Internet Search Company Execs Disagree on Future Search Technology
Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the 4-people-with-5-opinions dept.
Techie writes A panel of search engine executives at the Supernova 2006 conference in San Francisco agreed that there is still much that can be done to enhance the user's search experience, but seemed unable to agree on much else.
Re:Agree?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Ah, no.
What the parent was saying is that when I search for "clutch Ferrari explosion diagram", I don't want ads for fucking mechanic's shops. I want an explosion diagram - NOT FUCKING ADS TO SELL ME SHIT IN THE SEARCH RESULTS! On the side is Ok. I just REALLY hate it when I need information and I click on a (seemingly) related link and all I get is a sales spiel.
You fool. The problem, obviously, was that you used the term explosion. By now you are already on your way to Gitmo in regulation orange.
Re:Agree?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I would too, if I wasn't at work.
Re:Agree?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Dude, I bet you just did that because it said "breasts"
Hell, you'd probably click almost any breasts link...:-)
searching is already good, content, "maybe"
by
yagu
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Warning, jargon-speak: From the article:
The biggest challenge is how the industry and the
providers take search "beyond the box and provide you with a
'delight experience.' That is the future and where we are trying
to go," Sifry said.
I get goosebumps, but not of delight when I hear executives
talking about "delight experience". Maybe his heart is in the
right place but language like that is fingernails on my
chalkboard.
Interesting to me, I think internet search has matured nicely
and my overall experience is high on the satisfaction scale. I
rely heavily on Google and use Ask occasionally and virtually
always find links and information germaine to my keywords. I
think more important than refining searches is maturing content.
As often as not, I get to the links I expected to find from
search only to find poorly implemented sites that offer no value
to my quest. Mostly my experiences of internet-search
deficiencies occur at the endpoint (the found links), not the
transport (the search engines).
Only moments ago I had just one such episode. I recently
moved back to Illinois and am in the process of getting my legal
stuff in order, in this case vehicle registration, license
plates, and drivers license.
I easily found the Illinois web sites, but
that has done little to move me further in the task at hand. The
DOV Illinois sites are confusing, convoluted, obfuscated, and
have been little help in understanding exactly all I must do to
complete my responsibilities. Thankfully the most important
piece of information is included on their site,
the dreaded toll free phone number to call. Sigh.
(In the article Sifry did hit on something I'd like in
internet searching, though he tied it to mobile devices
The notion of "location" would be nice. I would point out that
Google does a pretty good job of wiring location into their
search simply by prefixing any search with a zip code (sorry
non-USAers)... and the resulting search will preamble the results
with some zip code specific results.)
(I still have no inclination to want or need mobile
presentation and ergonomics... while it will always be nice to
get some info on a mobile device I am always close enough and not
desparate enough to get to some land-based internet access.
Besides, when you desperately do need mobile
access to information, you're unlikely to get it! Don't even get
me started on my cross country Verizon debacle, and complete
radio-cell silence from Billings Montana to past Mitchell, SD!)
So for me, bottom line,
internet searching: already good and getting better, internet
content: not so good and seemingly slow to improve. The biggest
return on investment would seem to be better content everywhere
but that would also be a huge distributed (and nigh impossible)
effort.
Re:searching is already good, content, "maybe"
by
alfrin
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I easily found the Illinois web sites, but that has done little to move me further in the task at hand. The DOV Illinois sites are confusing, convoluted, obfuscated, and have been little help in understanding exactly all I must do to complete my responsibilities. Thankfully the most important piece of information is included on their site, the dreaded toll free phone number to call. Sigh.
I'm amazed, I didn't think it was possible to mimic the experience of a real DMV office on a website!
Re:searching is already good, content, "maybe"
by
sapgau
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I agree 100%. What seems to happen is for web owners and designers is to be a little more aware (i.e. less arrogant) of their user's needs and follow common accepted practices. Some of these recommendations have been around since the beginning of the internet.
Re:searching is already good, content, "maybe"
by
pete6677
·
· Score: 1
To make it truly authentic, you'd have to make the page take an hour to load, with a counter on the screen telling the user which place they are in line to see the page.
