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People are Smarter Than Computers (Part 2)
By Cameron Ferroni | December 11, 2007
And, frankly, smarter than many of us in the industry think. For years in search, it has seemed like the Holy Grail is the ability to take whatever the user types in the search box and return results based on what the user really wanted. For some reason we think that computers should be capable of reading the user’s mind and “just working.” Now computers are amazing machines - they have the ability to remember everything they have ever been told, and play it back with 100% accuracy at the drop of a hat, they can run multi-variable optimization equations in seconds, and they can even spell better than your average human. But what they can’t do, is read peoples’ minds. So why do we expect computers to be better at that than we are? If anything, they are worse.
Case in point - let’s say I existed in real life, and I wanted a book on car repair. Pre-Internet. I could take one of three paths, with some subtle variations. First, I could call my buddy and ask him if he had one. That only worked if your buddy was a mechanic. Second, I could go to my local library, head to the card catalog, look for the section on cars, get redirected to automotive, flip through that to find the subsection on automotive repair, then, armed with my excellent command of the Dewey decimal system, I could head down through the stacks and find all of the books on car repair. Fortunately for me they were specifically organized according to category, so by the time I got to the right shelves, I could probably pretty easily just scan through the titles for one that I wanted. As an alternate possibility in the Library scenario, I could have walked up to the person at the front desk, and asked for a book on car repair, and, depending on how they were feeling that day, they would have either directed me to the card catalog, or walked me over to the shelves themselves. As a third scenario, I could have headed to my local bookstore, and then basically done the same thing as at the library, either use a store reference to refine, or asked a salesperson to help me.
Now, you can see from the above examples, what I didn’t do in any case was go to some magic oracle in the sky, and say “car repair book” - and expect one to magically appear in my lap. But on the Internet, that is exactly what we have trained people to do. We send them to search engines, ask them to type in what they are looking for, and then let the computer do the work. And we exacerbate this behavior by specifically trying to limit the amount of interaction a user has with a site before returning a result. We in the industry have been conditioned that “any time a user has to click a button to get more information that’s one more chance for us to lose the user,” and so we’ve conditioned users to feel like they shouldn’t have to click on extra things to get more information, that the computer should just do it for them. Frankly, we have created a no-win situation for us, and for consumers. And with the overwhelming success of Google (in terms of $$ and users, if not actually in terms of user experience) every other one of us is fighting an uphill battle to try to recondition users and help them understand that with just a couple more directed clicks you can get a great result, in less time.
Now I will pause here to admit that the example I’m using right now is actually a bad one. Turns out Google does a pretty good job for a search for car repair book (although the ads don’t all take into account the book element, which I would argue they should). But when it comes to something more complex, like, say “5 star hotel in Seattle that is good for children and has a pool,” well, the results speak for themselves. And the reality is I don’t blame Google for this - this is a really hard query, as a query. But, if we are willing to put some onus on the users themselves, then they can get accurate information even faster than navigating through Google. At Marchex, we do this through the refinements. It’s an ongoing process/challenge to get all of the meta-data for every business to really blow people away, but at its core the metaphor works really well. And we aren’t the only ones - many of the top sites use refinements as a navigational tool to help people find exactly what they want - Amazon, eBay, Travelocity - all of them have been using it for ever, and refining it.
It’s time for all of us to realize that people aren’t inherently lazy, and that computers aren’t inherently smart. Asking a user to read a list and click a couple more times to determine their intent, rather than asking them to modify their search queries dozens of times, or page through tens of pages to infer their intent seems like a totally fair trade off….
Topics: Local Advertisers, Data, Local Search, Uncategorized |