Trust: Rhymes with Rust and Like Rust, Trust Erodes
August 6, 2011
We don’t do philosophy. But Discover Magazine has examined in “The Slow Decline of Trust over Time the idea of “trust.” The article is full of graphs that illustrate trends in trust from 1972 to 2010, as reported annually by the General Social Survey at the University of California, Berkeley.
Writer Razib Khan explains,
“I realized that the General Social Survey has 2010 results available. This means that I could check any changes in public trust and confidence from 2008 to 2010! . . . . It seems that my intuition was wrong in that American society had slouched toward more general distrust.”
Well, no, not between 2008 and 2010, but it has gradually eroded since the survey was begun in ’72. Khan broke the results down by a number of factors, and the one that interests me regards “confidence in scientific community.” It shows that, since 2000, that confidence has gone down.
I wonder, does this mean that people are also losing confidence in Web and enterprise search technologies? This might play a factor in the future of search.
What’s trust have to do with search? Three points:
First, if a search system does not process a comprehensive, cohesive colleciton of content, the researcher will not get what’s called precision and recall. What comes out are results that do not represent the on point information that matches the user’s query. Distortion can enter search results in many ways. Most users “trust” search systems. That’s probably not a great idea.
Second, if the search system lacks an editorial policy which makes an attempt to winnow disinformation from information, then the search system and its index can be distorted by certain actions. Search engine optimization experts know many ways to get a search system to display content which may not match the user’s query or the more fuzzy notion of “intent”.
Finally, as costs crush even the big boys of search, decisions may be made by humans or algoritms to introduce efficiencies. Costs may fall, but the index may deliver results which are wide of the mark with the distance of the miss undetectable to all but an expert.
In short, once search systems generated distorted information, trust is what makes this situation persist. Most users will ask, “What’s the difference?” If yoiu don’t know the answer to this question, trust those search systems. Life will be just fine.
Cynthia Murrell, August 6, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
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