Search is the Web's fun and wicked problem

"Search Patterns" author Peter Morville looks at the next wave of search and reveals the one innovation that led to a watershed moment

Search is the Web's most powerful and frustrating tool. It's the conduit to unfathomable amounts of information, yet it requires a fair degree of user education to reach its full potential. It's odd that something so important is so hard to harness.

And it's not going to get easier anytime soon. We may think of search as static and mature because we've used those ubiquitous boxes for years. But it's a tool in flux. Developments in mobile, augmented reality, and social graphs -- to name a few -- signal big changes ahead.

Peter Morville, co-author of "Search Patterns" and a long-time observer of the search domain, looks at the next wave of search in the following Q&A.; He shows how "weird ideas" will shape search's future, and he also reveals the one recent innovation that unlocked a watershed moment for search (it's not what you'd expect).

Mac Slocum: You've called search the "worst usability problem on the Web." Why is that? What makes it so bad?

Peter Morville: Search is a strange attractor that draws repeat visitors despite poor performance. In the 1990s, Jared Spool proved that when people were banned from using the search interfaces of major e-commerce sites, their success rates improved. But when given the chance, these same folks would choose to use search again and again. This hearkens back to research at IBM in the 1980s showing that users never read manuals. It's called the "paradox of the active user" and we experience it every time we drive off for a new destination without consulting a map. Instead of taking time to understand the territory and chart an optimal course, we prefer the illusion of speed and simplicity. So we search.

And thanks to Google, Web search works pretty well for basic lookup. But, cross over to categories like e-commerce, enterprise, desktop, mobile, social, and realtime search, and performance falls off a cliff. That's because search is a really hard problem that relies on language as a bridge. A few keywords can't provide sufficient insight into the searcher's intent. They just can't. So, search isn't as simple as the box. Search is a complex, adaptive system and an iterative, interactive experience. For designers, it's a wicked problem, and that's why it's so much fun.

MS: Where will future search innovations come from?

PM: In "Search Patterns," I write about averted vision or "the art of seeing distant objects by looking to their periphery." This astronomical analogy serves as a powerful reminder that forecasting isn't simply a matter of extrapolation.

The future of search isn't Google + 1. To get real-time search, we had to invent Twitter. And to achieve real-world search, an inevitable extension of augmented reality, we'll need to leapfrog from iPhones to iGlasses, and infuse our surroundings with sensors and spime. So, to anticipate changes in what we search and how we search, we should keep an eye out for emerging technologies and weird ideas that aren't labeled or categorized as search. In other words, we must look away to see.

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Four short links: 19 February 2010

Data Adjustments, Grasping Telcos, Open Data Panacea Denied, Newspaper Software

1. How to Seasonally Adjust Data -- Most statisticians, economists and government agencies that report data use a method called the X12 procedure to adjust data for seasonal patterns. The X12 procedure and its predecessor X11, which is still widely used, were developed by the U.S. Census Bureau. When applied to a data series, the X12 process first estimates effects that occur in the same month every year with similar magnitude and direction. These estimates are the “seasonal” components of the data series. (via bengebre on Delicious)
2. Vodafone Chief: Mobile Groups Should Be Able to Bypass Google (Guardian) -- Vodafone and other telcos want to charge both ends, to charge not just the person with a monthly mobile data subscription but also the companies with whom that person communicates. It's double-dipping and offensively short-sighted. Vodafone apparently wants to stripmine all the value their product creates. This is not shearing the sheep, this is a recipe for lamb in mint sauce.
3. Open Data is Not A Panacea, But It Is A Start -- The reality is that releasing the data is a small step in a long walk that will take many years to see any significant value. Sure there will be quick wins along the way - picking on MP’s expenses is easy. But to build something sustainable, some series of things that serve millions of people directly, will not happen overnight. And the reality, as Tom Loosemore pointed out at the London Data Store launch, it won’t be a sole developer who ultimately brings it to fruition. (via sebchan on Twitter)
4. Our GeoDjango EC2 Image for News Apps -- Chicago Tribune releasing an Amazon EC2 image of the base toolchain they use. Very good to see participation and contribution from organisations historically seen as pure consumers of technology. All business are becoming technology-driven businesses, realising the old mindset of "leave the tech to those who do it best" isn't compatible with being a leader in your industry.

