Designing User Experiences for Imperfect Data by Matthew Hurst.
Matthew writes:
Any system that uses some sort of inference to generate user value is at the mercy of the quality of the input data and the accuracy of the inference mechanism. As neither of these can be guaranteed to by perfect, users of the system will inevitably come across incorrect results.
In web search we see this all the time with irrelevant pages being surfaced. In the context of track // microsoft, I see this in the form of either articles that are incorrectly added to the wrong cluster, or articles that are incorrectly assigned to no cluster, becoming orphans.
It is important, therefore, to take these imperfections into account when building the interface. This is not necessarily a matter of pretending that they don’t exist, or tricking the user. Rather it is a problem of eliciting an appropriate reaction to error. The average user is not conversant in error margins and the like, and thus tends to over-weight errors leading to the perception of poorer quality in the good stuff.
I am not real sure how Matthew finds imperfect data but I guess I will just have to take his word for it. 😉
Seriously, I think he is spot on in observing that expecting users to hunt-n-peck through search results is wearing a bit thin. That is going to be particularly so when better search systems make the hidden cost of hunt-n-peck visible.
Do take the time to visit his track // microsoft site.
Now imagine your own subject specific and dynamic website. Or even search engine. Could be that search engines for “everything” are the modern day dinosaurs. Big, clumsy, fairly crude.