Alexei@Nitobi

Search is breaking. Every day around the world people are getting more and more bad results from Google searches. Snap.com is shifting the pendulum in the other direction.. I like what I see.. and it’s not the Ajax per-se, but how it integrates the human brain into the search process.

What is happening? Commerce-skew is destroying our ability to get useful information for one thing. A lot of really smart people have made it their lifes mission to get their ecommerce site listed super high for stuff that it shouldn’t be listed for. Here’s an example. “dvd player reviews“.. try it on Google – I dare you. Try to find a database of actual product reviews and comparisons.. and not just another pyramid-scheme link scam trying to sell you dvd players. It’s hard! I was searching for digital camera reviews a few months ago and wandered around for about an hour looking for decent resources. Try the Snap.com version of this search.

Product information is one thing.. but this problem extends to all domains and becomes a kind of ‘tragedy of the commons‘ in that people are perfectly willing to spoil a resource for others to suit their own immediate selfish needs. Google uses an inbound link algorithm (partly) to determine the relative importance of sites.. but this technique just doesn’t work anymore.

I know that Snap.com doesn’t acutally have a better search algorithm.. at least from what I can tell I get about the same results on Google as I have been getting on Snap. They may be the same for all I know. What I like is that they provide an interface that allows me to scan and determine quickly which results are worth investigating. I have seen criticism of this that imply that this is ‘bloat’, ‘fluff’, and so-on.. but in my view it’s not. It’s letting me use my own really good search tool (my brain) to do that last little bit of filtering. I feel that that at the end of the day, search engines will need to do stuff like this in addition to improving their algorithms because:

• folksonomies, tagging, other collaborative search refiners suffer from the common field problem
• the human brain is incredibly good.. better than computers at detecting patterns
• usability improves information search

Along the lines of this human brain thing.. take a look at what Amazon.com is doing with Mechanical Turk..

So what am I talking about with Snap? Is this just a more usable view into the same data? If so, can’t this be easily duplicated. Yes. Well.. the Ajax stuff they’re doing looks pretty slick.. I think they’ve but a lot of effort into their web search and news search tools.. But it could be duplicated. I just they’ve done a stellar job of their interface. I’ll be comparing the SERP’s (results pages) for a while to test the quality of returned results but I think I’ll be switching over.

OK so here’s what I’m talking about.. take a look at these screenshots and think to yourself.. if I was searching for a DVD Player Review (not a place to buy) which would help be find the information faster?

Google’s search for dvd player reviews – these are all bad results.

Snap.com search for dvd player reviews – still bad results, but I can use my amazing human brain to filter these results easily.

| Del.icio.us

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006 at 2:18 am and is filed under ajax, web2.0, business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.