Re:searching is already good, content, "maybe"
by
Irish_Samurai
·
· Score: 1
I agree, to a point.
With the web maturing like a 15 year old girl on hormone therapy, the concept of content and purpose need to be re-examined constantly. While I am annoyed at the inability of a large chunk of web designers to grasp the concept of navigation, I am equally annoyed at web "experts" who try to dictate the purpose of the web.
If the web is to remain a free environment, people should be free to put whatever crap they want up there. If a search engine can't index it properly, too bad for the content creators. If I want to create informative content, I should try my best to conform to usability conventions (there is nothing standard about it). If I want to create new style art house media, then I really don't care about usability conventions.
I think that sometimes these usability reports have an equally arrogant stance on trying to create a "standard" way to present information. Personally I think thats a load of crap. I will decide what standard I need to use based on the purpose of the site. Not being an idiot, I won't commit web suicide by making my e-commerce website hard to navigate, hard to read, and difficult to index.
But sometimes I want to create art in the new medium, and I don't need some blowhard telling me my navigation scheme is ruining the internet.
Re:searching is already good, content, "maybe"
by
sapgau
·
· Score: 1
Point taken, and I don't see anything wrong with creating/expressing art in your web design. Actually I think that those that do, have a better understanding of how web pages work.
I like to reference Alertbox not to piss the artistic liberal types but to have something to show the managers and team leaders of your typical corporate web projects. Because the tips are all too obvious (maybe arrogant) and mostly common sense it is very hard to argue against them and prevents anybody from reinventing the wheel and leaving a maintenance nightmare behind.
I wish they could some day be formalized somehow as a basic web portal/web commerce convention and allow us to move on. I guess we will have to wait until that 15 year old girl finishes highschool first and goes through her first break up!:-D
Re:searching is already good, content, "maybe"
by
Irish_Samurai
·
· Score: 1
Man, I can't tell you haw many clients I have shown Alertbox to. I then show them the Marketing Sherpa internet usage reports and they drop their jaws. "People really do that?" is a common response.
I didn't want my post to come off as criticising yours, just to add another dimention to it. I really wish some "designers" would read this stuff. Surmising how the rest of the world uses the web off of your personal web surfing habits is a bad move. I have to constantly fight PHB's on this issue also.
I just feel some people take it too far because of the "original" intent of the web. Yes it is for information, but look at all the ways the web allows you to present it. It's awe inspiring and fun as hell to play in. I feel like a television producer when television was first becoming popular. The fact that the content changes format so fast is a statement to the ideal that it can't be standardized.
Yet, I also understand best practices. Trying to play artist on an e-commerce site is suicide. Bitching that the search engines don't index your stuff properly when you use experimental layouts and multiple language layers to present your stuff is also ridiculous. Trying to coax website developers into using a single methodology is also ridiculous, as they might not find one that works better.
All in all, you have to recognize the sites function, the content, its target, and it's method of proliferation before you open your dev environment.
1) Lots of execs from the online search engine industry met
2) They agree that noone is doing it well and there's lots of room for improvement
3) ???
4) Profit!
Well, if there's one thing I'd wish for...
by
TheNoxx
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It'd be an option to search for only legitimate websites that are on topic with my search and filter out bullshit entries trying to make a quick buck from ads with no real content; perhaps something that uses a wiki or other list, if only a bit more controlled and less freely-edited, combined with clicks out and recommendations. Similarly, an option to filter out forum posts and the like wouldn't be amiss either.
-- Ex nihilo nihil fit.
Re:Well, if there's one thing I'd wish for...
by
Geekbot
·
· Score: 1
There are lots of places out there that have 'inventoried' lists. I don't know the preferred term for them. But, searchable sites where someone has gone through and collected relevant sites for different topics. The cost versus traditional search engines is that you get fewer results, and might very easily be missing the best and newest site. The benefit is that you are getting fewer results and not getting the worst and newest site.
Re:Well, if there's one thing I'd wish for...
by
TheOldSchooler
·
· Score: 1
I couldn't agree more. It is practically impossible to search for general information, or a review, about a product and not get a mountain of links to comparison shopping sites that are selling the product you're looking for. It doesn't seem to matter what you're looking for, you will also end up with nothing but links to buy the product, especially with electronics.
