[Sigia-l] the future of search

[Avi Rappoport]

At 7:32 PM -0700 7/24/02, christina wodtke wrote:
>Since we're all and a meditative mood anyhow, I thought I'd ask what you
>think the next radical innovation in search will be.

One of my favorite Library school professors, Michael Buckland, does 
this great presentation, showing how tortuous the path is between the 
user's inchoate information need on one end, and the  disorganized 
mass of information on the other end.  It takes a lot of steps, 
including an expression of the question, a writer to explain their 
view the information, and a whole apparatus of publications, storage 
and information retrieval tools (including 'ask a friend') to get 
from one end to the other.

The web has removed some of the barriers, like the need to go through 
a bibliography or library catalog and to recognize useful stuff by 
abstract and subject heading.  Full-text search allows some access 
that was impossible before, though we all miss the valuable metadata.

I really like Marti Hearst's faceted metadata (as you all know) -- 
what you may not know is that you'll be seeing a lot more of it in 
the near future.  Right now, my favorite implementation is Tower 
Records, but there will be more soon.  Integrating static metadata 
with dynamically-created content categories may work as well.

What I *don't* think will help much are those fancy algorithms and 
visualization tools.  Remember that most queries are pretty mundane, 
not big-picture concept stuff at all.  I just pulled this off metaspy:

juego de rol de shadowrun
yellow pages
SENATE TEXAS
vietchat
rosenthal wine
comet cursor
gingival curettage
UCSF Medical center
nerd
florida state parks

So I think that there will be a continued variation in search tools, 
some for people who have simple needs, others for those who need 
really complete coverage (due diligence, legal issues, patent prior 
art), and yet others within subject domains and specialties.  People 
just coming into a field actually need a lot more help than those who 
have been there a while, especially in understanding core and 
relational concepts.  No one size fits all.

Avi

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