Search and Why No One Knows How to Find Stuff
July 15, 2011
I received a call early this morning from an addled prospect in a distant time zone. After the call, I grabbed by trusty iPad and took at look at the news scooped up by my Pulse and Flipbook apps. Why search when I can let an anonymous system “tell” me what I need to know. One of the “must know” things snagged my eye with this fetching headline: “My Top 10 Insights from 10 Years in Search”. After dismissing an annoying ad about something called “search marketing”, my expectations were at snail level. I was not disappointed.
Search, I learned, was not about findability, information retrieval, semantics, or text mining. I learned that search is about:
- Pumping content without regard for quality to the top of a brute force search result
- Not resting on one’s laurels when a content trick actually works and fools the Facebook-obsessed Google from delivering high precision and recall
- Being “great” at Excel.
There were seven other “learnings” which shined a very weak light on the topic of search as I understand the concept.
Search has been usurped—maybe the proper word is devalued—by search engine marketing. The idea is simple. Traffic means revenues. The world in which this addled goose paddles uses a different denotation and connotation. Search is about answering questions. Search NOT about polluting a relevance method, getting clicks, and making money. I make money because I find information, absorb it, and frame my own ideas, products, and services. Information is one type of high value input. Fiddle with the input and the output is probably flawed or misleading.
Search is difficult, and it is getting problematic. Those with access to log files know that the majority of users’ actions can be converted to quite tidy items of data. These items can be used to deliver exactly what the majority of people want a search system to be: An input system for that which is consciously or unconsciously needed by an individual user.
In my odd little goose pond, I run a query on a phrase like “confluent opportunity space.” I want to know who said it, where, when, and why. Answering that question is something that few search systems can do. My hunch is that an individual operating with the foundation upon which the “10 insights” are erected may use approaches that may not work for my context. Heck, maybe the approach won’t work at all.
What’s this say about “search”?
First, I don’t think most people know what search is. The failure to define the overused and much abused term is leading to confusion. I think people use the term and talk about systems and methods that are more fractured than than rocks in the Allegheny orogeny.
Second, heaven help the vendor of text mining if the word search slips into a conversation with an online marketer. The dust up in “When Worlds Collide” will look like two puppies pushing into a bowl of kibble.
Third, I am convinced that people are not interested in understand search. The entire sector is confused and increasingly indifferent to useful communication about information retrieval.
We are on the path to a super saturated world of advertising. Calling this search is downright amazing. I am delighted to be 66, indifferent to such linguistic jumping jacks, and an addled goose paddling in a rural backwater.
The consequences of this devaluation and distortion of a once useful word may have more to do with today’s crises in decision making, innovating, and revenue generating than meets the eye.
Stephen E Arnold, July 15, 2011
Freebie by golly!
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