Re:Well, if there's one thing I'd wish for...
by
doti
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Well, if there's one thing I'd wish for... It'd be an operator to test for the age of the document I'm searching. If I already searched for something a month ago, and to search again to check for something new, I could search for "something age:-30d".
But I don't know if would make much sense, as file date info are generally not very reliable (ex, cp --preserve-timestamps is not the default).
-- factor 966971: 966971
Re:Well, if there's one thing I'd wish for...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I have a search engine: Search for sites that do -not- have adwords, or images. If the site has >2 ad spaces (adwords, image ads) then simply don't index it to begin with. If page has pop-up, don't index it. If page has slide-over ads, don't index'em. If page has flash, don't index it.
There are many simple rules you can apply that will simply eliminate 90% of the trash that comes up when you search for something---yes, it will have false positives, but that's the trade-off.
The problem with the web is that sites are financially motivated to annoy their users---and search engines are financially motivated to help those sites annoy users with their ads.
Re:Well, if there's one thing I'd wish for...
by
thePowerOfGrayskull
·
· Score: 1
Allowing users to rate individual search results for accuracy and relevancy would be good. Search algorithms could 'learn' from that, or at the very least they could be displayed alongside similar search results. On the other hand, I suppose the spammers would just rate their own ad pages high...
Re:Well, if there's one thing I'd wish for...
by
Baricom
·
· Score: 1
Both Yahoo! and Google support that - just not as an operator. Click "Advanced Search."
Lazy Customers
by
neonprimetime
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Technorati's Sifry said people want devices to be more aware of factors such as location, so if they were in San Francisco searching for, say, a store, they would not have to specify their location.
But what loop holes will I have to jump thru if I'm in SF and want to search for a store in LA? How frickin' hard is it to type in... "San Fransisco Store"... as opposed to just "Store"?
But what loop holes will I have to jump thru if I'm in SF and want to search for a store in LA? How frickin' hard is it to type in... "San Fransisco Store"... as opposed to just "Store"?
Probably not a lot more difficult than typing in "Los Angeles Store".
-- Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
I don't know, how frickin' hard would it be to type Los Angeles Store as opposed to letting the default search of "Store" go to the area you are actually geolocated in?
>But what loop holes will I have to jump thru if I'm in SF and want to search for a store in LA? How frickin' hard is it to type in... "San Fransisco Store"... as opposed to just "Store"?
How frickin' hard is it to type in... "Los Angeles Store"?:P
Re:Lazy Customers
by
neonprimetime
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Wouldn't the premise be then that if you type "Los Angeles Store"... it would search the San Fransisco stores for something named "Los Angeles Store?"... which brings up the question, how does it know if "Los Angeles" if the name of the city you're searching in, or the name of the product / store you're searching for?
Example: While in SF... use this technology to search for "Texas Roadhouse Steaks"... will it search for "Roadhouse Steaks" in Texas?... or "Texas Roadhouse Steaks" in SF?
"While in SF... use this technology to search for "Texas Roadhouse Steaks"... will it search for "Roadhouse Steaks" in Texas?... or "Texas Roadhouse Steaks" in SF? "
While my first comment was just a joke (didn't get it?;-), I'll make a serious response to this new comment:
If you asked a person something like "Where can I find Texas Roadhouse Steaks", what would you assume he was wasking for? The guy probably wants to find "Texas Roadhouse Steaks", preferably the nearest one.
If you asked a person something like "Where can I find Roadhouse Steaks in Texas", what would you assume he was wasking for? The guy probably wants to find "Roadhouse Steaks" in Texas.
Maybe the solution is to make search engines understand word syntax the way people do?
And if search engines could return results based on syntactical guesses, maybe it could also provide some "Did you mean...?" links within the search results, much like how Google presents links for you by guessing where you've made spelling mistakes? I'd search for "Texas Roadhouse Steaks", and it gives me results for "Texas Roadhouse Steaks" closest to where I live, but then it also gives me a link saying "Did you mean 'Roadhouse Steaks in Texas'?"
