Why we need to redefine search NOW

Before you start reading this do me a favor, save yourself the convincing and head over to your favorite search engine. Wait. Is it Google. Brilliant.

Now search for something, anything at all.

Done? That was fast. It took .00001 something seconds for that result to turn up. That’s perfect right. But wait what is the search result indicative of? In all likelihood the search asks you to redirect to a Wikipedia page.

So what you have done in essence is that you are the baboon who things that the shortest route in a triangle is not the hypotenuse but the other two sides since the hypotenuse is the longest.

Cheers

If you did not get the above I would suggest that you go back to your elementary math books and try and understand what that means.

But coming back to the essential question. Why do we need to redefine search?

In essence Google is acting like a broker and it is not in essence giving us information. Because in essence you are likely to end up on a website such as Wikipedia.

If that is what search is then I am sorry to say it is a sad day for the internet.

Search needs to be more dynamic. When you search something on a browser it shouldn’t just throw websites at you. It should give you solid concrete results. That’s what Google has tried to do to some extent but it’s relatively slow.

If you really come to think about it I think that Quora in all likelihood is doing a much better job with search than Google is. Atleast in Quora I get genuine answers that are stories in themselves and that brings me to the second point in the argument.

The stuff that is thrown at us is usually that it’s lines of crap that no one is really going to read. The human element of story telling is missing and that is where Quora significantly steps in and manages to do a brilliant job.

But more than all of this my issue is with the way search results come up on Google. Google has the best search algorithm around. There’s no doubting that fact and as much as this sounds like a Google bashing article it is not. Since Google defines search they effectively become the center point of all arguments.

So the search results are a mix of page rank algorithms as well as search engine optimization. There’s two kinds of those one which is black hat and the other one which is white hat. More on that sometime in the future. Google has over 200 factors that they will consider if they want to give a search result. That’s a good thing. But what if I don’t want it to be a wikipedia page every time?

A lot many times websites won’t agree to be crawled or indexed. It’s a stupid thing but there are these brilliant websites that are rich in content but just won’t agree to be crawled and they can under no possible circumstance show up on the search.

My next issue is that with the real in depth knowledge. So as stupid as this may sound a lot of people don’t know what JSTOR is. When searching for a research paper they tend to search google instead of heading directly there. It’s stupid and that’s what the search tends to make us.

My experience at quizzing teaches me to look beyond Google and Wikipedia in multiple ways. Primarily because almost everyone has access to this information and in all likelihood everyone has a fair idea of what is there on the top results on Wikipedia and Google. The issue is that where is the in depth knowledge? If you were to open an encyclopedia and search for something it would still give you a hundred things you can’t find on google or wikipedia.

A book on a particular topic will teach you things and tell you stories that Wikipedia or Google have not been able to integrate into search. Where is search going then?

What about all the individual stories, blogs and brilliant pieces of writings in offline magazines. Why haven’t they been integrated into search. The main argument contradicting this would be that you can head over to Google News and search for that particular thing. But that is another story in itself. It’s like exploring ten web pages. Shouldn’t Google’s job be simply to reduce the effort. Should it not create an app such as Summly and pick up the relevant knowledge off all the pages of those 10 news pieces and present it in the form of one list that takes 5 minutes to read rather than forcing the user to slog for 30 minutes?

And here’s the biggest issue. Search isn’t social. No further comments on this.

Cheerio for now.