Living Stories can reinvent the article

Google's Living Stories platform fills a big gap in the content universe

Content consumers -- the people who seek information but don't create or curate it -- are getting a raw deal.

Why? Because static articles don't capture the kinetic energy newsworthy topics generate. Real-time updates are flawed, too. Twitter can't offer context or deeper analysis. And RSS is most useful if you've got the time and energy to curate your sources. That's like gardening, though: some people love tilling the soil, but most just want to eat.

Until recently, there was no middle-ground content product. No service that combines editorial oversight with the archival quality of articles and the real-time info-drip of Twitter. But a few months ago, Google teamed up with the Washington Post and the New York Times to test a new content model called Living Stories that addresses the missing link in the content chain.

The first batch of Living Stories focused on things like health care, education reform, the war in Afghanistan and other broad topics with lots of viewpoints. Here's how the project was originally described when it was launched back in December:

Living Stories try a different approach that plays to certain unique advantages of online publishing. They unify coverage on a single, dynamic page with a consistent URL. They organize information by developments in the story. They call your attention to changes in the story since you last viewed it so you can easily find the new material. Through a succinct summary of the whole story and regular updates, they offer a different online approach to balancing the overview with depth and context.

Early execution on Living Stories wasn't all that impressive ("dull" was the defining characteristic). But the white-label look was just a starting point. Living Stories was built to be a tool; a new type of content platform. The real innovation would take place beyond Google's borders.

That's why yesterday's announcement that Living Stories is now available as an open source project is so exciting. Now we get to see what this thing is capable of.

Off the top of my head, I see three Living Stories projects developers at news or content organizations should immediately pursue:

1. If your company has topic pages -- many do, since they're SEO magnets -- look through your analytics and find the top 10. Create Living Stories around each of those topics and publicize the heck out of them.
2. Build out internal toolsets that let editors and writers create new Living Stories on the fly. That way, they can quickly plant a flag around a topic and then fill it out as additional coverage is produced.
3. Consider the public utility. Could the Living Stories platform become a community tool? A hub for targeted local events? News organizations get raked over the coals for missing big opportunities (classifieds, local search, etc.). Maybe Living Stories can play out differently.

The utility of Living Stories isn't limited to newspapers, either. A book publisher could post chapters or use it as an author portal. The timeline component could be adapted for family histories. Academics could chronicle research. It's a publishing platform, so you can do whatever you want with it.

Four short links: 18 February 2010

Open Politics, Ada Day, Hardware Debugging, Design Insight

1. David Cameron, The Next Age of Government (TED Talk) -- Cameron's argument is that with open data and behavioural economics, we can offer policy preferences but let people make informed choices. Interesting that transparency and open data can be a bipartisan issue.
2. Finding Ada -- pledge to blog about an inspirational woman in technology or science on March 24. I like it because it turns up personal stories and interesting people that I'd otherwise never have heard of.
3. On MicroSD Problems (Bunnie Huang) -- fascinating detective story as he tries to figure out how he got some dud Kingston SD cards. SPOILER ALERT: fault-tolerant hardware gets sold in tranches (great, ok, bad) and the bad tranche sold off-label.
4. A new global visual language for the BBC's digital services -- an amazingly detailed guide to the rationale and structure of the BBC web redesign. It's not often that you get this much detail into someone else's design, which is a shame because it's very instructive to read.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas' TED Talk on Augmented Maps

Blaise Aguera y Arcas (creator of PhotoSynth, founder of Seadragon and now Architect of Bing Maps) gave a talk at TED last week. In it he showed off some of the latest Bing Maps has to offer. He demoed the fluid zooming capabilities based on Blaise's own Seadragon technology and the 3D capabilities provided by Silverlight. He also demoed how images and live video can be overlay Photosynth-style on top of the map (these were both made possible by the mapping application platform that was recently added to Bing Maps).

The app platform is how Bing includes Twitter, Flickr and geolocated blog content. The screen-capture above shows a Flickr photo overlaid on the Bing's Streetview product. Google just released a similar product the other week. Both companies are taking advantage of Flickr's huge repository of geolocated photos. In January Blaise told me that the apps are built in C# and that the API is only available internally -- for now. There's a great list of the various map apps on the Bing Maps Blog (including one for viewing before/after imagery of Haiti and for following the Olympic games) .