Of course, something like that would take quite a bit of knowledge and processing power.
Wouldn't it be funny if AI came about accidentally by companies just trying to make search engines work better?
-- Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
The point is if the keyword "Store" automatically adds 'local context', like "San Francisco" to your search, what hoops do you have to jump through to ensure that adding your own local context of "Los Angeles" is going to *eliminate* the "San Franciso".
The last thing I want is to search for "Los Angelos Store" and get over half my results pointing at San Fransicso ANYWAYS. I get enough of that CRAP already searching for restaurants and other physical named locations.
What if you want a store and you don't know what city its in. If I search for "The Cheese Emporium Store" and the nearest one is a 6000 miles away that's the result I want. I don't want local cheese and other emporiums in San Fransico cluttering up my results.
Rather than have them guess what I want, what I'd REALLY like to see is semantic search based on what I actually ask for:
if I search for "read new_product_X reviews", guess what Google et al, I want to READ reviews on new_product_X; I do not wish to "Be the first to write a review for product_X"; nor do I wish to read the SAME review that has been scraped onto 200 useless websites.
Or if I'm looking to buy something and want a site that will ship to Canada; the 200 sites that say "We do not ship to Canada or Internationally" is not a match.
Additionally, I can generally do without arriving on orphan pages where all the links off of it go to custom 404 pages.
And I can certainly do without arriving on parked domain pages, and link farms.
For me these are where search engines fail.
Re:Lazy Customers
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
But why do those searches have to be implicit to your location. I hate it when software tries to tell me what is best for me. Why not give the user the option to make searches meaningful to your location when he/she checks a very clearly and visible checkbox. Show an obvious message or coloured frame indicating that those results are to be used for a particular geographic context.
Don't assume what the user wants... it never works.
If I want to search for something called "Los Angeles Store", I enter it with quotation marks.
As for product/city names -- I guess "they" have to have a list of cities and popular products and "we", as product makers, have to call our products distinctively, so that the product name won't be confused with anything else.
Wouldn't it be funny if AI came about accidentally by companies just trying to make search engines work better?
Funny? Not particularly. Realistic? Absolutely. Likely? I think so.
Not to wander too far off track, I often think that some of the Cyberpunk crowd has it right: the most probable way for us to develop true AI is for it to spontaneously emerge from/as the internet. In my particularly paranoid/flight-of-fancy moments, I wonder if it hasn't already happened. After all, there's no particular reason to think that a "brain" made up of millions of PC "neurons" would be at all interested in (or even aware of) the soft & damp bits attached to the ends of the neurons. From its point of view, for one thing, we would be operating in geological time. Odds are good that we wouldn't be recognized as anything other than "features of the landscape," as it were.
(Most of the time, to be sure, I'm much more rational/grounded/empirical of mind)
--
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
It gives you a mixture. I'm in Santa Clara right now and I just Googled "Rancho San Antonio" (without quotation marks), which is the name of an open-space preserve in nearby Los Altos (I did this before reading this article, because I wanted to find a map of the trails there). At the top of the page are results for "rancho" in or near San Antonio, TX. But the actual search results give websites about the preserve, and I found what I was looking for.
From the looks of the search results, one looking for a rancho in San Antonio may not have been as lucky as I, but there was probably a link near the top to give the localized results that they wanted.
The Dog That Didn't Bark.
by
Tackhead
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Here we are, the conference agenda, and the talk...
4:30pm Panel: From Search to Eternity
[Moderator: Chris Shipley (Guidewire Group), Kapenda Thomas (Jookster), David Sifry (Technorati), Jim Lanzone (Ask.com), Leila Boujnane (Idee)]
Search engines are the dominant interface for the Web today, and a huge force in driving economic activity online. What's next for search? It seems unlikely that we have reached the end-point of significant technical or business evolution in this incredibly active area.
I can think of... one company that's 10^100 (a googol) times more likely to have something meaningful to say when it comes to "what's next for search", but which wasn't represented on this panel.
Not that I'm naming names or anything. But who's missing from this panel?
