Sphinn - Jakob Nielsen On The Future Of Search

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Posted By: christographer 723 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://searchengineland.com)
Category: Searching

Usability guru Jakob Neilsen isn't shy about expressing strong opinions about search. In today's Just Behave column, Gord Hotchkiss has a fascinating interview with Nielsen touching on everything from universal search results to personalization and scanning of search results in other cultures, like China.

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from sensebot 723 days ago #

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Very interesting interview, especially since Nielsen is not expressing much optimism about the improvements to the search in the near future. One thing that I think is missing from their discussion, is a potential shift of the search results paradigm. I don't mean the layout of results, but rather the overall expectations of users from the search. See my Sphinn post "What Users Want From Search" about an emerging alternative (http://sphinn.com/story/318).

from billslawski 721 days ago #

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After reading this interview, I'm convinced that there's a serious need to add search topics to usability conferences.

1. Dr. Nielsen's description of how Amazon's item-to-item collaborative filtering works is completely wrong. See;

Collaborative recommendations using item-to-item similarity mappings

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=6,266,649.PN.&OS=PN/6,266,649&RS=PN/6,266,649

2. The SERPS of 2003 didn't include a blended mix of videos, news, maps, product search, book results, and information from many other separate databases. They didn't include mid page query refinements based upon user behavior interaction with the search engine. They didn't show query refinements from Google Base type databases. They didn't show sitelink styled links that attempt to anticipate final destinations on a domain.

3. The relevance paradigm of search engines isn't switching from an IR information system approach to a popularity approach. Popularity approaches, with quality factors like PageRank, have been around since 1998. The movement isn't towards the "best" page based upon popularity - it's an attempt to find the right page for the person searching - so that there is no one "best" page.