Search Keeps on Changing. Advancing? Not So Much
December 29, 2010
One can compare the art of conversation to driving a car. It’s good to be in control of your actions, so that you can steer the conversation down a correct path without crashing and raising your insurance deductable. Search Facets discusses the issue of conversation in relation to web searches in “Advancing the Conversation, not ‘Advanced Search.’” It compares web searches as conversations with users and how searches cannot just “talk at” users, but interact act with them on an intelligent level.
“Moreover, a conversational perspective also brings social and collaborative aspects of the discovery experience into full view. To state the obvious, people don’t just need to “converse” with dynamic information, they almost always need to converse and collaborate with other people. If I’m a marketing manager trying to analyze campaign effectiveness, I need to share insights and follow-on questions with the product sales team. Dialogue is central to the discovery experience.”
Vendors don’t always follow this ideology, though. They create “advanced features” that don’t help users understand information or how to apply it to formulate an answer. The entire web search conversation is then essentially dominated by tools that don’t have very good interaction skills and they crash their vehicle AKA web browser. Sounds like some vendors deploy solutions that have broken wheels, mirrors, and windshield wipers.
Stephen E Arnold, December 29, 2010
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