Blaise will be speaking at Where 2.0. The three day conference runs March 30- April 1 in San Jose. Radar readers can register with this discount code for 25% whr10pcb.. Early registration ends March 1st.

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Augmented reality and the ultimate user manual

The ARMAR project shows how augmented reality can revolutionize learning

Most user manuals are worthless. They're chock full of poorly written text and confusing diagrams. Worse still, the gap between problem and solution is vast because we're forced to apply a linear format (a guide) to a specific question. Where's a search box when you need it?

But here's an idea: What if instead of leafing through pages or scrolling through an online manual, you could simply see your way through a task? Just slide on a headset and work your way through a bit of customized, augmented-reality education.

That's what Columbia University computer science professor Steve Feiner and Ph.D. candidate Steve Henderson are trying to do with their Augmented Reality for Maintenance and Repair (ARMAR) project. They're combining sensors, head-worn displays, and instruction to address the military's maintenance needs. Take a look at this project video and you'll quickly see how the same application could extend to all sorts of use cases:

In the following Q&A;, Feiner and Henderson discuss the genesis of ARMAR and its practical applications. They also offer a few tips for anyone who wants to develop their own AR-based instructional project.

Mac Slocum: What inspired ARMAR?

Steve Feiner: ARMAR was inspired in part by earlier research projects that we have done in Columbia's Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab, investigating how augmented reality could be used for maintenance and assembly tasks.

This work dates back to 1991, when we began work on KARMA (Knowledge-Based Augmented Reality for Maintenance Assistance). The earliest work on ARMAR itself began in 2006, with initial funding from the U.S. Air Force Research Lab, when Steve Henderson began his Ph.D. studies at Columbia.

Our application domain of the LAV-25 light armored vehicle turret was the result of funding from the U.S. Marine Corps Logistics Base, beginning in 2007, to investigate how AR might be applied to future field maintenance of military vehicles.

MS: Is ARMAR in active use?

Steve Feiner: ARMAR is a research project and has not been deployed.

MS: Can you walk me through the ARMAR user experience?

Steve Henderson: The user can see five kinds of augmented content presented on the see-through head-worn display:

1. Attention-directing information in the form of 3D and 2D arrows, explaining the location of the next task to perform.
2. Text instructions describing the task and accompanying notes and warnings.
3. Registered labels showing the location of each target component and surrounding context.
4. A close-up view depicting a 3D virtual scene centered on the target at close range and rendered on a 2D screen-fixed panel.
5. 3D models of tools (e.g. a screwdriver) and task domain components (e.g. fasteners or larger components), if applicable, registered at their current or target locations in the environment.

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Four short links: 17 February 2010

Homebrew Highspeed Video, Werewolf History, Digital Book Rights, Moddable Space Invaders

1. Off-the-shelf camera hacked to grab high-speed video (New Scientist) -- scientists used a chip from a home cinema projector to record 400fps on consumer video hardware. They put the chip, which has tiny moving mirrors, in front of the digital camera and it directs the incoming light sequentially over a grid of pixels in the digital camera, meaning that each of the digital camera's frames contains 16 samples (frames) of the picture. You lose resolution but gain frames/second. (via viksnewsclippings)
2. History of Werewolf -- excellent history, which digs deeper than "it's a Foo Camp phenomenon" and into the actual origins of the game.
3. Digital Books and Your Rights: A Checklist for Readers -- The over-arching question: are digital books as good or better than physical books at protecting you and your rights as a reader? (via BoingBoing)
4. Space Invaders Enterprise Edition -- The magic of Space Invaders Enterprise Edition is actually under the hood. I’ve separated out the game logic from the Java source into a file parsed by a rules engine. This means we can easily view the game design, without it getting muddled with too much implementation code.

The Convergence of Advertising and E-commerce

With hundreds of millions of users paying to download music, applications and ebooks on mobile phones, with reports of Zynga generating hundreds of millions of dollars from selling virtual goods in social games, with startups like Square making mobile payment systems the hot new startup category, it's clear that e-commerce is poised to supplant advertising as the business model of choice for new startups.

