[Sigia-l] "Best Bets" or "Accidental Thesaurus" Examples?

[Richard Wiggins]

Sometimes when one asks a human or a robot a very specific question, an
answer comes back that isn't responsive to the question posed.

For instance, I came to Sigia-L and asked for other examples of "best bets"
style services used in university and corporate intranet applications. Your
reply was not a set of examples of such services; instead you offered
guidance about a "best seller" effect. 

With all result sets, the user is of course free to ignore items in the hit
list that don't seem germane to the query.  :-)  Perhaps that's what I
should've done here, but I want to make very clear that we are talking about
a relative handful of search terms whose meaning is obvious.  

Again, keep in mind that ALL hit lists from general purpose Web search
engines are arbitrary.  The masses have turned to Google for salvation, but
Google's hit list is as arbitrary as anyone else's.  What appears at the top
of their hit list is a function of a scoring algorithm chosen in Palo Alto
and the happenstance of how many people link to a given page.  (Indeed,
Google is the ultimate example of a search engine that gives high credence
to "best sellers".)

My simple suggestion is that, for the most commonly sought content, an
editor in East Lansing can do a better job of helping local users than can a
robot in East Lansing or in Palo Alto.  No search engine is perfect. Neither
are editors perfect, but when consistently hundreds of people at a
university search site enter "bookstore" it doesn't take Harold Ross or Miss
Cleo to divine what the reader seeks. 

If this were an OPAC or a bibliographic database, or even Amazon, we might
have something to discuss.  In this case, we don't. Having worked with real
users and real data and an increasingly ineffective AltaVista for six years
we've got a good feel for what the customer wants.  It's not just search
logs that give clues -- irate e-mail from users who can't find a list of
local bookstores can be very enlightening. 

Those who enter one of the 500 most popular searches inherently seek best
sellers.  Those who entered one of 100,000 one-time-only searches are a
different matter entirely -- but those 100,000 items would never appear in a
Best Bets list.  

If I go to the Microsoft site and type "explorer patch" and an editor has
pre-calculated a list of the most important IE fixes, that's goodness.  If I
seek an obscure patch for an older Explorer, it's my job to read further
down the hit list.  If I'm worried about tires on a Ford Explorer, it's my
job to pick the right search engine. As with any hit list, caveat searcher.

I'm very confident that the accidental thesaurus can help the masses in many
environments.  Anyone got some other examples of the concept in use?

Thanks,

/rich

On Sun, 25 August 2002, Listera wrote:

> 
> "Richard Wiggins" wrote:
> 
> > With all due respect, I do understand the notion of undercutting
> serendipity
> > and comprehensiveness,
> 
> I wasn't referring to either one.
> 
> > but I'm afraid you may not fully understand what we've built, what
I've
> > described, and how and why it works.
> 
> I tried pretty hard to not reference what you have done, in particular. But
> are you telling me that the introduction of 'best-bets', 'best-sellers' or
> whatever they may be called, do not further increase their circulation?
> That's why it's called a feedback pattern. I'm not questioning your
> intentions or the reasons with which you came by those selections, but this
> is a fairly predictable pattern. Once you go down the path of:
> 
> > However, given highly popular searches, we often DO know with pretty
good
> > confidence the page most users likely want.
>  
> you are managing results and, given enough time and circulation, actual
> usage patterns.
> 
> Now, this may or may not be good, as I said, but please don't tell me it
> can't be abused or used for promotion, as is done routinely in the
> commercial world.
> 
> > The idea is to, with some careful human input, give the majority what
they
> > seek at the top of the list.
> 
> Wasn't there a time when you typed in, say, "news" into the IE
address bar,
> you were taken not to <news.com> but to the MSN/news? After 5
billion such
> 'best-bet' referrals, it wouldn't surprise me if a good portion of users
> actually came to believe that news=MSN. I mean, they are both 'news',
right?
> 
> The logical extreme of this phenomenon was keyword searches being skewed in
> favor of advertisers by some search engines, without notice to users. It's
a
> slippery slope and that one was recently barred by the legal system in a
> settlement.
> 
> Between your case and the one above, I'm sure there's a zone of comfort for
> both the site owners and users, but let's not lose sight of the fundamental
> issue of 'guidance' here.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Ziya
> 
> 
> ------------

____________________________________________________
Richard Wiggins
Writing, Speaking, and Consulting on Internet Topics
rich at richardwiggins.com       www.richardwiggins.com