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January 06, 2005
Improving on Google
Search engine competition is fierce, i know. Rarely does a week go by without somebody talking about Google, the 800-pound gorilla of searching. Even more rarely does a moment pass without someone mentioning 'Google' in the same phrase as 'search'. With Google working so well, it's no wonder that so many people use it, and that all the other major search engines (Yahoo, MSN, Dogpile, A9, you name it...) are trying to catch up. Nearly all the search engines' results pages even look the same, save for A9's ingenious addition of images, movies, etc. on the same page (if you like).
So, ever wonder how even Google can do better? Enter my dad, a mid-fifties design engineer who never stops thinking :) Thus i attribute this suggestion to him, because as we Si'ers know, ordinary computer users are often the best source of new ideas.
You know those one or two lines of text that search engines include to give you a hint of what the page is about? The keyword(s) you typed appear in this mini-block of text, giving you a 'hint' of what you'd get if you clicked on the link. The idea? Make the text longer.
Why? Those one or two lines of text are called 'information scent' -- a term mentioned by usability experts such as Jakob Nielsen and originally part of information foraging theory by Pirolli and Card (PDF), written when they were at Xerox PARC. One would surmise that more of a scent would contribute to more knowledge of what was behind the link, up to a certain point where people would rather click on the link than read the long block of text. But where is this breaking point? Have the Google people done any research on this?
There are a number of ways to implement this, even if Google didn't want to make it a default setting, including the text-block expanding when you rollover the search result, or when you click on a plus sign button. It could also even be a preference setting, where a user could select whether he wants 1, 2, 5, 10, etc. lines of text.
So, there's an idea. Maybe somebody will see this and suggest it. In any case, i hope it gets people thinking, that things can always get better. Google knows this, and that's why they're doing so well. But they can get better too.
Posted by MaTT at January 6, 2005 01:13 AM
Comments
Write to Google! Ask for a job! Tell them you have marvelous idears about information scent that you will only share if they hire you. And let you work from delicious Pennsylvania.
Posted by: srah at January 6, 2005 10:13 AM
Well, another thing would be to indicate where on a page something appears, the top, the side bar, 4 pages down in a text document, ect...
There should also be some information about proximity or at least how to do a proximity search (do they have this? am I just blind?). For instance, if I do the search 'waffles bathroom' I might get a lot of results that list waffles somewhere in the middle and bathroom somewhere else when I really wanted information about waffles in bathrooms.
Those are the two things that bug me, mostly because I find myself searching obscure things.
Posted by: Urs at January 9, 2005 04:14 PM
I'm not sure about this, but proximity seems to be a factor in ranking, as in results that have waffles and bathroom closer together will be listed higher... not sure tho, but i agree that this bugs me too.
Posted by: MaTT at January 10, 2005 10:46 AM