Re:The Dog That Didn't Bark.
by
aleksiel
·
· Score: 3, Funny
hmmm....lycos?
Re:The Dog That Didn't Bark.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
No, silly. MSN.
Re:The Dog That Didn't Bark.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Or How About Our Buddy Jeeves??
Re:The Dog That Didn't Bark.
by
sapgau
·
· Score: 1
The only advances in search that are important to me are advances that make it easier and faster to find what I'm looking for. I don't use search engines for the "experience" but rather to locate the sites that I do visit for the experience. The only relevant change that might improve search mentioned was trying to find better ways to understand user intent. Luckily, anyone web-savvy knows enough little tricks and tidbits to get their intent across to a search box in any normal situation (small but useful things like - and + operators or site: searches).
-- do you know squarepusher?
The future is spam
by
MikeRT
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Unless these companies get the ability to sue the "SEO companies" and others that spam them, they will just get cluttered to the point that nothing short of SkyNet will be able to be useful.
Obligatory Red vs. Blue quote
by
Mayhem178
·
· Score: 1
Company Execs: "Hello, hello, can you hear me? Hello? Hey, dudes, thanks for the information, very helpful. After analyzing the data you provided, we have calculated a fool-proof plan for winning the war. Here are your orders: eliminate the enemy. Good luck. Also, try to do better and please win. See ya."
--
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
Technorati? Ask.com? Idee? Jookster? That is not much representation for an expert panel. No offense, but I prefer to know what is stirring around in Larry's and Sergey's little noggins. At least throw in a lackey from one of the top three engines.
the only thing they'll ever agree on is that thye need more ads per page, i'm guessing sooner or later the results fonts will start shrinking, or there will be a ratio of 1 valid result to 1 ad per page, and the ad will be bold and follow your cursor.
I think internet search is not so bad right now, for humans. One thing which could really use some improvement is making it easier for computers to search, i.e., the semantic web. As the wiki states, "Humans are capable of using the Web, say, to find the Swedish word for "car," to reserve a library book, or to search for the cheapest DVD and buy it. But if you asked a computer to do the same thing, it wouldn't know where to start." That sounds like a good plan to me. I often do lots of comparison shopping online, trying to find the best deal once I know which particular product I want. If an algorithm could do the same thing, all the better. Somehow those price comparison websites are just not adequate. That's only one application of course. Another is local searching while on the run (i.e. from a mobile). Again, there are searches that can do that, eventually, but there is room for improvement there. It seems like these are the sort of concrete problems the panel should have analysed, and came up with criteria for solutions.
Just off the top of my head....
by
aleksiel
·
· Score: 1
i'm just throwing this out there without doing any legwork on the subject, but my immediate thought would be to hire a large team of people to sort of moderate the search results for, as an example, google. they can look through the results for the larger searches, see which ones are just spammy or bombed results and which one are useful, and moderate the more useful ones up. i'm sure that there's already some sort of popularity algorithm in there somewhere, but most average people just won't wade through 30 pages of crap to find gold. they want their good results up front.
Re:Just off the top of my head....
by
saddino
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The free search agent CQ web uses this exact strategy, but programatically rather than via human modding. For example, if you search for "tom cruise" in Google via CQ web, it will ingest the content of the first 100 results and then use all that data to determine a baseline of statistically significant keywords and phrases (e.g. "mission impossible", "katie holmes", "chuch of scientology"). Then, CQ web re-evaluates the relevance of each result based on its "closeness" to the baseline. This generally moves spam pages out of the way and pushes up content rich sites. Plus, a quick glance of key words and phrases allows you to get "good results up front" by allowing you to decide what subcategory to dig into for more information.
Re:Just off the top of my head....
by
aleksiel
·
· Score: 1
that does sound good, but it is a bit different, as it is an agent you have to download and install. also, couldn't a quick-thinking spam-ish site just include other significant keywords in their page to boost their ranking on cq web?
it does make me wonder if google implements something similar to this. the intrinsic problem is that the less-savvy masses will visit the spammy sites looking for the information and the algorithm will register them as popular because everyone visists them, thus boosting the spammy sites more than the informative ones. imho, the best way is human interaction.
