Comments on: Search is broken – really broken.

By: street wear

street wear — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 06:07:22 +0000

Nice blog there.. a very interesting post.. I enjoy reading your post..

By: Tagz | "Search is broken – really broken. | luckyrobot.com - Gerry Campbell" | Comments

Sat, 16 May 2009 16:53:26 +0000

[...] [upmod] [downmod] Search is broken – really broken. | luckyrobot.com – Gerry Campbell (luckyrobot.com) 1 points posted 3 months ago by trshant tags web search future social saved [...]

By: Hip-hop Fashion

Hip-hop Fashion — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:34:11 +0000

thanks for sharing your point of view through this post,
I hope, more readers will come to visit your blog.

By: Reed M Meseck

Reed M Meseck — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:02:08 +0000

One of the huge emerging problems of the web is that as information moves faster and faster, it becomes stale quicker and quicker. Stale data isn't just less useful than than fresh data – it is potentially incorrect or misleading.

Take the example of real estate listings in this down market. The prices are moving faster than the search index can reflect so 9 out of 10 search results on the page often have the wrong price.

So how useful is search if what is returned is not “correct” ? The list price was correct at some point in time but is no longer valid. The heart of the problem is that search today lacks temporal semantics – i.e. the ability to represent the same piece of information along a timeline with different values. Making the problem worse is that current search engines have no way of reflecting temporal semantics and seeing the history of values – the changes along the timeline – might be of great interest. Stream search is a completely untapped facet of search.

There are many aspects of search that remain unexplored. Search communities are a natural social pattern. Personalized search contexts are another opportunity – why after all these years should each search be completely divorced from the context of your prior search request ?

Search is not getting better – it is getting worse. In part because information becomes stale more quickly and in part because we have not expanded on the search paradigm. Google dominates the space and is remarkably not very innovative when it comes to advancing Search. Everything else but Search.

By: Alex Bunardzic

Alex Bunardzic — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 22:00:10 +0000

Good writeup, Gerry. If you'd like to learn more about what I deem to be the future of the web, and how will we make it serve humans (instead, as you've pointed, us serving it), please read this: http://tinyurl.com/cqnylv

By: Lucky Robot - Search Is Broken - Really Broken « Collecta.com Blog

Lucky Robot - Search Is Broken - Really Broken « Collecta.com Blog — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 01:40:30 +0000

[...] Lucky Robot – Search Is Broken – Really Broken February 6, 2009 http://luckyrobot.com/2009/02/06/search-is-broken-%E2%80%93-really-broken/ [...]

By: The Rise of Sensor Media | luckyrobot.com - Gerry Campbell

The Rise of Sensor Media | luckyrobot.com - Gerry Campbell — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 22:44:38 +0000

[...] my last blog post Search is Broken I wrote about the emerging existence of realtime, expressed content. I also explained that the [...]

By: John Furrier

John Furrier — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 23:20:27 +0000

I would add for more on how f'd up search is my personal blog has a ton of opinion posts on it re: the future of search www.furrier.org

By: John Furrier

John Furrier — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 23:19:14 +0000

Just found this post after friending you on twitter. Totally right on. Search is so broken and I mean so 1999-2001.

If you look at user behavior in the terms of “discovery and navigation” across today's apps then the notion of just an index seems silly

By: barneypell

barneypell — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:25:22 +0000

Gerry,
Long time no see, and it's great to read your post. I agree that traditional search engines are oriented around authoritative content (where lots of links from authorities matter). This makes them less well-suited to ranking real-time content. I also have thought about the theme of fragmentation, though I think it applies to the real-world as well as to the web (you have soccer buddies but don't much discuss technology with them). (There's actually an inverse fragmentation happening with social networks, where you get to have just one persona to share with all your friends, instead of different personas you get to present in context of real conversations).

It sure seems like knowledge of social graph and context should make search better, but real progress would come from examples of actual broken-ness. Hence: What are 10 actual queries, or tasks, for which search is broken today?