Information Retrieval Gupf

A number of people have already written about the Sue Dumais “Salton Award” talk at SIGIR.  I encourage you to read their posts, and in particular pay attention to the emphasis that she put on her work at the intersection of HCI and IR.  I see this area as only continuing to grow over the next decade.

So along those lines I want to share a small tidbit from her talk that I particularly identified with.  As I’ve written about in the past, one of my pet irritants is the search input box.  Web search has been around for 1.5 decades, but there is still only a single line for expressing and inputing the richness of one’s information needs.  Dumais shares this frustration, and in her talk showed this slide:

This is web search at 15.  Lycos started with 54k pages in July of 1994, and today we are up to billions.  Web search engines started indexing only web pages and Usenet newsgroups.  Now there are maps, videos, shopping, stocks, health, travel, and so on.  But has there been parity in the manner in which users are able to express their richer and more complex information needs?  No, that remains unchanged.  The shot above shows the past n years of MSN/Live/Bing search interfaces (the next slide also did the same thing for Google — but I missed that shot), obtained through the Internet Archive.  Nothing significant has changed.  Sure, things get a little wider, things get more colors and a few more verticals.  But it’s still a one (not even two!) line input box.

Dumais felt, and I completely agree, that continuing down this path is not the best way to approach Information Retrieval.  Sure, for certain types of queries we will still only need this flat simplicity.  But with the richness of information available (video! music!), continuing to optimize for single line text does a disservice to the users.

I just finished reading a though provoking post from Anil Dash, about how Google’s recent Chrome OS announcement signifies an important moment: 

This is, for lack of a better term, Google’s “Microsoft Moment”. This is the point when the difference between their internal conception of the company starts to diverge just a bit too far from the public perception of the company, and even starts to diverge from reality. At this inflection point, the reasons for doing new things at Google start to change.

Dash gives a number of explanations for why he believes this moment has arrived.  The first observation that struck me was about Google’s attitude toward self-promotion.  For its entire company history, Google has proudly and vocally called attention to the fact that it does not advertise its own services; its products speak for themselves and are spread by word-of-mouth and by reputation alone.  That is the self-declared “Googly” way.  This was not just early days rhetoric, spoken only when the company was young.  As recently as last year’s SIGIR 2008 conference in Singapore, Googler Kai Fu Lee explicitly stated during his keynote speech the fact that Google does not self-advertise.  But this, Dash says, is changing.  Now there are slick television ads for Chrome.  There are highly promoted developer conferences for Android.  And just two days before Kai Fu Lee gave his SIGIR talk, categorically declaring that Google never self-advertises, I was at a San Francisco Giants game and saw a large, LED banner advertisement for Google Transit.  This change has an effect on the public perception of the company. Dash writes:

This would be okay, except that I doubt Google’s internal self-image as an organization has changed to reflect this new reality. “We’re not like some giant company with flashy TV ads — we’re just a bunch of geeks in Mountain View!” And while that might be true for the vast number of engineers who define the company’s internal culture, the external impression of Google being just another tech titan like Microsoft will gain footing, making the audience for Google’s messages less tolerant of ambiguity and less forgiving of mistakes…Google has made commendable steps towards communicating with those outside of its sphere of influence in the tech world. But the messages will be incomplete or insufficient as long as Google doesn’t truly internalize and accept that its public perception is about to change radically. The era of Google as a trusted, “non-evil” startup whose actions are automatically assumed to be benevolent is over.

Now, you might ask: What does all this have to do with this Information Retrieval blog? Continue reading →