But that's only the beginning. A few weeks ago it occurred to me that there's a very real possibility that the next breakthrough in advertising itself is its convergence with e-commerce. Buying an app from the Android Market, I realized how those of us with smartphones have become accustomed to seamless purchases on our phone. That is, we search for an app, and then we buy it, directly from our search vendor.

Isn't that after all the goal of advertising? To cause a transaction. So why not do away with the intermediate step of sending someone to a website for more information? Especially with the limited screen real estate on the phone, there isn't really room for the contextual text advertising that made Google its billions. Interstitial or popup ads are intrusive and unwelcome. But how much search activity on the phone is tied to commerce already? Find a restaurant nearby and make a reservation? Why not pay as well? Point Google Goggles at a bottle of wine you enjoyed at that restaurant, and have a few bottles more show up on your doorstep?

This line of thought led me to the conclusion that Google, Apple, Microsoft, will soon be announcing e-commerce programs akin to Adsense, in which retailers will register with "app stores" to allow physical goods and services to be bought as easily as apps. We can also expect announcements of partnerships between phone providers and Amazon or Wal-Mart or other big retailers who can fulfill e-commerce requests from the phone. I have no inside information to support this contention, just the logic of the marketplace.

Interestingly enough, it was only a few days after I had this thought that I met with the folks at Siri, which bills itself as "Your virtual personal assistant." Siri does pretty much what I was imagining for Google or Apple: it searches, and then does something. In our conversation, one of the founders referred to it as a "do engine" rather than a search engine. Right now, Siri mainly interfaces with services that provide APIs for reservations, like OpenTable or TicketMaster. It isn't a general purpose e-commerce engine. But that is clearly in the future, if not from Siri, then from some other startup, and then, inevitably, from the big guys.

E-commerce is the killer app of the phone world. Anyone whose business is now based on advertising had better be prepared to link payment and fulfillment directly to search, making buying anything in the world into a one-click purchase. Real time payment from the phone is in your future.

Fourt short links: 16 Feb 2010

Curation, Voice Assistance, Data Silos, and Voice Transcription Poetry

1. Of Tandoori and Epicuration (JP Rangaswami) -- Curation is the process by which aggregate data is imbued with personalised trust.
2. Siri -- a personal assistant iPhone app, like IWantSandy but with voice recognition.
3. Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University's Institutional Repository -- great lessons for all open data projects. The reward structure established by each discipline largely defines the motivation behind faculty behavior. As eloquently stated by the economist, "While we are going through a digital revolution - in the way we teach and communicate with each other - the reputation of being published in the print journals is still the strongest incentive for motivation." This position was largely echoed by the engineer, who stated "what is holding us to the journal is the promotion procedure. This is about a problem of measurement with how Cornell evaluates my work." That said, there are real risks associated with changing one's practices, especially when one assumes the role of an early innovator. As the communication faculty member summarized, "There has to be a better way than the current system, but I'm not willing to be on the leading edge in using that system." (via JHW)
4. Google Voice Transcriptions Annotated as Poetry -- found art that reminds us that it's hard to wreck a nice beach.

   WHATEVER THIS IS (Caller: My friend Christina)
   
   Hey mister
   it's Christina
   just left you a message and then
   I got your message and realized
   you're stuck out
   
   but I'll try you.
   
   But yeah, just trying to be tomorrow
   (if you get the chance)
   And if you're a few Karen in China the next day
   Council lot more
   eating minnows on the step
   and give me a little
   
   I'll be hanging around then and I am
   well,
   whatever this is.

Where 2.0 Mapping : Mobile : Local

The Where 2.0 conference program is almost complete. The focus is on the tech industry's advances in Mapping, Mobile and Local. Each of these areas are being treated equally and each will have its own afternoon track. Coming back this year we have great speakers such as John Hanke (Google), Jack Dangermond (ESRI), Ryan Sarver (Twitter), Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land) and Dennis Crowley (Foursquare).

