Re: Thoughts on Bing

[Rich Kulawiec <rsk () gsp org>]

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 01:55:43PM -0400, Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu wrote:
> Got anything besides Microsoft PR to back up the thesis that Bing plans to
> do better at "the results you want" than other search engines?

Having done some work over the past few years with various search
engines (that is: software products designed to implement search) I think
it's safe to say that "the results you want" is an entirely a marketing
creation.  In some narrow application instances, it can be inferred via
knowledge of the target audience or by the primary business use: for
example, a searchable patent database could be tuned for use by lawyers.
Or a repository of Unix/Linux commands for use by system administrators.
And so on.

But (a) there's no way to do this in general case and (b) the entire
exercise is mostly ad-hockery (a definition I contributed to TNHD a
couple of decades ago): that is, it's a matter of twiddling lots of
knobs until something pleasing appears on the screen.  (Sufficiently
skilled and experienced people are *very* good at this, so I'm not
denigrating the results they achieve.)

A secondary problem with this is the user population, nearly all of
which does not know what a Boolean query is and certainly doesn't
know what more advanced query forms are -- because none of the popular
web search engines, including Google, provide them.  (Again, not a
criticism: not much point in providing features for 0.0001% of the
user base.)  It's very difficult to figure out what "the results you want"
are, let alone provide them, when input is just a list of words.

A tertiary...ah, never mind.  The bottom line is that Google seems to
twiddled the knobs to settings that work reasonably well for enough people
that anyone seeking to supplant them will have to twiddle their knobs
sufficiently better that folks will be motivated to switch.  That will
not be done by the marketing department (of the Sirius Cybernetics
Corporation, who I believe have an urgent date with a wall).

---Rsk
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