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November 22, 2004

Personal search: limitations?

There's an intereview with Vivisimo CEO Raul Valdes-Perez at ~CNet here: Narrowing the search

What is especially interesting is his comments on the limitations of personalised search, which states plainly some key points:

• People are not static; they have many fleeting and seasonal interests. A student might intensely research Abraham Lincoln for a school project but may care nothing at all about the subject later on.

• The surfing data used for personalizing search is weak. The data that online booksellers like Amazon.com use is strong: I'm paying $20 for a book and committing 10 hours of my life to reading it. (Let's ignore the problems with gift purchases.) Surfing data involves the minimal commitments of a mouse click and a few seconds to look at a page before leaving.

• If the data used for inferring user profiles is the whole Web page that the user visited, then it's misleading. In this case, the user's decision to visit the page is based on the title and brief excerpt (snippet) that are shown in the search results, not the whole page.

• Home computers are often shared among family members, whose surfing interests obviously diverge.

• Queries tend to be short. My own spouse couldn't figure out my interests from a one or two word utterance, so how is a computer going to do better?

Personal search - as a general fory into inevitable personal advertising - has been a buzz-word in search for some time now.

However, as Microsoft proved long ago with that annoying animated paperclip in Word, just because a company thinks it's being helpful, doesn't mean that it actually is...

Posted by at November 22, 2004 07:18 PM

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