The Search User Wants a Story

I fired up reddit this morning and was completely flabbergasted by one of the top posts.  The title of the post was “This is Why I Use Google, Not Bing”.  And it linked straight to this screenshot (which I reproduce here, in case the target disappears at some point):

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This blew my mind, not only that an alphageek would prefer the (Google) interface on the left to the (Bing) interface on the right, but that the redditor alphageek community would so heavily upvote it.  The way I see it, this speaks directly to the issues of simplicity as storytelling vs. sparsity that I’ve talked about from time to time.  The interface on the left is anything but sparse.  In fact, it is extremely busy and filled with images,  a tool belt of various verticals (news, video images), query modification tools such as timelines and recency sorting, and query reformulation tools such as narrowly related searches (top middle) and broadly related searches (lower left).

In short, everything about it is “non-Googly” Continue reading…

June 25th, 2010 | Category: Exploratory Search, Information Retrieval Foundations | 19 comments

More on Simplicity and the Paradox of Choice

I came across an interesting blogpost today, entitled “The Paradox of Choice is Not Robust“.  To requote their quote:

Benjamin Scheibehenne, a psychologist at the University of Basel, was thinking along these lines when he decided (with Peter Todd and, later, Rainer Greifeneder) to design a range of experiments to figure out when choice [...]

June 23rd, 2010 | Category: General, Information Retrieval Foundations | 4 comments

Simplicity: Sparsity or Storytelling?

A tweet by @akumar prompted me to punch up this quick blogpost:

as with all controversial issues, there’s a positive in google trying bing/image – that they’re not afraid to learn from competition

What Amit is referring to is the recent addition of gorgeous photographic images as search page background.  See for example this writeup: http://blogs.abcnews.com/theworldnewser/2010/06/google-vs-bing-copycat-picture-on-prominent-page.html

He is of course correct; Google is learning from the competition.  But there is another issue at play here, one that I don’t want to overlook because I feel it is very important.  It is the issue of simplicity.  What is simplicity?  How is it defined?  How is it measured? Conversely, what is complexity?  What is clutter? Continue reading…

June 10th, 2010 | Category: General, Information Retrieval Foundations, Social Implications | 15 comments