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Choose Your Own Adventure: Alternatives to Bing and Google

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By Jason W. Bunyan

Search engines are one of the Internet’s lifelines. Even as users debate the merits of Bing and Google, a new wave of technologies is revisiting the concept of search in order to improve or even supersede the current popular forms. As clinical research suggests that search may have dubious physiological effects on users, perhaps these changes present an opportunity to improve the ergonomics of the medium.

Vantage and Criteria
Search engines have gained a measure of significance so great that it is almost irresponsible to discuss them without first acknowledging that commercial activity tends to influence our perception by giving us a choice of what role we want to play when engaging in the act of assessment. Commercial forces splinter conversations about subjects like search into subcategories – user experience, journalistic coverage, marketing (e.g. buzz words such as ‘the conversation‘), sociopolitical reasons and clinical study – many of which are never reconciled. Contrasting information from these sources can make it difficult to determine whether, say, Bing is better than Google.

Fine – but is Bing better? There appear to be two answers. First, there is the vast ‘conversational’ dialogue taking place that contains commentary about everything from Bing’s allegedly poor logo design to carefully crafted, almost transcendental arguments that Microsoft and Google are ultimately the same organization. And perhaps, in a sense, they are – or have been – though not at the same time or for the same reasons.

Journalists’ views have been more nuanced, if only because they have more words with which to work. Guardian UK’s Tim Anderson held that Bing was not better, and based his feedback on hands-on use as well as reports from ‘blind engine’ tests in which users used Yahoo, Google and Bing and rated each engine. Initial voting placed Bing in first place, and it later fell into second. The Huffington Post’s Esther Dyson didn’t offer a hard opinion about whether Bing was better but, like Wired’s Epicenter’s Ryan Singel, closed her article with forward-looking thoughts that suggest while Bing may not dominate search in the present, its appearance signifies the naissance of a technology that may render modern search obsolete, and sooner rather than later.

There are two takeaways here:

1. The world of search is in the process of atomizing and reformulating; and
2. Mythic mediums can be surpassed by new ones. The caveat here is that ‘new mediums’ aren’t all that common; much of what we encounter are updated versions of established ideas, remade because the original platforms can be enriched with data from emerging platforms. For instance Twoogle, which is Browsys’ hybrid Google/Twitter engine, and Semanti, a search engine add-on designed to enrich search by mining social networks (Facebook specifically), do not reinvent search so much as they put particular information together for purposes of convenience and added depth.

While traditional search may not die out, it will evolve in order to better fit user needs. The Huffington Post’s Dyson points out that Bill Gates believes “the future of search is verbs.” Actions, rather than data, will become the focal point of why we look for things online. New developments in search also suggest that the Q&A keyword format of search will be deemphasized and usher in an era where technologies amass information that we create in order to make intelligent suggestions to us. While these innovations will most likely give rise to a host of new privacy problems, perhaps they will move users away from the current mode of search, a format that clinical studies suggest may have dubious physiological effects.

Physiological Effects of Search
“[M]y concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages,” writes The Atlantic’s Nicholas Carr in Is Google Making Us Stupid? “I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do … The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” Carr subsequently provides accounts from a series of web-savvy professional contacts who share how they have become increasingly disinclined to read print. Scott Karp, one of the bloggers that Carr follows, admits that he no longer reads books at all.

If Carr’s article was based solely on individual accounts, it would be easy to dismiss, but clinical tests indicate that accounts such as these may well be indicators of the physiological effect that search and, more broadly, the web medium, has on the human mind. A University College London study of online research habits suggests that users often exhibit “a form of skimming activity … which involves hopping from one source to another … rarely [returning] to any source they’d already visited, [and] typically [reading] no more than one or two pages of an article or book before [bouncing] to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.”

Ironically, the earliest discussion of search engines was published in The Atlantic nearly 70 years ago. In As We May Think, scientist Vannevar Bush proposed the creation of the memex, a device that would be “a sort of mechanized private file and library [that] stores books, records and communications, [can be used] with exceeding speed and flexibility.” In Bush’s view, this ‘memory supplement’ could never replicate the mind; it could only support its efforts by making its memories, which are often fleeting, permanent.

Even 70 years later, Bush’s captivation with the concept of preserving memory is compelling. When discussing how the memex could facilitate research, the method he outlines is less likely to be used by the average search engine user than it is by scientists or attorneys, whose roles require them to review numerous sources, determine when a source is light or irrelevant, add personal insights, and think divergently in order to craft arguments capable of withstanding critical pressure. At the close of his illustration, Bush again returns to the matter of permanence by noting that these constructed arguments, which he refers to as trails, “do not fade,” and can be used “[s]everal years later.”

One of the aspects of Bush’s article that is both fascinating and unsettling is the way that his words provide an illustration of how, to some extent, it is difficult to escape one’s own conceptions of time and space. Bush only considered, and could only consider, what it would be like to use the memex in his modern world, using his perception of the rate of speed at which daily life – in his case, one of scientific research and development – took place.

To Bush, search was going to be an activity that went at a deliberate, scholarly speed, and arguments could be cultivated and set aside for years so that they could be raised when needed. He didn’t see the accompanying structures that would have to be created in order to make search possible, or the immediate social and psychological repercussions of making this form of technology available to people.

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