Navigation Misses the Point of Search and Retrieval
March 18, 2013
How does one become a sheeple? One answer is, “Accept search outputs without critical thinking.”
I don’t want to get into a squabble with the thinkers at Nielsen Norman Group. I suggest you read “Converting Search into Navigation” and then reflect on the fact that this was the basic premise of Endeca and then almost every other search vendor on the planet since the late 1990s. The idea is that users prefer to click than type queries or, better yet, have the system just tell the user what he or she wants without having to do so much as make a click.
Humans want information and most humans don’t want to expend much, if any, effort getting “answers.” In the late 1970s, I worked on a Booz, Allen & Hamilton study which revealed that managers in that pre-Internet Dark Age got information by asking the first person encountered in the hall, a person whom an executive could get on the phone, or by flipping through the old school trade magazines which once flowed into in boxes.
A happy quack to http://red-pill.org/are-you-one-of-the-sheeple-take-the-quiz/
What’s different today? According to the write up, as I understand it, not too much. The article asserts:
Users are incredibly bad at finding and researching things on the web. A few years ago, I characterized users’ research skills as “incompetent,” and they’ve only gotten worse over time. “Pathetic” and “useless” are words that come to mind after this year’s user testing.
There you go. When top quality minds like those Booz, Allen & Hamilton tried to hire took the path of least resistance almost 50 years ago, is it a big surprise that people are clueless when it comes to finding information?
The point of the article is that people who make interfaces have to design for mediocre searchers. Mediocre? How about terrible, clueless, inept, or naive? The article says:
… you should redirect users from a normal SERP to a category page only when their query is unambiguous and exactly matches the category. A search for “3D TV” could go to the subcategory page for these products, but a search for “3D” should generate a regular SERP. (Costco does this correctly, including both 3D televisions and other products relevant to the query.) Until people begin to grasp the complexities of search and develop skills accordingly, businesses that take such extra steps to help users find what they need will improve customer success — and the bottom line.
My view is just a little bit different and not parental like the preceding paragraph.
First, a search system is only useful if the user knows what has been indexed, what the editorial policy is for inclusion, exclusion, updates, and error corrections. The baloney about a vendor indexing “all” information is a fundamental issue related to understanding what can be found or what is presented as an “answer.” Consider the Nielsen surveys. Do you know what biases creep into the sample selection, the margins of error, the deltas over time? I did not think so. If the fundamental information is not understood, how well does a search system work? In my view, not too well.
Second, what mathematical flaws are inherent in modern search systems. I have completed several lectures which run down the issues inherent in Markov chains, k-means, and eight or nine other “off the shelf” methods implemented by engineers who do not explain how these numerical recipes work to senior managers. Senior managers are often busy looking at interfaces and too busy to pay attention to the inherent weaknesses of some methods. Here’s a pun for you? Clever, right? Do you understand the relationship of Jon Kleinberg’s CLEVER method to Google PageRank? Any concerns along that line?
Third, the issue of dropping content from crawls and from the indexes is one that most folks pay little attention to. Both in the US and Canada Web site content is “disappearing.” As a result, some information which was available is no longer available. What? How can governments shape information? If content is no longer made available, what happens when a person looks for a contract for a Medicaid Integrity Contractor?
Fourth, I am inundated with PR spam about predictive systems. The companies hosing out nonsense are suggesting that their math is going to solve a wide range of findability problems. Most of these systems emphasize slick visualizations. Now that adds another layer of obfuscation to the information. If a person does not know the limitations of the underlying data, how will these people make sense of pretty pictures? The answer is that eliminating intellectual rigor for each link in the findability chain creates sheeple.
Are your Bing, Google, or commercial system outputs accurate, comprehensive, current, or meaningful? The answer to this question is not navigation.
Stephen E Arnold, March 18, 2013
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