Independent Engines
by
Doc+Ruby
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Disagreement among competitors is good: that's competition. Worry when they all agree: that's a cartel.
Three prisoners were sitting in a U.S. jail, found guilty of "economic crimes" and were also comparing stories. The first one said, "I charged higher prices than my competitors, and I was found guilty of profiteering, monopolizing and exploiting consumers." The second one said, "I charged lower prices than my competitors, and I was found guilty of predatory pricing, cutthroat competing and under-charging." The third prisoner said, "I charged the same prices as my competitors, and I was found guilty of collusion, price leadership and cartelization."
Which reminds me that companies with actual competitors aren't found guilty of monopoly abuse, cartels, price fixing, or collusion. That hardly anyone is found guilty of those crimes even when they are guilty. That US jails are singularly empty of such people, while the markets are lousy with them.
That joke isn't "funny because it's true". It's funny because monopolists have a lousy sense of humor, and a great sense of excuses.
I'm reminded of the cartoon showing a robot working an assembly line, with its human boss looking on thinking "hmm, maybe if I paid it, I could sell it some more stuff".
Not much chance of seeing regexp searches, when they're all busy reenacting the search/portal mistakes of the past, and trying to push the boundaries of how much spam they can stuff into your results before their product becomes completely useless. Which is a shame, I just spent quite a while trying to do a particular search using lots of inclusions and exclusions, and hitting the maximum terms limit, when it would have been a trivial search if I could have used a regexp to match the urls I wanted.
Ah yes. Exactly what I was about to post. Smart searches that guess what I mean are nice when I'm looking for something but don't know quite what it is yet, but sometimes I do know exactly what I want. When I can quote some text from the site verbatim, or I'm looking for something that's difficult to express clearly, like info on something in the C language, regexps are exactly the thing I need.
I wonder how much use the feature would get though. Most of Google's (and other engine's) users probably wouldn't use it, thus lightening the load. Of course, I don't know if they even store that kind of full-text data.
Regardless, I'm just wishing. I don't expect it to happen.
Re:Regular expressions
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Bingo. Regular expressions, while powerful, are not efficient, and the cost of running a regular expression against millions of URLs (or, even worse, web pages) is an unacceptable performance hit. There is a reason search is hard, and a big part of it is scale.
You're sadly right. There are few ways to show what context you want for your keywords as opposed to the keywords theirselves. Yes, things like 'site:' do help, but are quite limited. What I'd like to see is a multiline textbox for my query. The first line would be keywords as usual. The next lines would be context of various kinds: sites/domains, date ranges, parts of the document (headings, navigation, main text, bibliography, etc), kind of the document (blog/forums post, wiki page, short blurb, online book, etc)...
Of course, it woul take the search engine know a lot about basic features of texts, web sites' structure, and a thing or two about the real world. But that would do for some "new experience", imho.
--
Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes
This is similar to my vision too
by
microbee
·
· Score: 1
I have always thought there was still much that could be done to enhance the user's desktop experience, but was unable to come up with much else.
Guess I am now qualified for a position in such a panel.
1. You have a quote from the article so clearly you RTFA, but your reply has a misspelled word that was in TFA portion which you quote so clearly you did not RTFA.
2. Others reply to your quote which has the correct spelling of SF yet in their reply they misspell the same way so clearly they did not RTFA, but they did read your reply, but they did not read your quote.
All in all San FranCISCO should be renamed San FranSISCO to prevent/. users from making presumptions as to if anyone really RTFA!
Re:The future is spam - How to stop SEO spam....
by
iamcf13
·
· Score: 1
Track the submitting IP addresses, the URLs they submit, the domains they submit for, and the time interval involved. Possible signs of SEO spam would include....
Lots of submits in a short amount of time from one IP address. Throttling/blocking can be used to thwart this.
Lots of URL submits in a short amount of time directed at one domain from 2 or more different IP addresses. Blocking submits an be used to thwart this.
Doesn't seem to be that hard to do....
