Delegation search: Why users outsource decisions to AI
From travel planning to product research, users increasingly seek confidence, recommendations, and a faster path to action.
Topic: SIGCHI
Mobile Searcher Behavior Should Drive Design & SEO
Mobile searchers have different goals, motivations, and limitations than desktop searchers. What are things you should consider before building and optimizing a website for mobile searchers?
We’re All Different. Why Aren’t Our Search Options?
Our online activity is about to be spread over more and more devices. This opens up some interesting implications for UI design. More and more, we’ll be launching queries from more places that will have different environmental challenges. For example:
Woman Follows Google Maps “Walking” Directions, Gets Hit, Sues
Is Google responsible for giving out bad directions through its Google Maps service? We’re about to find out. After Googling walking directions for a trip in Park City, Utah, Lauren Rosenberg claims she was led onto a busy highway, where she was struck by a vehicle. She’s now suing Google for damages. The case, Rosenberg […]
Yahoo Beefing Up Social Scientist Staffing In Yahoo Labs
Yahoo has suffered attrition and a brain drain of top talent for the past couple of years. Google and Microsoft, in some cases, have been beneficiaries of those defections. Indeed, we’ve been lamenting the loss of engineers and talent at Yahoo for some time. Now, however, the SF Chronicle reports on a new hiring effort. […]
Digital Literacy And Digital Diligence
Do you regularly use Google’s Wonder Wheel? How about SearchWiki, Yahoo Correlator or Search Monkey? I’m guessing about 95% of you said no. And you’re no ordinary group of searchers . In terms of search literacy, you’d be ranking in the top 0.1% of the population. In a randomly assembled group of 1000 people, you’d […]
The Rise Of Help Engines: Twitter & Aardvark
Back in 2000, there was a little-remembered but amazing survey that I love to cite showing how search engines had, in only a few years, topped the list of information resources consulted. They’d even pushed past family and friends. Now the times are changing, as family and friends have themselves become easily searchable resources. The […]
U Rank – Microsoft’s Social Search Experimental Site
Out now from Microsoft Research is U Rank, an experiment that allows people to move results around, as well as share them with friends and add comments to listings.
Search Life Meets Real Life — Tell Me Your Thoughts!
I was thrilled when I got invited to speak at Chris Pirillo’s Gnomedex event happening in Seattle this August 21-23. Gnomedex is legendary to me, and to present at it — well, wow! Plus some nervousness, which I hope this post will help with. I’m looking for some thoughts on my topic of "Search Life […]
Search 4.0: Social Search Engines & Putting Humans Back In Search
Previously I’ve covered what I dubbed Search 3.0, how search engines have evolved toward blending vertical or specialized results into “regular” web listings. Today, the step beyond that: Search 4.0, how personal, social and human-edited data can be used to refine search results.
Search In The Year 2010
If I ever had to build a search engine, or more precisely, the interface of a search engine, this would be the team I would want to bring together. When I came up with the idea of looking forward three years and speculating on what the search results page may look like in 2010, these […]
Google’s Human Touch
The Human Touch That May Loosen Google’s Grip from the New York Times questions whether Google’s use of algorithms and computers to compile search results might lead to its demise in the future.
Mahalo Launches With Human-Crafted Search Results
Mahalo, the expected people-powered search engine backed by Jason Calacanis, has now gone live in an early "Alpha" test release. In Mahalo, human editors have crafted the top search results for popular queries. For example, search for [paris hotels], and human editors at Mahalo have assembled a page that lists actual hotels in Paris rather […]
Wish List: Interactive Help From Google’s Matt Cutts & MattPasses
I’ve been making up a Google wish list to update from my earlier one this year. Pandia just came out their own wish list, as did David Wallace more generally. And for whatever reason, it came to me. I want an interactive Matt Cutts to provide Google webmaster assistance. Think Ms Dewey meets Matt Cutts. […]