As They Like It

One of the best parts of my job, especially this time of year, is marveling at great achievements; how splendid it was to witness an old friend and erstwhile student, Eric Meyers, defend his dissertation last month.

Eric’s dissertation covered a lot of territory; he studied the relationship between group information-seeking processes and the products of that activity in middle-school students, and found, among many fascinating things, that while youngsters liked working in groups, it often impeded rather than enhanced their performance on information problem-solving tasks. His model of group problem solving, suggesting beneficial places for professional intervention and assistance, will also be of great interest to many.

A minor note in his work caught my eye. In many cases, it seemed students were relying on the search results page, rather than clicking through to a website to find answers or information. That’s not difficult to believe for middle-school students working on a class assignment, nor, now that I think about it, for anybody else. Truth be told, I’ve done this before, if all I was looking for was available in the title, URL, or brief excerpt on the results page.

This results-page-as-destination was on my mind when I saw a commercial a few days later highlighting a new feature from Bing. It’s one of the early forays into an area we all know is coming: social search. That’s been in the wind for a while, and now Microsoft is rolling this out. They say that research shows 90% of people consult family or friends when making a decision and that 80% will delay a decision until making that consultation.

Now you don’t have to, because Bing will do it for you! As Microsoft encourages, “see which stories, content, and sites your Facebook friends have ‘liked,’ from news stories, celebrities, movies, bands, brands, and more. With the ‘thumbs up’ from your friends you can jump right to the stuff that matters the most to you.” Integration with Facebook will also allow it to prefer sites and “stuff” that friends have liked, as well as things that have been liked by others, an addition to the popularity metrics that search engines have used for years.

There’s more, including a suggestion to ask friends to “like” more things, so that there’s more data to use (and more traffic on Facebook, imagine that), and so on. Undoubtedly, this is only the beginning of this sort of trend—there’s a whole lotta data out there in status updates and likes, tweets, geolocation check-ins, and so on. (No automatic biometric attitudinal data yet, but no doubt that will be coming soon from mood sensors on phones and tablets? Ick.) And if we’ve learned nothing else over the last decade, it’s that data will get used by somebody who sees a way to make money off it.

All of this seems to me a simultaneous broadening and narrowing of the concept of search: encompassing even more information to improve a process notoriously difficult to crack, while diminishing the depth and complexity of the evaluation, understanding, and use of the results. Assuming this works, we’ll see more examples of socially- aided or driven search, which will no doubt affect how search works, and thus how people think about search, and on and on, becoming a process increasingly personal and popular, in both senses of the word.

Mayhap Keats had it right nearly 200 years ago: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” … but that’s another story.