Google’s mission of “organizing the world’s information to make it universally accessible and useful” may seem like an impossible dream, but for me that dream doesn’t go far enough.
When I do a search I don’t just want information in return. At a minimum I want knowledge, and ideally I want the necessary understanding that goes with it too.
Social Search (Image courtesy of Lone Wolf Librarian)
Even with the last decade’s worth of advances in search technology and online media, I still find by far the best way of understanding a topic is to discuss it with another knowledgeable person.
While the information available on the web is immensely valuable, it can take an inordinate amount of time to piece together all the relevant fragments (and to discard the irrelevant ones) in order to gain the knowledge that a real person would have about the subject.
What’s so frustrating is that often one of these knowledgeable people is in the same company or even the same room as you, but without standing up and asking everyone around you a question you have no way of knowing who that knowledgeable person is.
You don’t know who already knows what you want to know.
For example, imagine I am researching Photo Voltaic Cells for my house. Not only do I want to find out about all the available products and how they work, but I also want to know if one of my colleagues has experience with using them, or if one of my friends works in a related industry.
This is where I think Search needs to go. It needs to be able to tell me not just what information exists out there but also who I can talk to about it. Google have made some basic attempts to address this with beta features like “Results from people in your social circle for …” at the end of your search results, or by integrating live Twitter feeds relating to the keywords you use, but the results I’ve seen so far are patchy at best.
A well implemented feature that achieves this would not only save you lots of research time personally, it could also save businesses huge amounts of money by increasing productivity.
Imagine you work in a multinational and are tasked with looking into a piece of US tax legislation. You do a search and the results show that Mary in the Paris office did a lot of similar searches six months ago and created some documents that mention the topic too. A quick phone call to Mary could save you hours or even days getting an understanding of problem at hand.
Given all the recent media coverage about online privacy in relation to Facebook and the like there would definitely be some obstacles to overcome in relation to sharing the information needed to work out who knows what, but given the proliferation of Google Apps I think it would be well within their capabilities to start offering this in the enterprise space.
[A quick aside to the topic: Anyone who has ever done any teaching knows that sharing information is a beneficial in both directions. If you are knowledgeable about an area and teach it to someone else, often in the process you can develop an even greater understanding of the topic, particularly by being asked unexpected questions.]
The idea for this feature started out as part of a conversation I had with colleagues over a beer around two years ago and I’m a bit surprised that it hasn’t happened yet, but I have no doubt that it will, and soon. What ideas have you had to improve Search, and have any of them come to pass?
I get the impression that Mahalo is trying to bridge the credibility gap via their question and answer site and I find myself using more fully formed search queries these days such as “can I unlock an iPhone 4″ instead of “iPhone 4 unlock” in the hopes of coming across a stack exchange or yahoo answers result. I do still prize recommendations from someone I know over a blog post or website however.