BayCHI/InnovationsInSearch

BayCHI meeting, April 2005: Recent Innovations in Search and Other Ways of Finding Information

• http://www.baychi.org/calendar/20050412b/

This topic attracted a bigger crowd than the PARC auditorium could hold, and some people had to watch on the lobby's TV monitors. -- They announced that the audio will be archived, but I don't see it on the web yet. Some other attendees have posted their notes (follow BayCHI link above).

The 5 panel members got 5 minutes each for introductory remarks and demos.

Peter Norvig, "Director of Search Quality" at Google, showed a few examples:

• "What is the population of Japan?" -- Google now gives you the actual answer (and a reference to the source), before the usual search results.
• "When did Elvis die?" -- It answers this, too, and automatically uses a "majority rules" algorithm to believe the sites that say he died, rather than the ones that claim Elvis is a space alien who didn't die.
• You can Google search by SMS from your cell phone, as in "Starbucks 95014".
• Google maps now integrate aerial photos (and you can scroll around with the mouse).
• Google Suggest -- uses AJAX (Async Javascript and X-something) to talk to the server as you type & fill in the combo box. This is really cool...try it out.

Ken Norton from Yahoo:

• Their mission is to let users "Find, use, share, and expand (remix, re-make) knowledge."
• Video search.
• MediaRSS
• Flickr - photo sharing community
• http://next.yahoo.com

Mark Fletcher from AskJeeves:

• Blogs are growing fast. Everything is "version 0.5" now.
• AskJeeves acquired BlogLines in 2/2005.

Udi Manber from A9 (a division of Amazon):

• Yellow Pages at A9 - has 28,000,000 images from the streets of 20 major cities.
• He showed highlights of a funny recording of Washington, D.C., security people giving their guy a hard time. He had stopped his rented SUV, with a camera mounted on top, right in front of a State Department buildling. They asked "Is there any film in that camera?" and he said No. (They forgot to ask whether it was continuously recording straight to a hard drive.)
• A9 remembers your search history, and which pages you visited before. When you repeat an old search, it says "Hey, these results are new since the last time you did this search," and shows which ones you already followed.

Jakob Neilsen:

• Search-success statistics: Overall, searches are successful 56% of the time, but only 33% of the time within a site.
• "Help doesn't." -- He showed a screen-video of a confused user trying to search for information on "headaches." After a couple of minutes, everybody was rooting for the poor user to click in the right spot. Some of the sources of confusion:
  • Typing goes where your blinking insertion point is, not where your mouse cursor.
  • Alert pops up with instructions, and user tries to follow the instructions without first dismissing the alert.
  • Typed search into the browser Location field rather than a page's search field.
  • After getting close to some results, followed a link on a very general left-side navigation rail, thinking the info there would still be related to the search.

Other comments

• Users have much higher expectations from their searches than they did years ago.
• The average number of words in a search query has risen over the years, from 1.3 in 1994, to 1.9 in 1997, to 2.2 in 2004. (Filled in from Barney Pell's notes, as I only had the 1.3 and the 2.2.)
• The width of the search box matters. If you provide a wider search box, users will on average do longer queries. (I think the implication was that even though the narrow search box will happily scroll to accommodate a long query, users feel constrained by the appearance.)
• (Neilsen) There has been no progress in Navigation since the first Mozilla(?).
  • Site maps are useless because they aren't standardized.
• (Manber) Computer Science people like to say: "Anything you can do, I can do meta."
• What do we NOT use search for? Social stuff, stuff that you'd rather ask your friends (What's a good band, or what's a good restaurant.)
  • (Norvig) We don't use search for things that are "too complicated." -- If you need to synthesize, aggregate, and summarize, search isn't good at that, so you ask an expert (if you know one) instead.
  • (Neilsen) "Loyal customers" don't use a general search, they go to a specific site instead (example, Amazon customer goes straight to Amazon).
• (Norvig) "I don't want it to be TOO easy for everybody to publish web pages. I only want to read stuff from people who had to put SOME amount of effort into it." (Mumbling from audience members that it's already too late.)
• (Norvig) Answering a question about "abusing search": Google will decline to index your site if you return different content to the GoogleBot User Agent than you return for regular users.
• (Neilsen) Mentioned the "Anti-Mac" project, from 10+ years ago. -- He suggests we need a combination of Language and visual interface.

—Dave Lyons mailto:dlyons@lyons42.com