Comments on: Search Frustration: It's Still Hit Or Miss On Complex Decisions

By: mattmc

mattmc — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:48:36 +0000

The real issue here is that this is structured data, which is hard to scrape from a crawl. If the sellers published the information in structured form via a data API, you might have a chance of building the query you want.

By: billyb

billyb — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:20:28 +0000

I am so far behind in this bingtweets thing….partly because I don’t understand the power of it or the reason to use it in the first place….I wish someone would explain why people use twitter in more detail and give me an actual example of how it benefits them….I understand facebook and myspace but this really has me frustrated.

By: Tony Karrer

Tony Karrer — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:39:33 +0000

This is a similar problem to a lot of knowledge work. Complex knowledge work does not have a right answer. Instead it's judged on various signals. See: Evaluating Performance of Concept Workers

And the answer is that you need to do some basic research to figure out some questions and to figure out where to find people, and the reach out to people with expertise. The beauty is that it's incredibly easy to get to people with significantly greater expertise and they are often quite willing to help. See also: Networks and Communities

Of course, most of us learned (in school) that talking to others is cheating. So, there's a lot of learning to be done around these work literacies.

By: Steve Melito

Steve Melito — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:55:22 +0000

Sometimes, too, the information you seek is available in places that seem off-the-beaten path (but hopefully not too far below the fold).

If you were looking for information about the 1967 Shelby GT500, for example, a lens builder named ThomasC can help.

http://www.squidoo.com/1967-shelby-gt500

No, Thomas C isn't an optometrist. Rather, he's a master of Squidoo - a community website that allows users to create pages (called lenses) for subjects of interest.

Squidoo was founded in part by Seth Godin, author of marketing tracts such as "Purple Cow" and "Meatball Sundae".

By: billh

billh — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:27:20 +0000

The people who own the information you seek, which is probably born from general research as well as individual first hand experience, can profit modestly by selling it. Why would you expect to find it for free? Because information wants to be free?

By: Steve Melito

Steve Melito — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:05:16 +0000

If you're looking for serious information about classic cars, then why not go where the classic car enthusiasts are? CR4: The Engineer's Place for News and Discussion aggregates content from Hemmings Motor News, CarDomain, and MOTORZ TV. CR4 provides search capabilities, of course, but you can also ask a question using the Automotive Forum. (Even better, a real human being will answer it.)

Here's a link to CR4's Automotive Section.

http://cr4.globalspec.com/section/automotive

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 11:27:25 +0000

Why do I have the strange feeling that this post is a prelude to a piece about Aardvark?

P.S.

A bit off topic but I know this is also an area of interest to you and since today coincides with the start of the O'Reilly Gov 2.0 event in D.C. (wish I could've been there!)...

From Edge:
Comment from George Dyson on "Economics Is Not a Natural Science" By Douglas Rushkoff

"How to best transcend the current economic mess? Put Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, Elon Musk, Tim O'Reilly, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Nathan Myhrvold, and Danny Hillis in a room somewhere and don't let them out until they have framed a new, massively-distributed financial system, founded on sound, open, peer-to-peer principles, from the start. And don’t call it a bank. Launch a new financial medium that is as open, scale-free, universally accessible, self-improving, and non-proprietary as the Internet, and leave the 13th century behind.

In essence, I agree with the piece and the comment.

I also believe that the Chagora structure and design is very close to what they are talking about... (it can function with standard and/or newly created currencies whether localized or not. Especially when combined with methods of geographical localization with scaled anonymity.
The practical microtransaction in all areas is essential for proper scaling of civilization and its the political microtransaction (networked citizen lobbying) that is the trigger.

P.S. PayPal is a bad model for civilization development.

(Chagora is essentially scalable speech and association)

If I'm an idiot I'd like to find out soon since things are very tight. I'd like at least a chance to present my case and don't know where else to go.

By: Konteyner

Konteyner — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:41:41 +0000

Yes JG, you are thinking true and you say good idea.

Thanks you.

By: JG

JG — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 18:38:24 +0000

You also write: There’s not a definitive answer that scales to everyone who might have the question. What’s right for me is not right for you or the next fellow

Information retrieval researchers are well aware of this, and (as I mentioned above) started developing techniques over thirty years ago that still aren't being used on the web to address this problem.

My question to you, John, is: Why not?

My tentative answer is: Monetization.

When you are deep-engaging in your "classic cars" learning session, are you in a frame of mind to click an advertisement for a classic car, a used classic car engine, or whatever they want to sell you? Probably not. You're trying to learn about what makes a good classic car. Not actually yet buy one.

Actually buying the car, rather than learning about how to buy, is a different set of searches that you'll be doing, at a different stage in the process.

It's true you might click a few of the ads, to give yourself an idea about how much various cars or engines cost. But from the advertiser's perspective, that's a wasted, zero-ROI click, something that the advertiser will wise-up to. But again, because you're in the early, learning stage of your information need, advertising is pretty worthless to you -- it's not really relevant to your task.

Let's suppose this information gathering stage lasts days or even weeks, and you do hundreds and hundreds of queries or query-like interactive applications built on search. How much does that cost the search engine, in terms of processors, researchers, engineers, electricity, bandwidth, etc? A lot. Much more than a single, home page lookup search.

And at the end of the day, when you finally learn everything that you need to learn, in order to begin the purchase phase of your task (buying the car), you might start clicking ads again. But how much money is the search engine going to make on the couple of ads that you click? A few bucks?

I can't help but conclude that the reason why we don't see more of this decision-oriented search on the web is because of advertising-supported business models. If you make 97% of your income on search advertising because you've trained users to believe that search is a "fact lookup" engine, does it make sense to start to train users to think of search as a learning and exploration engine? No. Because then they'll use the engine a lot more, relative to the amount of ads that they click. And that's bad business.

Bing can get away with it for a while, because they're heavily subsidized by Office and Windows. But Google? Will they ever go this route? They haven't shown any significant signs of it over the past decade. I have to imagine that it's because of their business model. It's good for advertisers, but bad for searchers.

Or am I completely wrong in my analysis? I've been seeking an answer to this for years now, and have never seen a convincing counter argument.

Anyone?

By: JG

JG — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 17:11:26 +0000

You write: …as soon as you go a bit down the tail - like my example for classic cars - search becomes a pivot point for an ongoing and often taxing decision process. The opportunity, I think, is to figure out a way to support that process down the tail - saving us time, clicks, and frustration along the way. I see two paths toward that goal: one is creating applications on top of “ten blue links” which help me organize and aggregate the knowledge I process while pursuing a search query

Let me remind you of a January 2007 (almost 3 years ago now) comment thread on your blog. Here are a few of the key comments from that thread, though I would recommend reading the whole thing:

http://battellemedia.com/archives/003254.php#comment_119346

http://battellemedia.com/archives/003254.php#comment_119385

Explicit relevance feedback is a known way, a known "application" for helping the user self-personalize their way down into the long tail of information they might not have found any other way.

See also some of my comments from May and September of 2008:

http://battellemedia.com/archives/004429.php#comment_131053

http://battellemedia.com/archives/004468.php#comment_131507

http://battellemedia.com/archives/004597.php#comment_133537

http://battellemedia.com/archives/004597.php#comment_133548