Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research, gave us a glimpse on where Google is focusing its efforts for the future in an interview with Kate Greene from MIT Technology Review this week:

The core of what we do is still search and advertising. A lot of researchers are working on that. They’re working to give better-quality search results and to match ads better. Another area of research is gathering more sources of information, such as text in books, still images, video, and now audio in terms of speech recognition. I think another focus is to understand how people interact with Google and interact with each other on the Web, in general. How do people operate in these social networks? Understanding that question can help us serve them better.

These statements don’t reveal anything new or secret about Google, but they do reinforce what we’ve been saying for some time: the relevance arena, which is where search quality and ad matching live, is a vital and vibrant piece of the search equation, and there’s still a lot of room to grow.

His point about understanding how people interact with Google and each other on the Web is also an important one, and I’m glad to see that he included it in his initial statement. In The first principle of search relevance, I discussed the need to focus on the user in order to deliver true relevance:

What is relevance, if not caring? What is relevance, if not a reflection of the user’s needs, wants, and values? Without caring about the user, our search for relevance would fall dramatically short.

It’s great that someone as senior as Norvig is reinforcing that idea. The purpose of technology is not technology. The ability to do things differently is not an imperative to do so. At the end of the day, the question is and must continue to be: how will this affect people?

One of the things I love about mywebDNA is that it brings those two concepts, relevance and people, together on so many levels. With mywebDNA, the users are the filter that determines relevance.

I recently did one of those team-building exercises where we got split into groups of three and given a bucket, a bit of pvc pipe, and two balls. Our first challenge was to use the pipe to try to whack the balls into the bucket. Our second was to use the bucket and the pipe any way we wanted to get the balls into the bucket. The second was easier, of course, and the message was that these two things made it easier:

1. Usability, and
2. Control.

It’s important to note that when I talk about relevance, I’m not suggesting we should only be allowed to see certain things. We should be able to see anything we want! We should have access to a Web that allows us excellent usability and total control over our own experience.

The fact remains that, at the end of the day, we’ll only be able to access the minutest sliver of what the world has to offer us, online or otherwise. In economics, people talk about scarce resources; in life, our attention is the scarcest resource of all. Personally, I like to direct mine towards things I care about.

Google does a brilliant job at indexing, ranking, and (if you’ve got it turned on and aren’t opposed to it on moral grounds) personalization based on geography and demographics. Those calculations spit out a result that they hope will appeal to you at the deepest level. With mywebDNA, though, who you are at the deepest level serves as the filter; relevant Google results are circled because you are who you are.

Later in the piece, Greene asks Norvig what the outstanding problems in search are. He responds:

In general, we think there are two aspects of it. One is understanding users’ needs more. The other is understanding the contents of documents, whether they be Web pages or video. Mostly we look at what the user types in, treat the input as individual words, and count them up on pages and weigh those pages with different kinds of evidence. But we don’t look only at words they type in. We also look at spelling variants, and if a user types in a long query, we break it into pieces. Maybe a user meant some words, but didn’t really mean others.

Here is a simple three-step equation:

1. Understand users more.
2. Increase relevance.
3. Serve them better.

Do you think this is a valid goal?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 4:18 am and is filed under People matter, VortexDNA, Predictive search, Relevance, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.