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.”