Comments on: No, Search is Not Broken

By: Alan Crawford - Tampa, Florida

Alan Crawford - Tampa, Florida — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 06:50:41 +0000

Judging by the price of their stock … they sure are doing something right.

By: Success

Success — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 06:21:59 +0000

Google are continuously striving for the “perfect search model” and have done a pretty good job but it is far from perfect. The Web 2.0 model gives some insight into how things will evolve. You are right to say that search engines should take account of all human input and humans must always put the searcher uppermost in their minds when deciding upon search criteria for their sites. It’s a two way street.

By: izwan

izwan — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 23:30:24 +0000

well, I’m agree with you. most search engine now give more efforts to improve their search engine such as google. currently, google give some penalty to most directory typed website.

By: Waleed

Waleed — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 13:14:08 +0000

Yes you are absolutely right, nothing is impossible for Google !!

By: Don Jones

Don Jones — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 16:30:44 +0000

“I agree with Jerome, but would add that as search technology improves, it will become more ‘human’ centered”

Google would certainly have you believe this

By: Paul Brown

Paul Brown — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 22:41:11 +0000

I agree with Jerome, but would add that as search technology improves, it will become more ‘human’ centered.

By: Raya

Raya — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 11:59:13 +0000

I agree with Jerome

By: Jerome Pesenti

Jerome Pesenti — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 15:01:30 +0000

Barbara, by “library” I just meant a “controlled set of content” and did not suggest that it meant “pre-search” (I used the two terms in combination, not redundantly). I am also aware that information retrieval has been around for a very long time (the term was coined in 1950!), that librarians have been using search tools long before I did and that they are often today the biggest proponents of introducing modern search tools in corporations and organizations.

The whole point of my post was to entice corporations to invest more on search technology and information access rather than on controlling content generation.

By: Barbara Wagner

Barbara Wagner — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 13:45:11 +0000

To Jerome Pesenti

You said “they are based on old, library-centric pre-search information access models based on static taxonomies and manual indexing”

Since the 1960s I have been and continue retrieving information via computers (and otherwise) inside and outside of libraries. At Western Reserve University, I studied with founders of information science before they went to Pittsburgh, using first-generation computers and IBM card readers–but it wasn’t about the equipment. I learned about information retrieval when the first professional information science association was still called the American Documentation Institute and before there were courses in computer science. And I was searching the Net before the Web existed — long before the verb became a noun.

I know that searching techniques have not been static nor have they relied on manual indexing; they have evolved immensely and still do, as your studies should have shown you.

Your term “library-centric pre-search information access” implies that searching did not exist before computer scientists “invented” it using the Internet. That is not true.

Library-centric is not “pre-search.”

Librarians and information scientists may have used some different terminology for some of your IT-based terms, but they understood and understand how the search process works — whether computer-based or not. Plus they understand user needs and their searching behavior.

To use your terminology, librarians are the interface between users and mechanisms for retrieving information that guide them to use those tools most effectively. I see this every day. You can have the most sophisticated computer algorithms for searching the Web, but that does not mean users can automatically use them effectively on their own. Librarians have to make the
abstract searching theories work in the real world;

I do appreciate Clusty as I appreciated Lycos and Northern Light and other innovative search engines, because they make my work at the “user interface” easier.