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…
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