Jeremy‘s got an interesting post and discussion on his IR Gupf blog about the process of improving search results. The gist of the discussion is that the process of tweaking search engine performance leads to a local optimum, and cannot be used to discover new interfaces and interaction techniques to support information seeking.
Exploratory search is like adding a search suspension, search tires, a manual search transmission, search bucket seats, and search steering wheel to your search engine. And, of course, search cup holders.
Google recently announced its 2009 Google Fellowship recipients, and I was pleased to find a name I recognize among them. Nicholas Chen (University of Maryland) won the fellowship for HCI. Nick’s been doing very interesting research on multi-screen reading devices (check out this CHI 2008 video) and pen-based computing. Congrats to Nick on this impressive achievement! It’s great to see this interesting part of the HCI field being highlighted in this fashion.
It is ironic, however, that there is no award for research in anything resembling information seeking support systems. There are awards for research areas such as cloud computing, machine vision, distributed systems, and natural language processing, but nothing integrative that could be used to improve information seeking interfaces. Sigh.
It’s my pleasure to announce that the final report to the NSF on the workshop on Information Seeking Support Systems (ISSS) so ably organized by Gary Marchionini and Ryen White has been published. The report covers many aspects that define this research area and distinguish it from both Information Retrieval and Human-Computer Interaction fields.
Three kinds of challenges are defined and preliminary steps toward meeting the challenges are presented in this report: robust models of human‐information interaction; new tools, techniques, and services to support the full range of information seeking activities; and techniques and methods to evaluate information seeking across communities, platforms, sources, and time. Special attention is given to collaborative information seeking and the need for industry‐academic collaboration.
It was a wonderful experience to have two days of discussion of these and other topics with so many smart people, and I am happy to have contributed to the workshop organization and to the writing of the report. Finally, I am delighted that collaborative information seeking is featured as an important aspect of the field. We hope that this report will inspire others to take on the outstanding challenges and will encourage the NSF to understand the significance of this work for our society.
I am curious to play with Microsoft’s Kumo when it comes out. It looks from the screenshot in this CNET article like they’re trying to come up with some aspects to the search, which should make it easier to make sense of large results sets. I am a bit surprised that there isn’t more hype about it, compared, say, with what Wolfram | Alpha was able to generate.
The other interesting bit is how the PowerSet technology will be integrated and what its ultimate impact will be. My interest is not only technical but also personal, as a several of the PowerSet technical staff had worked at FXPAL a few years ago. They’ll probably appreciate the confusion this name is likely to cause us here at FXPAL in the near future.
I just poked around and found an interesting Health search site that’s part of Microsoft Live. Although the blank landing page is a sharp blow to the senses coming from the nice Manatees currently inhabiting the Live Search page, once you enter a query, the interface is actually quite pleasant. I haven’t played with it for real, but it seems to populate some aspects (Conditions, Personal Health, Drugs & Substances, Alternative Medicine, and Nutrition, with others available through a link), organizes some featured content along with a set of links to medical sites, allows search results and searches to be saved, and shows some ads.
In his resent post, Daniel Tunkelang was cautiously optimistic about Google’s forays into HCIR, suggesting that Google’s “baby steps” are leading in the right direction. I agree that it would be a great innovation if Google weaned itself (or allowed its users the option) off the single ranked list precision-oriented search paradigm, and made it easier to explore the results in a variety of ways.
There is an interesting trend on the web (that I may be the last one to notice) of tools to save your search results. The purpose of these tools to is to do what bookmarks where invented to do, but to do so more effectively. The idea is that by putting useful or representative pieces of the pages you found onto some page or set of pages, you can get back to them easily, share them with others, etc. The number of such tools is growing. There is the Google Notebook, of course. And the Yahoo! Search Pad and EverNote. And now something called Snipi. Continue Reading
There is a great line in a paper by Reddy and Jansen about search:
information seeking is just as much about producing new knowledge–a creative and inventive activity–as it is about finding extant information.
This breaks out beautifully in terms of the dichotomy about finding and exploring: finding is the canonical “known item search” so well executed by Google and Yahoo!, whereas exploring is about creating new knowledge. Exploring is a much more complex activity, that cannot be boiled down to a short input text box for input and a ranked list of documents for output. It’s probably too late to change terminology, but this distinction is important to keep in mind when designing information seeking interfaces.
In Google’s 2008 annual letter, Sergey Brinn writes “Perfect search requires human-level artificial intelligence, which many of us believe is still quite distant.” This seemingly cautious statement reveals Google’s narrow focus on precision-oriented search. It is plausible that as systems get better and better at understanding the searcher’s intent, they will be more likely to identify useful documents. Sergey’s take on search is that in his childhood he “could not have imagined that today anyone would be able to research any topic in seconds.”