Of Candied Herbs and Happy
Babies: Seeking and Searching
on Your Own Terms
Elizabeth F. Churchill

Yahoo! Research | [e-mail]

November + December 2008

[ 1] “person” could be “user” or “human” or “agent”. I suggest picking one that acknowledges a human is present in the transaction.

A friend asked me to buy some candied herbs for her while I was in Italy. I had never heard of such a thing. It sounded dubious— and entirely likely, therefore, to be some foreign delicacy that I would in fact turn out to adore. And that was the case. But before getting there, I needed to find out where to buy said “candied herbs.” My friend had thoughtfully sent me a link to a shop where they were apparently available. But while the shop was easy to find, every time I went, it was closed, windows shuttered.

So I figured I would try to find another source. What better way to do that than to search the Internet? The world is, after all, at my fingertips via a query in a box. “Candied herbs buy torino” yielded no results, at least none I could make sense of. So I translated “candied herbs” into Italian: canditi erbe. I typed this into a search box and got back many (many) pages in Italian, a language I don’t speak or read. I translated said pages. No luck. I tried Yahoo! Answers and found recipes for candied everything-you-can-imagine. But, as to where I could buy them in Torino? Still no luck.

Getting truculent, I start typing in broader terms—perhaps the problem was the word “can-

died.” I tried various combinations of “sweet” ”sugar” ” herb” ”plant” ”eat” ”cook” ”tourist” ”gift” ”edible,” and various herb names—all of which sounded disgusting when combined with “sugar” or “candy”—sage, basil, borage….and so on. Still no luck.

Since I was looking for a foreign food in a foreign language and would not have been able to recognize a candied herb if one bit me on the nose, I was not really surprised that I was having this problem. But, I also suspected there must be a way to find this elusive information—if only I could just enter the right combination, the correct incantation of words into that little search box.

There is a nice term called “gaslighting” that means a willful undermining of someone’s sense of reality in order to drive that person mad. I was feeling a little less sane as I tried to semantically link previously unconnected concepts to generate possible relevant query terms and review the results —so much information, so little of use. The search engine asserted dominance, drawing me out and then underscoring my linguistic (perhaps conceptual) inadequacy: I was free associating and getting punished for my efforts.

In the end, I just kept return-

ing to the shop that my friend referred me to. There in the amazing sweet shop cum apothecary store, circa 1836, lay the fabulous prize.

So what does this all have to do with design? To pose the question differently, what does this have to do with person-centered [ 1] interaction design? A lot.

Internet search has become the dominant paradigm of information seeking for many of us. However, the paradigm of Internet search is in its infancy, and search as an Internet experience is often construed very narrowly. There is much discussion about matching query terms, indexing, and ranking relevant results, and determining which are the best algorithms to determine which content is delivered back as a result of a query. These are, of course, crucial factors in the design of good search experiences. Search engines have personalities based on how these processes are prioritized and how results are presented.

But as the example above shows, seeking and finding involve (many) keyword queries. And a lot more than a page and a query box is involved. For just that scenario, I opened at least 20 browser windows over two days, interweaving my search