[Sigia-l] re: the future of search

[Listera]

"James Weinheimer" wrote:

> This sums up the attitude that I have heard repeated many times: "It's good
> enough".
> What exactly does that mean?

Look around you. You have kitchen utensils, lawn furniture, book covers,
tools, shoes, practically anything you can think of, poorly designed but in
abundance. Good enough to be sold and bought. You have an OS or a word
processor or a scripting language barely good enough but shipping by the
millions. Indeed, life is full of crap that's just good enough. I'm positive
that I can come to your house and find many things that are good enough that
you paid good money for. So could you.

Google is certainly good enough in that very sense.

> So, which items in which various ways?

You don't have/get to make that decision for users, they do it themselves.
We can't federally mandate that people stop using horribly designed MP3
players and all adopt the iPod, for example.
 
> Why? It doesn't cost too much to pay for people to make web pages--in fact,
> they make quite a bit of money at it.

Actually, you can get web pages done literally at $5/page, $15-$20/hour. Are
you willing to work at such rates?

> The answer is: administrators don't want to pay for it because they are
> convinced they can get the same result for free. The results are *irrelevant*
> to them, because whatever people get will be "good enough".

True. If the choice is between not having search functionality or having a
search engine, I think the choice is self evident. But let's not kid
ourselves, the 'categorizing' professionals have done a horrible job of
selling themselves as resources that can solve these problems. The value-add
of a good categorization/retrieval system above and beyond good search
engines is neither easy to explain nor an actively sought after checklist
item.
 
> Nobody does "research" on the web.

That may be a non-starter as a way to convince people :-)

> A thesis demands much more than a couple of Google searches!

The number of people who use the web for thesis research [vs. those who
simply (re)search] is statistically negligible.

> Or at least, I hope it will for a few more years!

You mean till (your) retirement? ;-)

Again, I'd urge you to consider the absolutely colossal change: coming from
practically zero, today hundreds of millions of PC users are able to search
and find things with hitherto unimaginable efficiency across the entire
globe. 

There's no point whatsoever in minimizing the value in that by claiming
technology isn't perfect. Weather reports are rarely perfect but imagine
living without them. Just as weather reports keep betting better, so does
search technology.

Best,

Ziya