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.