Mapping

Maps have moved from flat and static creations to rich representations of the world. And now maps are moving to realtime. The idea of constantly-updated community maps are now the norm and the modifications are constant. The base data of the map you are looking at could have been updated in the past couple of days in time those updates will be instantaneous. The data layered on maps has also changed. No longer is it expected that data will be siloed or have restricted access. In addition to being realtime data is increasingly open and available for all to use. This is especially true when a community has been called on to create a dataset for an application. The combination of almost-realtime maps and open data have enabled mobile applications

Some mind-blowing talks in Mapping include Blaise (the creator of Photosynth and Chief Architect of Bing Maps) talk on The Map As An Information Ecology, Digital Globe's CEO Walter Scott talk on satellite imagery, and a collaborative talk on Haiti: Crisismapping the Earthquake. We're also going to have conversations with Google Earth's John Hanke (about PlaceRank, the move to mobile and Google Place among other things) and Tim O'Reilly will talk with San Francisco's CTO Chris Vein (about DataSF and other geo initiatives of the city).

Mobile
In two short years location-awareness has become an expected feature of a mobile device. This is entirely due to the increasingly open development available on smart phones today. The App Store and other mobile market places are filled with location-aware apps. Gone are the days when one could easily slip away, or get lost. Advanced consumers now expect their todo list to know where are they are (even if their (i)phone can't use a background process to take advantage of these apps). Location-awareness has brought increased attention to new mapping data (and a big push towards 3D), new interfaces (such as augmented reality) and the occasional awkward social situation.

Some choice sessions in this area include Ryan Sarver, the Director of Twitter's Platform, talk on Geostreams, GDGT's Ryan Block's Locative Devices panel, Josh Williams of Gowalla's talk on Moving People with Pixels, Dennis Crowley of Foursquare's talk on using g Jason Grigsby's talk on hybrid mobile apps, and of course, several talks on Augmented Reality. In mobile we'll also look at mobile intersects with machine learning and how computer vision and apps like Google Goggles will change the mobile experience.

Local
When I stand on a corner I can now know more about it than ever before. I can immediately look up what businesses are nearby and where my friends prefer to go. Businesses are increasingly realizing that their online reputation (via local search and sites like Yelp) will affect foot traffic as well. A consumer can quickly and easily evaluate a store moments before stepping in.

People talking in this area are Yelp's CEO Jeremy Stoppleman, Danny Sullivan is going to talk with Local Search Engines, and MG Siegler will be examining how social mobile services affect the local space.

We'll be discussing these Mapping, Mobile and Local trends with Google and Yahoo! (and others) at Where 2.0. The three day conference runs March 30- April 1 in San Jose. Radar readers can register with this discount code for 25% whr10pcb.

Four short links: 15 February 2010

Android and Earthquakes, Microsoft Income, SVG Editing, Crawling GitHub for Fun and Profit

1. Tale of Android Phone in Earthquake in Haiti -- guy in Haiti with working unlocked Android phone and Internet connection used it to channel Facebook "save me" requests to rescuers. (via Andy Linton)
2. Microsoft Operating Income by Division -- the title says "income", the graph says "profit", but either way the online division of Microsoft isn't healthy. (Love the small Vista tick and large Windows 7 tick).
3. SVG Editor in the Browser (via kevinmarks on Twitter)
4. Algorithmic Recruitment with Github -- crawling GitHub, building in-memory graph of developers, selecting for connectedness and influence.

Innovation Lessons in "Start-Up Nation"

One might expect Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle to come from the pen of business school or economics professors, but the biographies of authors Dan Senor and Saul Singer reveal policy backgrounds. Both were advisors in the U.S. Federal Government.

These backgrounds give a clue that Senor and Singer aim beyond questions of how to be a successful entrepreneur or high-tech executive. In fact, their book is a serious investigation of the social, historical, and psychological traits that produce extraordinarily creative people--and significantly, creative people who can translate their cranial light-bulbs into technologies with the potential to change the world.

The book has garnered a fair amount of news coverage, but still not as much as it deserves, in my opinion. It took me only about three hours to read, and I highly recommend it as a refreshing--but not necessarily reassuring--perspective on a country that is profoundly misunderstood and misrepresented by media outside its diminutive borders.

In this blog I'll summarize the traits that that the authors find make Israel a successful incubator for innovation, distinguishing between traits that other countries can emulate and traits that seem uniquely embedded in Israel's historical and geographic circumstances. Finally, as I usually do in these book reviews, I'll lay out three observations that came to my mind while following the authors' argument: the importance of hard data, flipping axioms, and the creative role government can play.

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