Choose Your Own Adventure: Alternatives to Bing and Google
Posted: July 30, 2009
The future tends to reveal itself to people in lucid, fleeting moments, which is one of the reasons that it’s difficult to prepare for it. As Charles Leadbeater explained in his 2005 TED talk on innovation, inventors often don’t even know what they’re making as they design it. While Bush foresaw the search engine as accurately as anyone could be expected to, he could not see the commercial environs in which search would exist.
It is where search exists, as well as the justifiable but equally objectionable motives of the creators and maintainers of the web that contribute to search being what it is. In Carr’s words, “The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model … Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link — the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.”
In order for search or any other part of the web to begin to have an effect on attention other than atomization, creators of technology would need to experiment with the medium on a sensory level, beginning with how users experience search.
Because of the potential effects that this could have on economics and users, it is difficult to imagine industry titans engaging in a radical departure from its current model; however, there are a number of emerging alternatives, and perhaps in time organizations will begin to move away from search as we know it and begin focusing on ergonomic considerations. One way to reframe could be to enable users to modify the medium itself so that their method of interface could be as hot or as cool as they want it to be, or able to change in order to work with the nine different forms of human intelligence that are known to exist.
KartOO CEO Laurent Baleydier explains that his company aims to do just that. “The growth on alternative search engines will allow users to choose more adequately those search engines that facilitate their search according to their type of intelligence,” Baleydier says. “Some are focusing on information visualization, others are working on an ontology search engine based on semantic analysis and in our case, we want to provide a broader solution and incorporate several tools at the same time.
“For instance, we provide the user with visual maps, customization, semantic search, topic suggestions and e-trends, so we can facilitate the user’s search regardless of their knowledge on web searching but also offer options for those who are experienced; we also let our users choose the format of their results rather than asking them to learn our framing and technical parameters.”
Some senses are easier to use in the realm of search than others. In 1998, AI and ergonomics researcher Dr. Mark Chignell and a business partner started Personification, a company designed to create a ‘Web Walkman’ that would allow people to search for information using an auditory interface. Chignell is healthily skeptical about auditory solutions. “Lack of a reliable input method is a big show stopper for auditory search,” he says. “[L]ong lists of search hits cannot be browsed through visually. Automated text clustering works fairly well, but like many things in this domain, it is not quite good enough for primetime.”
While aural applications may not be a wise approach to take, Chignell believes that creators could take a different approach: make search invisible.
“Search is a bit like artificial intelligence. If it was working well, we wouldn’t even notice it. It would be done in the background as part of whatever task we were working on … A glimpse of that kind of functionality is provided by recommender systems, such as when Amazon recommends books for people to read. [C]ommon interests can be inferred based on statistical [buying] patterns, and useful recommendations can be offered as suggestions without the users having to explicitly search.”
Search has a long way to go, according to Dalhousie University Canada Research Chair in Management Informatics and associate professor Dr. Elaine Toms. “Sue Feldman used a wonderful analogy: we have ovens, microwaves, toasters and barbeques, which all have heating technology, and we use each for its specific purpose. So why not multiple search tools? In her example, I think the common outdoor fire is the current search engine. And we have not yet developed tools for task-specific environments that need and use rich information. [Compare] what a scholar needs and what a health consumer needs. We are not even close.”
Hunch, a self-described decision-making site that gets smarter the more it’s used, abandons the concept of search in favor of helping to inform with decision making by absorbing meaningful information. After asking a user 10 questions or less, Hunch proposes a concrete and customized result for hundreds of decisions of every kind. The company’s long-term goal is for a user to be able to come to Hunch with any decision she is pondering, and after answering a handful of questions, get as good a decision as if she had interviewed a group of knowledgeable people or done hours of careful research online. The company hopes that in time users will trust it to make an informed decision without having to turn to lots of external time-consuming sources of information.
Wolfram/Alpha also becomes more intelligent over time, though by design it is more libertarian in nature. William Gibson once said that a search engine’s ability to yield results is inextricably connected to what one can conceive. Wolfram ups the ante by making it clear that a working understanding of things like derivatives or theta will allow you to do far more than someone who visits the site and enters an isolated term, like ‘sonnet.’ That said, like Hunch, Wolfram is not predicated on the Q&A format and over time, the platform may transform into something that is completely unlike its initial iteration.
Even as Bing and Google receive coverage for their battle for search supremacy, each of these new technologies is alluring in its own way. In an early article about Bing, CNET’s Rafe Needleman observed that “Bing makes Google look complacent, and that’s not good for Google.” When compared to these other technologies, both Google and Bing both look somewhat bland. And although it difficult to envision a time when Google, Microsoft or search as it exists would become obsolete, with technology, everything remains to be seen.
Loading ...
interesting article..makes one think
I think that Twitter is a good alternative to Google & Bing