otherwise users will be less satisfied users. Less satisfied users, the metric assumes, means fewer queries.
I am not as immediately convinced. Sure, I have no doubt that the number of queries issued did drop as a result of latency increase. But can we immediately conclude, from the information contained within this report, that users were less satisfied with their overall search processes? The author writes: Continue reading…
On Wednesday I attended the Executive Round Table on Semantic Search, at the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference. Researchers from Ask, Hakia, Yahoo, Google, Powerset/Bing, and True Knowledge were on the panel. In the next few days I hope to give a longer write-up of the session over on the FXPAL blog. In the meantime I wanted to quickly point out one nugget, and one related Tweet.
The panel covered a large number of topics. But it was inevitable that the moderator would turn to the Google panelist (Peter Norvig) and ask him what he thought about Bing. There has been too much buzz lately for that question not to be asked. I was pleasantly surprised by his answer. I’m not going to risk quoting him, only paraphrasing. And if I misrepresent anything, any mistakes are mine, and not intentional.
[Paraphrase] Norvig’s first answer to the Bing question was to say that he likes the idea of innovation in the user interface. He thinks that there is a lot of room for more such innovation, and for a lot of different reasons. Historically, there has been too much emphasis on getting the ranking right, at the expense of all else. Of course (he added) a quality ranking is something that you absolutely must have. But for too long it has been the only thing that has been worked on, and that needs to change. He thinks Bing has made some good steps, and that there are a lot more that can be made as well.
Wow! This is not the Google that I’ve known for a decade, the Google that has actively shunned most forms of interactivity, feedback, and exploration other than spelling correction. Continue reading…
I came across an interesting article today in the New Scientist on the topic of mass-scale food annotation. The idea is that we can instrument our food, so that we know much more about its origin and manner of production:
WHERE does your food come from? A few years ago, most consumers were satisfied with a sticker showing the country of origin. But concerns about fair trade and the environment, as well as food safety, are now driving a wave of projects aimed at tracking food from farm to shopping basket. Though price is still the main factor determining the food that people buy, many are demanding to know more about its source. This is partly due to a series of recent food safety scandals, from major outbreaks of salmonella and E. coli to melamine showing up in baby formula and pet food. “The public want to know where their food and other products come from, how they are made, and whether they contain any ‘unhealthful’ contaminants,” says Dara O’Rourke, an environmental policy expert at the University of California, Berkeley. Ethical and environmental concerns figure prominently, too. In the US, for example, “a small but rapidly growing percentage of the population – perhaps 8 to 10 per cent – are deeply interested in these issues,” says food policy expert Marion Nestle of New York University. “Interest in where food comes from is part of a growing social movement.”
Most manufacturers already use barcodes or RFID chips to track their products. But with the help of cheap cellphone and internet access it is becoming possible to collate data from remote locations around the world and make it available to the people who are actually going to eat the food. In many cases manufacturers are alive to the notion that transparency about the source of their food is good for business. Sime Darby, a large palm oil supplier in Indonesia and Malaysia, is working with FoodReg, a firm based in Barcelona, Spain, that develops food-tracking software. The idea is to develop a system to prove to customers that its crops are not grown on land recently occupied by tropical rainforest. In remote regions where farmers don’t have access to computers, they can use cellphones to record onto FoodReg’s online database the time and place the crop was harvested. Tracking systems like this should also make it easy to calculate the distance that goods travel to reach stores, allowing consumers to estimate the greenhouse gas emissions racked up by the transport of their food. “The calculation of food miles and carbon footprint could be the killer application for traceability,” says Heiner Lehr of FoodReg. “The technology is there. If a big retailer puts itself behind this, it could happen very fast.”
Projects like this are interesting to me because I can imagine myself in the future making decisions about how and what I buy, based on the information that I am able to obtain about my various choices. In fact, it would be nice to be able to walk into the grocery store with the information seeking intent of finding a good source of protein (whether chicken or beef, or maybe even just beans) for the evening’s meal, and come out of the store with a product that not only fit my budget, but that I felt good about buying. But in order to make this information useful to consumers, there has to be some sort of search or information retrieval layer built on top of the data.
This is where the “I’m feeling lucky” model of simply trying to give the consumer an “answer” breaks down. Continue reading…
Via Paul Lamere, I came across this recent Google blogpost on large scale graph computing. I started reading, and quickly became excited by what I was hearing:
A relatively simple analysis of a standard map (a graph!) can provide the shortest route between two cities. But progressively more sophisticated analysis could be applied to richer information such as speed limits, expected traffic jams, roadworks and even weather conditions. In addition to the shortest route, measured as sheer distance, you could learn about the most scenic route, or the most fuel-efficient one, or the one which has the most rest areas. All these options, and more, can all be extracted from the graph and made useful — provided you have the right tools and inputs.
“Yes!” I thought. ”Yes! I am finally starting to see a growing acknowledgement from one of the Search Majors that when you have a goal-oriented topic, to get from Point A to Point B, there isn’t just a single, most effective, most efficient route. A user might actually want to choose — explicitly choose via input tools — different pathways through all the potential waypoints. Continue reading…
I would like to point to a post worth reading, over at Blogoscoped, about personal, blind side-by-side comparisons of the various contending search engines. I have seen studies like this for years, both on the web and in published, academic papers (see my earlier post). And this current, informal study continues to confirm what all the other studies have shown: When you strip away branding information, there is no clear winner from among the top-contending search engines. Maybe years ago, Google was leaps and bounds better than all the others. Today, it does not appear to be the case.
The reason I point out this informal study is not only to continue to raise awareness of the essential parity among the engines, but to point out something interesting that the author of the post (Philipp Lenssen) says: Continue reading…
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