If the SEO firms are absolutely stupid, they would submit from the same IP address their website is hosted from making IP blocking a snap!:)
Slashdot Mirror
This just in. A panel met, and failed to come up with anything! More on that after sports.
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
Can we agree to have search results show less garbage?
:)
Yah yah, one man's garbage is another's treasure...
Warning, jargon-speak: From the article:
I get goosebumps, but not of delight when I hear executives talking about "delight experience". Maybe his heart is in the right place but language like that is fingernails on my chalkboard.Interesting to me, I think internet search has matured nicely and my overall experience is high on the satisfaction scale. I rely heavily on Google and use Ask occasionally and virtually always find links and information germaine to my keywords. I think more important than refining searches is maturing content.
As often as not, I get to the links I expected to find from search only to find poorly implemented sites that offer no value to my quest. Mostly my experiences of internet-search deficiencies occur at the endpoint (the found links), not the transport (the search engines).
Only moments ago I had just one such episode. I recently moved back to Illinois and am in the process of getting my legal stuff in order, in this case vehicle registration, license plates, and drivers license.
I easily found the Illinois web sites, but that has done little to move me further in the task at hand. The DOV Illinois sites are confusing, convoluted, obfuscated, and have been little help in understanding exactly all I must do to complete my responsibilities. Thankfully the most important piece of information is included on their site, the dreaded toll free phone number to call. Sigh.
(In the article Sifry did hit on something I'd like in internet searching, though he tied it to mobile devices The notion of "location" would be nice. I would point out that Google does a pretty good job of wiring location into their search simply by prefixing any search with a zip code (sorry non-USAers)... and the resulting search will preamble the results with some zip code specific results.) (I still have no inclination to want or need mobile presentation and ergonomics... while it will always be nice to get some info on a mobile device I am always close enough and not desparate enough to get to some land-based internet access. Besides, when you desperately do need mobile access to information, you're unlikely to get it! Don't even get me started on my cross country Verizon debacle, and complete radio-cell silence from Billings Montana to past Mitchell, SD!)
So for me, bottom line, internet searching: already good and getting better, internet content: not so good and seemingly slow to improve. The biggest return on investment would seem to be better content everywhere but that would also be a huge distributed (and nigh impossible) effort.
1) Lots of execs from the online search engine industry met
2) They agree that noone is doing it well and there's lots of room for improvement
3) ???
4) Profit!
It'd be an option to search for only legitimate websites that are on topic with my search and filter out bullshit entries trying to make a quick buck from ads with no real content; perhaps something that uses a wiki or other list, if only a bit more controlled and less freely-edited, combined with clicks out and recommendations. Similarly, an option to filter out forum posts and the like wouldn't be amiss either.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
Technorati's Sifry said people want devices to be more aware of factors such as location, so if they were in San Francisco searching for, say, a store, they would not have to specify their location.
... "San Fransisco Store" ... as opposed to just "Store"?
But what loop holes will I have to jump thru if I'm in SF and want to search for a store in LA? How frickin' hard is it to type in
I can think of... one company that's 10^100 (a googol) times more likely to have something meaningful to say when it comes to "what's next for search", but which wasn't represented on this panel.
Not that I'm naming names or anything. But who's missing from this panel?
The only advances in search that are important to me are advances that make it easier and faster to find what I'm looking for. I don't use search engines for the "experience" but rather to locate the sites that I do visit for the experience. The only relevant change that might improve search mentioned was trying to find better ways to understand user intent. Luckily, anyone web-savvy knows enough little tricks and tidbits to get their intent across to a search box in any normal situation (small but useful things like - and + operators or site: searches).
do you know squarepusher?
Unless these companies get the ability to sue the "SEO companies" and others that spam them, they will just get cluttered to the point that nothing short of SkyNet will be able to be useful.
Company Execs: "Hello, hello, can you hear me? Hello? Hey, dudes, thanks for the information, very helpful. After analyzing the data you provided, we have calculated a fool-proof plan for winning the war. Here are your orders: eliminate the enemy. Good luck. Also, try to do better and please win. See ya."
