Web Search – It’s Worse Than You Think
Matthew Hurst writes (in part):
While it seems like everything in the online space is hunky dory and progress is making predictable strides towards our inevitable AI infested future, I often see such utter failures in search engine results that makes me think we haven’t even started to lay the foundations.
Here’s the story: as I’ve become interested in mining the news cycle for various reasons, I’ve started attempting to understand who the editors of major news sources are. The current version of the Hapax Page on d8taplex tracks the attribution of article authors and editors (I conflate the concept of writer, reporter and un-typed contributors under the term ‘author’ while explicit editors are tracked separately). From this analysis, I see that there is someone called Cynthia Johnston who is often associated with articles from Reuters (in fact, she is currently at the top of the list ranked by count of articles).
You need to read his post in full to get the real flavor of his experience with the Cynthia Johnston search request.
Two quick points:
+1 to we have not laid the foundations for adequate searching. Not surprising since I don’t think we understand what adequate “searching” means in a multi-semantic context such as the WWW. Personally I don’t think we understand searching in a mono-semantic context but but is a separate issue.
As to his blog post changing the search experience for anyone seeking information on Cynthia Johnston, do we need to amend:
Observer effect (information technology)
or
at Wikipedia, or do we need a new subject:
Observer effect (search technology)?