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Here are the five top posts on this blog for 2010, in order:
Kasparov and Good Interaction Design Search Versus Recommendation: Not the Only Tension More on Simplicity and the Paradox of Choice What You Can Find Out Don’t Forget Explicitly Collaborative Information Seeking
Thank you to all three of my readers who made [...]
The web is abuzz this week with talk of the Google Books Ngram Viewer. It’s a great tool, and leads to some very interesting exploration and trend visualization. So does this tool fly in the face of my rant from a few days ago, about how Google’s improvements to search are all automated improvements, with no opportunity for the user to learn and grow?
The first problem is that because (most of) those 550 changes happen while the users are still “asleep”, users don’t actually notice them. Google doesn’t exactly go out of its way to make many of its search improvements visible to the user, and so it’s often difficult to tell whether or not something has happened. As a user, I personally don’t like that approach, because a change that is invisible or purposely hidden is a change that I as a user have no control over, and am not able to change back or alter further. And as I argued in an earlier post, the way to creating passionate search users is not to give them luxury seats without waking them up. Instead, the way to create passionate search users is to give them search tools that give users a path in which they can grow, improve, and get better at searching. Do users get better at flying, or at seeing and comprehending an information landscape from 30,000 feet, if they’ve got luxury chairs? Arguably not. If anything, the luxury chairs make it harder for users to sit upright, to have a “leaning forward”, engaged experience. Users are less inclined, pun intended, to be active participants in the experience. All the decision are being made for them.
On the surface, it would appear that users now have such a tool, a way to explore, compare, and learn. A way to lean forward at the edge of their seats (rather than lean back, asleep, in luxury chairs) and make search work for them, rather than the other way around. However, the problem is that this tool is still not connected back into an actual search. One can visualize trends, but one cannot actually find books that best exemplify these trends.
Take for example the Ngram Viewer query [science, religion]. Continue reading…
Search Engine Land has a short article on bias versus brands. The issue at hand is whether Google Instant has a brand bias. Google says it does not:
Singhal explains that when someone types in T, mathematically “most people typing T will go to Target. That’s the probability model. If you add R to it (“Tr”), most people are looking for a translation system. It’s actually just pure mathematical modeling.” It is just math, he says, not a bias.
Oh come on, now! What kind of explanation is that? There is no such thing as “just math”. There is always a conscious decision to use math in a particular way.
Let’s take as an example the classic information retrieval ranking function: tf * idf. Continue reading…
Have been on a six month blogging hiatus, and wouldn’t you know it.. it took another fun Google article to pull me back. It is a recent FastCompany piece, entitled Google to Zuckerberg, Bing: We Still Innovate. The premise of the article is that Facebook has recently partnered with Bing to deliver social search and cites Google’s slowed rate of innovation as one of the primary motivators for this move. This has left Google, one source says, “miffed and confused as to how Zuckerberg figured they weren’t innovating”.
Perhaps I could be of assistance. Continue reading…
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