What are we SEARCHing For?

John Battelle of FM Media recently pointed out an academic paper that explores what people value in search engines, and what the creators of search engines try to achieve. The piece is titled, "Is Relevance Relevant?" -- which seems to be a great general question for the age of blurred focus. The piece points out that search engines have been criticized for proving too much and too little information and shows the conundrum faced by businesses due to the fact that users hate heavily monetized, busy search engines, but of course, the ads and the other monetary schemes basically ARE the business.

The piece also references the good old days when Alta Vista -- with its academic orientation – was the leading search engine and claims that relevance as an objective idea has been attended in favor of "satisfying users."

I sometimes wonder why it's so hard to find really intelligent interesting content on the web that was so easy to find back in the mid-90s. This might be the answer. Google has replaced real intelligence with a mixture of business interests and the "wisdom of crowds." Thus, when I ego surf – let's be honest here -- I no longer seem to find fascinating complicated criticism of my work. Rather I find an endless circle jerk of sites pointing out that some piece that I've written exists – one after another. No thoughts, just fingers pointing in various directions. In some ways, this is the way the net looks today.

Not that I want to bring back Alta Vista. But here's an interesting thought from an interview I did with Cory Doctorow a few years back:

"It's pursuing the deviance, what Bruce Sterling called 'Wooing the muse of the odd' that actually creates a system that has a lot of perceived value. I think that every single one of us is an edge case. There's this amazing Bill Gates quote from Davos last week where he was talking about how Microsoft was going to get back into search and compete with Google and someone said, 'You know you guys did a pretty crappy job with search the first time around.' And he said, [paraphrasing] 'Yeah. You know what we did? We focused on the 20% of the queries that represented 80% of what people were looking for instead of the 20% that were really odd. But what we found out is that the whole perception of value lives in whether or not it meets those little queries.'"

So the answer my friend is further down the long tail, not back toward an academic elite.

Read "Is Relevance Relevant"

Read the RU Sirius Interview with Cory Doctorow