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
"A panel of search engine executives"
Technorati? Ask.com? Idee? Jookster? That is not much representation for an expert panel. No offense, but I prefer to know what is stirring around in Larry's and Sergey's little noggins. At least throw in a lackey from one of the top three engines.
the only thing they'll ever agree on is that thye need more ads per page, i'm guessing sooner or later the results fonts will start shrinking, or there will be a ratio of 1 valid result to 1 ad per page, and the ad will be bold and follow your cursor.
sigs suck
I think internet search is not so bad right now, for humans. One thing which could really use some improvement is making it easier for computers to search, i.e., the semantic web. As the wiki states, "Humans are capable of using the Web, say, to find the Swedish word for "car," to reserve a library book, or to search for the cheapest DVD and buy it. But if you asked a computer to do the same thing, it wouldn't know where to start." That sounds like a good plan to me. I often do lots of comparison shopping online, trying to find the best deal once I know which particular product I want. If an algorithm could do the same thing, all the better. Somehow those price comparison websites are just not adequate. That's only one application of course. Another is local searching while on the run (i.e. from a mobile). Again, there are searches that can do that, eventually, but there is room for improvement there. It seems like these are the sort of concrete problems the panel should have analysed, and came up with criteria for solutions.
i'm just throwing this out there without doing any legwork on the subject, but my immediate thought would be to hire a large team of people to sort of moderate the search results for, as an example, google. they can look through the results for the larger searches, see which ones are just spammy or bombed results and which one are useful, and moderate the more useful ones up. i'm sure that there's already some sort of popularity algorithm in there somewhere, but most average people just won't wade through 30 pages of crap to find gold. they want their good results up front.
Disagreement among competitors is good: that's competition.
Worry when they all agree: that's a cartel.
--
make install -not war
Not much chance of seeing regexp searches, when they're all busy reenacting the search/portal mistakes of the past, and trying to push the boundaries of how much spam they can stuff into your results before their product becomes completely useless. Which is a shame, I just spent quite a while trying to do a particular search using lots of inclusions and exclusions, and hitting the maximum terms limit, when it would have been a trivial search if I could have used a regexp to match the urls I wanted.
Oh no... it's the future.
Google this: search engine + problems + solutions
My sig sags.
What couldn't they agree on? I used to use that all the time to search for... oh, Supernova. hmmm. yeah.
You're sadly right. There are few ways to show what context you want for your keywords as opposed to the keywords theirselves.
Yes, things like 'site:' do help, but are quite limited.
What I'd like to see is a multiline textbox for my query. The first line would be keywords as usual.
The next lines would be context of various kinds: sites/domains, date ranges, parts of the document (headings, navigation, main text, bibliography, etc), kind of the document (blog/forums post, wiki page, short blurb, online book, etc)...
Of course, it woul take the search engine know a lot about basic features of texts, web sites' structure, and a thing or two about the real world.
But that would do for some "new experience", imho.
Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes
I have always thought there was still much that could be done to enhance the user's desktop experience, but was unable to come up with much else.
Guess I am now qualified for a position in such a panel.
Whenever I run out of ideas, I fire up Google and do a few searches to brainstorm. Maybe this would work for these guys?
1. You have a quote from the article so clearly you RTFA, but your reply has a misspelled word that was in TFA portion which you quote so clearly you did not RTFA.
2. Others reply to your quote which has the correct spelling of SF yet in their reply they misspell the same way so clearly they did not RTFA, but they did read your reply, but they did not read your quote.
All in all San FranCISCO should be renamed San FranSISCO to prevent
what? The next big breakthrough in search technology is not going to come from a committee?
Currently hooked on AMP
Track the submitting IP addresses, the URLs they submit, the domains they submit for, and the time interval involved. Possible signs of SEO spam would include....
:)
Lots of submits in a short amount of time from one IP address. Throttling/blocking can be used to thwart this.
Lots of URL submits in a short amount of time directed at one domain from 2 or more different IP addresses. Blocking submits an be used to thwart this.
Doesn't seem to be that hard to do....
If the SEO firms are absolutely stupid, they would submit from the same IP address their website is hosted from making IP blocking a snap!
Hahahaha, ah yeah. Looks like we have some upset editors here.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.