Michael Zimmer.org

information ethics : privacy : new media : values in design : 2.0

Push for the “Perfect Search”

There’s been quite a push lately for what I’m calling the “perfect search” – a search engine that is personalized, local, implicit, predictive, etc. This is something I will be writing more about soon, especially whether there will be room for political and ethical values in the design of such “perfect” search tools. But for now, take a look at this related article “Searching for a Better World”. Personally, I think this quote is the best:

Senior Microsoft researcher Susan Dumais says her work is about making search more relevant to the average computer user looking for information on the web.

“It’s hard to think of a system that is more impoverished than the way search is at the moment,” she says.

“The fact that you can type in 20 characters, have that compared against 5 million pages and get anything worthwhile is amazing, but there’s a lot more you can do. The horse and cart was thought to be amazing until the car came along.”


Related posts: (automatically generated)

  1. AoIR: Search 2.0: Web 2.0, Personal Information Flows, and the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine
  2. Google Universal Search: Half of the Perfect Search Engine
  3. SEM on Search & Consumer Privacy
  4. Academia’s quest for the ultimate search tool
  5. Scholarship on Privacy and Search Engines
  6. Google’s Peter Fleischer is Dangerously Misleading on Privacy and Personalized Search

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