Slashdot Mirror
To Search Smarter, Find a Person?
Svonkie writes "Brendan Koerner reports in Wired Magazine that a growing number of ventures are using people, rather than algorithms, to filter the Internet's wealth of information. These ventures have a common goal: to enhance the Web with the kind of critical thinking that's alien to software but that comes naturally to humans. 'The vogue for human curation reflects the growing frustration Net users have with the limits of algorithms. Unhelpful detritus often clutters search results, thanks to online publishers who have learned how to game the system.'"
...for food?
I saw it on Slashdot, it must be true!
People are better at sorting stuff before them. Algorithms, written by people, have a harder time doing what we do intuitively but can sort through more stuff. Algorithms do indeed reflect the wisdom of people, so this is a false dichotomy.
Unless we are talking about Skynet.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
It's more a generation gap. While people in my generation are well versed on how to navigate Google and all it's side dark alleys for the gold nugget the boss is really looking for the older boss just wants it to work and is more prone to hit the "I'm feelin' lucky" button and trust what that tells them. That's where the tech snoops like us come in handy to find the obscure and convoluted information on the net. On more that one occasion the uppers have come to me to find something online because I can find it faster and more accurately.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Tag article "activelyavoid" and move along.
Interestingly enough, this whole thing sounds like an idea Rob Malda thought up about 10 years ago, except Brijit lacks a discussion and moderation system where experts and opinionated thinkers can vie to share their collective wisdom to enhance the content of the original article.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
Or, "1995 called, it wants its Yahoo! back."
In the absence of the mythical, impossible strong-AI, there will always be an important role for experts -- you know, thinking meat, sitting there pushing charges through neurons, having opinions about stuff -- and those experts will probably use a lot of mechanized search tools to improve the breadth of their knowledge, their awareness of knowledge, and the accessibility of information. Technology and people work together!
But you're an idiot if you take out the wetware-based BS filter.
It's coordinating all that expert opinion, and filtering out the drivel, that poses the great organizational challenge of our collective information future. Wiki-based approaches are a good first step; maybe a "trusted-wiki" like Citizendium will be the next step; it's definitely going to keep evolving. But it's long been recognized by the reasonable that if you want an informed opinion, rather than a pattern match, you ask the librarian. We've known that since Alexandria -- nay, Ur -- and it's a shame we keep forgetting.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
"Insane Google-fu" can be put on my resume under "skills".
There's a lot of interesting things you can do in research when you get people involved. The simplest is just hiring someone to find the information you need. I believe that a *lot* of companies could significantly increase the productivity of their developers, engineers, etc, if they maintained a pool of trained searchers that could be called upon for difficult queries (paid at maybe a fourth the rate of salaried employees). I know that I've had searches for work that took most of a day just to find that one formula I needed from 30 years worth of journal papers.
A somewhat more interesting thing, in my opinion, is all the "wisdom of crowds" stuff we see so much hype about. It's interesting because it works very well in certain cases - basically the case where the popular thing is the right thing. The main problem with this is that any search engine that shows you 10 results and then counts which ones you click, well, it's not getting your input on result #11, or 23, etc. So before anyone votes, items that happen to be near the top almost certainly stay at the top. Many good items that the algorithm ranked medium might never get voted on!
One way around this is to randomly select some less good results, so that viewers get a chance to vote for the underdogs and bring them to the top of the pile. But this pollutes results for each user, essentially making them pay a "moderation tax" by requiring them to see things that the algorithm has no reason to believe are better results.
All-in-all, social information finding features seem to be much better suited for finding things you didn't even *know* you wanted - StumbleUpon being a great example of a tool for doing that. I would imagine that this could be very useful even in the corporate sector, as many business strategies and engineering techniques have variants or cousins that are similar in function, but may be more obscure. Having the ability to see that "people who searched for X ended up wanting to know about Y too" might save me a lot of time...
We're back to the Yahoo! model because people have figured out how to game the system, namely Google, without adding content that's important to the searcher.
It's not hard to throw out most of the bottom-feeders. We do it. The crowd at Search Engine Watch (which, despite the name, is all about advertising, not search quality) is writing me angry messages for doing that. Now that we've demonstrated that 36% of Google AdSense advertisers are bottom-feeders, they know they're being watched. Some feel they're being targeted.
Bear in mind that most search requests are really, really dumb. That's what Google has to answer. In fact, most Google search requests don't hit the search engine at all; there's a cache of common queries and answers in all the front end machines, and a sizable fraction of requests are answered from cache.