Danny Sullivan and Yahoo on the past and future of search
Danny Sullivan argues that search interfaces haven’t changed significantly for a decade, and that this suggests that the ways people have tried to change them aren’t likely to work when people try the same things yet again. He backs his thesis up with lots of historical screenshot pictures, some of which actually made me a bit nostalgic. In particular, he suggests that topic/cluster-based query refinement is a non-starter.
If he’s wrong, it will probably be because people today are satisfied with search only some of the time. Here, in a Business Week article, is a pretty good cut at where search so far has and hasn’t worked:
“Web searching can be frustrating for a lot of people,” says Tomi Poutanen, Yahoo’s director of product management for social search. “Search does a very good job if you are searching for something factual or doing research. It is not as good when searching for experiential knowledge—such as what is a good sushi restaurant in New York—where a person’s experience would count in having that answer.”
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