Danny Sullivan is a long time commentator on the search industry. If you’ve read John Battelle’s The Search you’ll know how important he was to Google’s early development.
Danny recently wrote a post called Why Search Sucks & You Won’t Fix It The Way You Think which argues that most UI innovations in search (such as clustering) haven’t been successful because they don’t add value for the user. Interesting thoughts for those of us trying to expose more infomation to casual users.
One Comment
The old ideas about making search more relevant - such as clustering - are being taken up in new ways. Tag clouds and metadata clouds are clustering, but clustering created by a user community rather than by an algorithm. Already I’m finding tag clouds, and the associated ‘networks’ in delicious useful as other people who save the same kinds of resources that I do, lead me to ones that are also useful. In other words, someone with the same interests has done the search for me and found a resource useful enough to save. This is one of brilliant manifestations of the web - the hive mind at work.
Post a Comment