Comment by stevenbedrick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevenbedrick | Hacker News Reader

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> Keyword search isn't good enough anymore

Citation needed.

I'd actually be quite satisfied if the current state of the art for general-purpose web IR stayed about where it is now- it's pretty dang good! I can't remember the last time I needed to find something using text search and was unable to. And when Google folks talk about making search "better", what they seem to generally be talking about these days is making it more "personalized", which strikes me as a questionable goal in terms of costs and benefits. Cost: living in an electronic panopticon the likes of which Orwell could never have envisioned, having my private information used as a raw material for somebody else's monetization strategy, etc. etc. Benefit: marginally better IR?

Note that I'm not writing this as some sort of technophobic Luddite- I'm actually an academic researcher who works on IR problems. I guess it's just that I, as a potential end user, don't see enough value in hyper-personalized search to be worth the inevitable tradeoffs in terms of privacy and information centralization.

Plus, I'm absolutely not anti-Google, or full of conspiracy theories, or anything like that- but I still find it more than a little creepy to think about just how much information they have about me. Just sayin', is all.

Sometimes it's the technologists who are the most resistant to technological change. I sometimes get annoyed when Google displays results other than the 10 blue links, and tries to correct my searches when I'm searching for info on APIs, but I recognize that I'm in a minority and most people would benefit from more hand-holding.

Put another way, you may be comfortable enough with computers to remember what directory your files are in, and handling backups manually, and all that. But my mother, despite decades of my attempts to the contrary, is not and never will be. And far more people are like her than me (and, I suspect, you). I think this is what Larry Page is in part talking about when he invokes the idea of the 1-percent-of-what-we-could-be-doing.

Take a look at my colleague Sharon Vaknin's test of Google Now vs. Siri. They're both remarkably capable by the standards of even three years ago, but unlike Siri, Google understands context. "How tall is President Obama?" <answer> "By what margin was he reelected?" <answer> http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57584898-285/google-now-...

I'm echoing what ender7 wrote above, I think, but you can't have a useful conversation with 10 blue links.

>>Sometimes it's the technologists who are the most resistant to technological change.

Because it's the technologists that truly understand the pros and cons of a proposed technological development. Everyone else tends to be starry-eyed daydreamers who are living in an alternate reality.

Good point, and there are a lot of factors that go into it. r00fus made a similar point in a sibling reply, and I absolutely agree that users like us are quite different than 99.99999% of Google's other users- it definitely sounds like we have similar family members. And as I replied below, experts and novices have very different needs in terms of their information behavior.

I still don't think that lets Google off the hook, though; it just makes it more important that their personalization strategy be backed by very flexible, granular, and technically meaningful privacy controls. It means that Google should be setting an even higher bar in terms of educating their users about precisely what data gets collected and exactly how it gets used- and they should empower their users to control how that personal data impacts their experience using Google's products.

The number of their users who actually care about this stuff right now is basically a rounding error when compared to their total user numbers, but that doesn't mean it isn't important. And hopefully, as more and more of our life is conducted online, the number of people who care about this will increase.

I agree on "personalized" search. It can be handy (I search "Backbone" and get BackboneJS), but I worry that highly personalized search and content can lead to a feedback loop in which your pre-existing perceptions and biases are perpetually reaffirmed.

Imagine someone who takes Fox News and InfoWars seriously only being presented information from those sources. They could never escape!

Or take someone interested in mindless topics like celebrity gossip and whichever Kardashian has recently lost weight. A customized information feed will only enable them to fritter their life away in the pursuit of mindless, inane entertainment. They might come to think that these things actually constitute attention-worthy news!

Granted, these scenarios apply a bit more to customized news feeds like Yahoo homepages or Google News, but to some degree it applies to search as well. Sometimes I worry that I am already trapped in a closed information loop. Maybe the U.S. is an oppressive dictatorship and North Korea stands for freedom and innovation! I may never know.

I find that when companies say "better" usually they mean "more profitable for us".

Sometimes it involves end-consumer benefits, but often not. Google used to be one of the companies where this rule didn't apply as much. In their shift to becoming Microsoft2, this rule seems to apply more and more.

This isn't a critique of Google insomuch as it's a critique of any sufficiently powerful corporation.

Yes, I've noticed that corporate PR statements that begin with "To serve you better..." rarely end particularly pleasantly for me as a customer.

It makes more sense, of course, if we interpret such statements through the lens of the Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man." :-D

As a programmer, you're probably a lot better at understanding what a search is/does and how to pick good keywords or which keywords you can swap and refine to get better results. Most of the general population isn't there in my opinion (just based on what I've seen around other people trying to search thing). The general population doesn't use site: to restrict results, - to remove a word or even " to search for an exact phrase.

I think those are the people who could benefit more from a more context-knowledgeable search, and I think that's still a huge majority of people.

That's definitely a fair point- "experts" have very different search behavior from "novices", and could potentially get more benefit from personalized search support.

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