[ 2] http://devel-oper.yahoo.com/search/
boss/
for “candied herbs” with alternative activities, including searches
for other things: “candied herbs
torino,” “longboard sales,” “united
airlines flight information,”
“Brahmin handbags,” “turin
shroud,” “Taryn Rose shoes,”
“spime” (I have spared you my
crude translations and the typographical and spelling errors.)
Often I had many windows open
at one time. I copied and pasted
content I found that might be
relevant into a text editor. I bookmarked potential sites for my
friends to look at and translate
for relevance. I looked at images
of what could be candied herbs; I
even found a video showing how
to candy things at home. I asked
friends by email and instant messenger; I posted photos to Flickr;
I searched You Tube. My friends
Twittered to ask their friends. I
spoke to people by phone.
That was a lot of surf, send,
and sift. I should say it was thoroughly enjoyable—a treasure
hunt—and ultimately worth it to
find and finally experience candied rosemary.
My story is not unusual;
it’s mundane, even. We routinely engage in human-human,
human-machine, human-multimodal representation,
human-place (digital and physical) interactions and use multiple
browsers, devices and displays,
text editors, bookmarking services and applications, notepads
and pens. Search is also social—
we use the phone, email, social
networking sites, and services to
seek knowledge from others and
to get people to look for things on
our behalf.
Fascinated by the wealth of
design and engineering challenges in this world of information finding, Cristen Torrey of
Carnegie Mellon University and I
have spent this summer conducting field interviews, collecting
stories of the hard-to-find-on-the-Internet—from people not
knowing the words for things,
to things for which there are
no words. We have been charting examples of how people
search when they don’t know the
specific words or terms for the
things they are seeking (domain
language/literacy), when they
don’t know how to articulate
the concepts (not named and/
or complex concepts), and when
the content or learning need
involves visual, kinetic, or physical knowledge in the pursuit of
an embodied skill, such as screen
printing, bodycasting, or looking
for yoga poses like “Happy Baby”
when you know what it is but not
what it is called. Our investigations have followed people as
they triangulate between different media (words, pictures, videos) and social search sites and
forums such as Yahoo! Answers
and Flickr, where there are many
examples of images that are
posted with the title “What is
this?” We have begun to characterize searches by first understanding people’s term, concept,
and domain familiarity, and their
willingness to expend energy
becoming search strategy literate and/or to turn to collaborative seeking. And we have been
looking at whether that which
is sought has a name at all.
Without getting too linguistically
relativist, there are some things
for which there are simply no
words in one language or domain
of expertise but an abundance
in another language or domain.
Suffice it to say, there are many
strategies that people use to find
the known and named (recall and
recovery searches), the known
but unnamed (discovery and recognition searches), the undefined
(recall, describe, and name), and
the unknown and unnamed (
discovery and/or name).
Clearly, we are not all done in
this research and design world
of Internet search. There are
open questions about what is the
appropriate unit of analysis. To
be concrete, did my search “
session” above start and end in one
browser? Across several browsers? Did the search begin with
the request and end with the
purchase? Or did it end unsuccessfully with the failure to find
a second source? Has it ended
yet? What are the boundaries
of the search experience, and
what different kinds of tools
are needed to support these
different activities? What are
the applications that will blur
the boundaries between seek,
search, browse, recommend,
remember, and augment? How
can we give the search experience some continuity, over time
and place? Observing people
engaged in ongoing inquiry and
discovery over time, my group
has designed an application for
project-oriented, multi-media,
iterative searches, so people can
garner and glean in collaboration
with others.
But we need a lot more
research. Examples of rich areas
include personalization and what
that means to people, and considering how mobile search differs
from desktop search. We need
to design more effectively for
domain-specific search. In this
regard two of my favorite sites of
late are Octopart (http://octopart.
com/) and Shazam (http://www.
shazam.com/music/portal).
Octopart is a search site special-
