To Search Smarter, Find a Person? 136
Svonkie writes "Brendan Koerner reports in Wired Magazine that a growing number of ventures are using people, rather than algorithms, to filter the Internet's wealth of information. These ventures have a common goal: to enhance the Web with the kind of critical thinking that's alien to software but that comes naturally to humans. 'The vogue for human curation reflects the growing frustration Net users have with the limits of algorithms. Unhelpful detritus often clutters search results, thanks to online publishers who have learned how to game the system.'"
Algorithms are written by people (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless we are talking about Skynet.
Generation Gap (Score:5, Insightful)
Critical thinking comes naturally? (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Everything Old is New Again (Score:5, Insightful)
In the absence of the mythical, impossible strong-AI, there will always be an important role for experts -- you know, thinking meat, sitting there pushing charges through neurons, having opinions about stuff -- and those experts will probably use a lot of mechanized search tools to improve the breadth of their knowledge, their awareness of knowledge, and the accessibility of information. Technology and people work together!
But you're an idiot if you take out the wetware-based BS filter.
It's coordinating all that expert opinion, and filtering out the drivel, that poses the great organizational challenge of our collective information future. Wiki-based approaches are a good first step; maybe a "trusted-wiki" like Citizendium [citizendium.org] will be the next step; it's definitely going to keep evolving. But it's long been recognized by the reasonable that if you want an informed opinion, rather than a pattern match, you ask the librarian. We've known that since Alexandria -- nay, Ur -- and it's a shame we keep forgetting.
Like the original Yahoo (Score:4, Insightful)
Economics, Wisdom of Crowds, and Experts (Score:5, Insightful)
A somewhat more interesting thing, in my opinion, is all the "wisdom of crowds" stuff we see so much hype about. It's interesting because it works very well in certain cases - basically the case where the popular thing is the right thing. The main problem with this is that any search engine that shows you 10 results and then counts which ones you click, well, it's not getting your input on result #11, or 23, etc. So before anyone votes, items that happen to be near the top almost certainly stay at the top. Many good items that the algorithm ranked medium might never get voted on!
One way around this is to randomly select some less good results, so that viewers get a chance to vote for the underdogs and bring them to the top of the pile. But this pollutes results for each user, essentially making them pay a "moderation tax" by requiring them to see things that the algorithm has no reason to believe are better results.
All-in-all, social information finding features seem to be much better suited for finding things you didn't even *know* you wanted - StumbleUpon being a great example of a tool for doing that. I would imagine that this could be very useful even in the corporate sector, as many business strategies and engineering techniques have variants or cousins that are similar in function, but may be more obscure. Having the ability to see that "people who searched for X ended up wanting to know about Y too" might save me a lot of time...
Re:But isn't AI and metadata just around the corne (Score:3, Insightful)
If I can guarantee anything I can guarantee that someone or some artificial intelligence will find a way to game any new system, no matter how sophisticated it is.
ref. Spy vs. Spy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_vs._Spy [wikipedia.org]
As far as human editors go, Wikipedia seems to strike the right balance. I often include 'wiki' in my search string.
Re:Really? (Score:2, Insightful)
If so, that would seem like a decent reason to be looking for a new job...
Either you pay the editors, or it's crap (Score:4, Insightful)
Wikia shows the problem with this approach. Coverage of Star [Wars|Trek|Gate|Craft] is extensive. Coverage of, say, bank regulation is nonexistent. If you want to find out how we got into the subprime mortgage mess or what to do about it, Wikia search is totally useless. That's what you get from volunteer editors. Wikipedia does better, but most of the good contributions were made years ago.
Today, you pay the editors, or you get fancruft.
It's amusing that the author of the article feels overwhelmed by The Economist. That's a very well written magazine with good reporters; they had the only reporter in Lhasa when the Chinese clamped down, and they have a good analysis this week of the issues surrounding derivatives. If this guy can't handle The Economist, his organization's answers will probably be dumbed down to the level of, say, "People". That level of crap one can get for free, from many existing sources.
Remember Google Answers? Nobody really cared, and Google shut it down.
There's a whole industry of expensive, small-circulation specialist newsletters, but those are niche operations run by specialists in narrow fields.
Re:But isn't AI and metadata just around the corne (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:But isn't AI and metadata just around the corne (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact, it's a basic theorem that given sufficient time, human-level intelligence can always beat any system with less than human-level intelligence (aside from trivial cases like a complete firewall). This is because the human's theory of mind can fully encompass the lesser system (so you can understand how it works), while the reverse is not true. Computers can only beat humans at chess when the match is played with a time control.
This doesn't mean that a computer system can never be good enough to solve this problem. However, it does mean that if you could build a computer system that could solve it, then it would insist on being paid.
It also doesn't mean that using human-level intelligence will always solve this problem. Humans can still be beaten, they just start on a level playing field. Hence it's pretty much inevitable that some people will still find ways to game the system.
Re:Economics, Wisdom of Crowds, and Experts (Score:1, Insightful)
Fsck that. Pay me my full rate or find it yourself... especially if your expecting me to find the info ASAP. At 1/4 rate you get it "next Thursday, after 10pm... if nothing on TV is good... maybe."
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
There has to be some kind of intelligent filtering. If it's not done for me, it's done by me, when I choose which result to click. The biggest problem with paying someone to do that sorting for you is the simple fact that it's too expensive. Yahoo might have stayed a human-sorted list forever, except that it would have taken an army of "surfers" to do it. The web just got too big to be done that way all the time.
Google results used to be a lot more relevant than they are now. Far too often, I'm interested in X, and search for "X" on Google, I find millions of people who want to sell me X. But I'm not even sure if I want to buy it. I'm looking for information about X. That is getting harder and harder to find. The quote in the summary is correct - people have learned how to "game" the system.
How often do you "google" something, and then just go to the Wikipedia link? I do all the time. That way, I can be sure to get actual information about the subject, rather than a link to its Amazon page. In many ways, because of the search engine optimizers, Wikipedia is already replacing Google as the default source of information.
Applicable (Score:3, Insightful)
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
--T.S. Eliot