A great article on where search MAY be heading – Search 4.0: Putting Humans Back In Search
I’ve been intrigued by the notion of human search and the site Mahalo was/is of interest. The main interest has stemmed from the following:
- I feel the tweaking of search algorithms can only take you so far.
- Most users will only visit the first page of results.
- Given the experience within TRIP we have a pretty good idea what would constitute a good set of results.
- We have some experience in this area. A while back (so not up-to-date) we created a number of reviews e.g. statins or knee osteoarthritis.
The big problem is scale. We could create human-powered search results for the top 100 searches – but that’s scratching the surface. Perhaps I’ll do some mock-up and get users to ‘vote’ to see which they prefer.
Watch this space.
May 30, 2008 at 11:57 am
Jon, I would not do that – it is endless to have up to date hand searches for a releveant number of topics. Services like “UpToDate” do this for you and they charge quite a lot for this… I’d rather concentrate on being a good search engine
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