Thoughts on searching the web

It may be a surprise to hear that someone pursuing a higher degree in Library Science is a relative newcomer to computer searching. When I was an undergrad way back in the early ‘90’s computers were for me fancy typewriters, very useful but I could get the same results from my electric typewriter even if it took four times as long. The irony of this is one of my roommates was working toward his masters in computer programming. I knew he was doing things with computers other than typing up papers but was unclear just what he was doing.

The only exception to my view of computers was the library catalog; I loved the electronic card catalog. Although I didn’t know it at the time I was database searching I just thought what a great way to search the card catalog. The system was very intuitive. It included Title, Author and Subject searching just like the old cards I was used to and in addition Word search. Word searching was great for browsing. I would start with a very broad term and continue to add words to narrow down the hunt. With each term added the system would tell me how many hits it retrieved. This made it very easy to know if the search had been narrowed enough, or too much. In “Blind Co-Browsing, Teachable Moments, and the Power of Gaming”, William Badke (2007) uses the analogy of looking for a person to illustrate database searching; it strongly reminds me of my own electronic card catalog hunts.

I did not own my own computer until 1999. My father, always an early adopter of tech. gadgetry (he bought the family an Apple computer when they first came out), bought me a Gateway so we could IM, which we did a few times until the novelty wore off. I used my computer mostly to update my resume. I’d been on the internet but didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. I assumed Google and the other search engines would work in the same was as the card catalog in college. It seems like the search would work the same way but I have not gotten the same kind of experience. For example I just did a test search on Google starting with the keyword “searching”; 321,000,000 results were found. I added the keyword “techniques” and received 785,000 results. When I then added the keyword “new” Google returned 8,670,000 hits. If Google is automatically ANDs the keywords, how could I get more results with more words?

The talk of how to improve the current systems is varied but one idea being explored is the semantic web. “The formatting tags used to create Web pages are part of the hypertext markup language (HTML), and they describe only what a Web page's information looks like (boldface, small, large, underlined, etc.). The Semantic Web would go beyond cosmetics by including tags that also describe what the information is: tags would label text as designating, for instance, subject, author, street address, price or shipping charge”. (Frauenfelder 2001) This type of coding would make the web not only easier to search but also easier to personalize.
The amount of customization that Berners-Lee talks about developing in “A Smarter Web” sounds great at first.

"Imagine running your cursor over the name of [a] hotel and being informed that 15 percent of the people who've voted on its quality say it's excellent. If you happen to know that the hotel is a dump, you can instruct your browser to assign those people a trust level of zero. (The polling information would be saved on a third-party “annotation server” that your Web browser accessed automatically.) By assigning high levels of trust to people who match your tastes and interests, and “bozo-filtering” the people who don't, the Web will start looking more like your Web". (Brener-Lee as quoted in Frauenfelder 2001)

We do this sort of thing naturally. When you are looking for a movie you ask people who have similar taste in films for their opinion. But I worry that such filtering will be very insulating. I think it is important to hear opposing opinions. If the web is filtering everything, imagine the things that will be missed that are found now by sheer serendipity. But perhaps the biggest problem will be how to handle all the existing web pages. Will we retroactively recode them all?

All of us who watched Star Trek the Next Generation know exactly what the ideal internet interface will be, the Computer onboard the Enterprise; completely interactive, voice recognition technology, and searched with ease. Now the designers just have to figure out how to get us there.

Badke, W. (2007, July/Aug.). Blind co-browsing, teachable moments, and the power of gaming. Online, 31 (4), 43-45. Retrieved May 19, 2008 from Wilson Web.
Frauenfelder, M. (2001, November). A smarter web. Technology Review, 104(9), 52. Retrieved May 21, 2008, from Academic Search Complete database.